Johannesburg – All eyes are on Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana as political parties, civil rights organisations, businesses and ordinary South Africans are expecting him to prioritise the energy crisis, unemployment, crime, and the economy.
Godongwana will deliver the 2023 Budget speech to the National Assembly in the Cape Town City Hall at 2PM today.
He will provide details of spending and revenue collection proposals to implement these plans.
The ongoing blackouts have made it difficult to run businesses and the hardest hit are small businesses.
Black Business Council president Alias Monage said for them, the critical question was the energy crisis, saying one cannot talk about recovery and reconstruction without sustainable and secure energy.
“The minister must make a bold and tangible statement on these issues, including even how he is going to budget for feasible energy in the form of coal power … in the absence of that, it then becomes a major problem …
“Secondly, they need to provide a bounce-back scheme in the form of incentives for small and medium enterprises so that they can then build various areas in terms of the recovery, as part of the problem (is) that they have suffered from Covid-19 and from this energy crisis.
“The third part will then be how do we then deal with the infrastructure in terms of transportation because part of the problem is around the rail system, both passenger and locomotive in terms of carrying goods and carrying people from various places, because in the absence of the infrastructure, the recovery then becomes a pipe dream,” said Monage.
He said the last part would be to deal with the notion of the national disaster, to ask, on what basis are they going to introduce the procurement, given the fact that they need to move faster in dealing with the placement of equipment and other areas in the energy space?
“For us, those are some of the issues that the minister needs to deal with so that we don't then talk about austerity, but we then talk about better things for all of us.”
Cope said it expected that solutions for the energy crisis, load shedding and crime would be top of the list in Godongwana’s Budget speech.
Party spokesperson Dennis Bloem said Cope was afraid that the minister would “once more” present a lot of empty promises.
“South Africa is in an economic and political crisis, and the country is bankrupt,” Bloem said.
He said in the past 29 years, the ANC government had systematically destroyed the economy through rampant corruption by greedy and selfish cadres.
Bloem said almost all the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were on their knees. He said the country was in a debt trap.
The party said if the minister was serious, he must urgently and without delay assure the nation that there was a budget to fund the roll-out of a solar energy panel programme and bring Eskom back to full operation.
“He must assure the country that there will be no corruption with the Energy Solar Panel programme roll-out like what happened with the Covid-19 PPE mass looting. He must announce concrete plans to address the unemployment crisis, which is rising by the day. The people are getting restless. We expect that he will increase all social security grants,” Bloem said.
“He must increase the budget of the police and all law enforcement agencies to give muscle to these agencies to fight crime in the country. He must scrap the sugar tax and suspend fuel levies to soften the blow on businesses caused by the devastating load shedding and increase the budget for health care and the budget for higher and basic education.”
Dion George, DA MP and spokesperson on finance, said the most important thing was economic growth.
“Our economy is not growing fast enough, and it's likely we will end up in recession this year. So far, if I were the minister, what I would do is incentivise small businesses to make sure that it's easier for them to operate. I think that will be the key thing in terms of growth, and to make it easier for domestic savings in terms of tax on savings,” said George.
He said he expected Godongwana to talk about Eskom, saying that was the elephant in the room. “The biggest crisis in our growth is the lack of energy and the rolling blackouts, so we need a solution to that, and the solution to that is independent power producers, so get rid of the regulation that's standing in the way of generating more power; I would do that. Also, I would look at immediate steps to alleviate the cost of living crisis because that's the biggest thing with apparently 80% of households putting less food on the table than they did in the past; that's the major problem,” he said.
The Star