February is always a special month for us political animals. In the first or second week of the month the president unveils his cabinet’s programme of action for the year. MPs then go away for a few days and mull over his speech during their Valentine’s Day festivities.
In the final week of the month the finance minister outlines how the president’s vision will be implemented given what’s available in the state coffers. The president’s political address supposedly guides the budget.
The election victory of the ANC in 1994 and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president, for example, were followed by a major departure from the race-based budget priorities of the previous 48 years of National Party rule.
Reflecting changed priorities, the democratic project ushered in new political and economic programmes (the reconstruction & development programme followed by the growth, employment & redistribution policy), and radically different allocations of taxpayers’ money.
Under Mandela, for example, electricity connections multiplied and social grants increased as people who had been excluded from the infrastructure rollout and social welfare nets were finally included. Under Thabo Mbeki, institutions such as the SA Revenue Service (Sars) and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) were strengthened as tax collection and the fight against corruption were professionalised and prioritised.
After 2009, however, the gap between what the president says in his state of the nation address and how the rands and cents are allocated or preserved widened. In fact, the relationship between the presidency and the National Treasury became a joke.
In the Jacob Zuma years the state of the nation address was characterised by talk of a developmental state and generous spending on everything from tertiary education to infrastructure. Yet, from Nhlanhla Nene and Pravin Gordhan we heard only dire news of a state whose coffers were running dry and whose debt hole was getting bigger. Essentially, the president made promises the state could not pay for.
From 2009 on, political ineptitude, lack of vision, spinelessness and rampant corruption rendered the budget a piece of paper that explains how we are spending the last bits of cash we can still be bothered to collect from business, and nothing else.
All the promises of action have not been worth the paper the budget is written on because we all knew that one big shout from a key constituency within the ANC and the government would veer away from its stated programme.
It was like that under Zuma and it has continued under President Cyril Ramaphosa (with all the caveats that he has had to deal with a pandemic).
It is within this context that we have to judge this week’s budget delivered by finance minister Enoch Godongwana. The minister knows the gulf that existed between the Zuma administration’s talk and its actions. Throughout that time he was the ANC’s head of economic transformation, and his job swiftly descended into explaining that the fantasy world in which the Zuma presidency lived was not the same as the real world occupied by the Treasury.
Godongwana is a political man. He understands that the words emanating from the presidency matter, and that his budget has to back up those words or the entire process is rendered useless.
He knows we can shout as much as we like that he should be prudent, but he knows too that prudence presupposes that one has some cash in the bank to be prudent with, and that the presidency won’t announce a drastic measure such as free tertiary education for all without consulting the Treasury first. That is what Zuma did in December 2017, catching his finance minister Malusi Gigaba by surprise.
The time for games, for flowery words and no action, is over. We have painted ourselves into a corner where unemployment is the worst in the world (while, incredibly, we donate R50m to Cuba) and poverty deepens.
Godongwana’s budget either speaks to and supports the political programme outlined by the president on February 10, or we will continue to flounder. This is not scare-mongering. None of us wants to live in a country where red lights are constantly flashing and February is a nightmare.
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