On Wednesday, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana tabled the National Budget for 2023. Here is all the latest news and analysis available on Daily Maverick.
On Wednesday, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana tabled the National Budget for 2023. Here is the latest news and analysis on the Budget.
The food industry will get a tax break to ease the effects of load shedding on the cost of groceries. But there’s more that the industry can do to keep a basic basket of foods affordable.
The results of policy experiments over the past three decades make it clear that South Africa needs to begin to do things differently if it wants different results. We need bold people and institutions to take the initiative and walk through that door.
The Budget Speech delivered by Minister Enoch Godongwana heralds the end of Eskom as we know it. Although several other factors will also come into play, the stabilisation and transformation of the country’s energy framework will now depend on the successful roll-out of the National Transmission Company of South Africa, and the implementation of the much-awaited and urgent reforms to the Energy Regulation Act.
If South Africa were an individual, its financial planner would be saying, ‘Whoa, you’ve got too much debt; you need to cut expenses and start living within your means’.
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An estimated 18.3 million people live in extreme poverty in South Africa, but, say some in civil society, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s Budget speech didn’t reflect any urgency to providing social protection through grant increases that cushion food inflation of 14%.
The government has hiked the tax on cigarettes and booze by a nominal 4.9%, and expanded the fuel levy rebate to food manufacturers for a period of two years. That’s because rolling blackouts, the weakening exchange rate and higher input costs are driving food price inflation.
Budgets, while important, are not the right mechanism to drive the structural change needed to improve the responsiveness of our public health system in meeting the needs of the population. But, argues Russel Rensburg, we can reorient the health system towards meeting the health needs of the population and then let the budget bolster the reforms. Here, Rensburg provides some suggestions on how to go about it and contrasts that with the Budget announced by Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana this week.
In an action-packed week, the good news outweighed the bad and financial markets largely discounted a deterioration in geopolitical relations, instead focusing on the well-received South African Budget and poring over US Fed meeting minutes for signs of interest rate certainty.
Stripped of plants, allegories, literary quotes and Bible verses, the 2023 Budget was blunt — a stable finance framework for savings, investment and growth, structural reforms, particularly in energy and transport, and improved state capacity for public services and to fight crime and corruption.
The 2023 Budget shows a decline in spending on basic education in real terms, despite warnings from experts that the sector is in crisis. Early childhood development, meanwhile, has seen a significant increase in funding, in line with efforts to expand access to early learning programmes for South Africa’s children.
Public health experts caution that more detail is needed about how an extra R23 billion allocated to the Department of Health by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana in his 2023 Budget will be used to employ health workers and improve services, while also warning that a smaller overall health budget will lead to poor people having access to fewer public health services.
Daily Maverick and Business Maverick’s crack team of journalists weigh in on Budget 2023 and provide a line-by-line account of their immediate thoughts. They watched the full speech so you don’t have to.
Some people regard it as a positive error if you are in politics and you have a sudden outbreak of honesty, because then your opponents can and will use it against you forever.
The presentation of a national Budget is often a slightly strange affair; it is the prose of governance after what is supposed to be the poetry of the State of the Nation Address. Going into the speech, it was clear that the government’s credibility was on the line, and, as the trite saying goes, hard decisions would have to be made.
‘I’m astonished that the government cares so little about the health of their citizens,’ said Professor Karen Hofman, a leading researcher in sugar and other health-related taxes.
Public sector unions called for an end to attacks on collective bargaining and want their backdated salary agreements to be implemented.
For now, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has allayed market fears that South Africa’s debt trajectory is spinning out of control. The budget he unveiled on Wednesday triggered rallies in the rand and the domestic bond and equities markets, while analysts and economists gave it a cautious thumbs up.
How it will work is that individuals and households will be able to receive a tax rebate to the value of 25% of the cost of any new or unused solar panels that they have bought. This incentive does not include inverter or battery purchases.
Tax revenue collections for 2022/23 are expected to total R1.7-trillion, exceeding the 2022 Budget estimate by R94-billion, which translates to – no major tax announcements this year.
In a country where many face increased financial instability in retirement due to a lack of savings, government’s proposed ‘two-pot retirement system’ remains earmarked for implementation from 1 March 2024.
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