South Africa's Budget Speech Set for 21 May: Key Insights from Finance Minister Godongwana
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana announced on Wednesday in a media briefing that the third Budget speech will take place on 21 May.
Image: Picture supplied
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana announced on Wednesday in a media briefing that the third Budget speech will take place on 21 May.
The announcement comes following the 0.5 VAT reversal announced last week by the Treasury, which was proposed in the March 2025 Budget and the matter being taken to court by the Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
Minister Godongwana also announced that he and the Treasury would not be taking any questions regarding the preparation of the third budget speech until 21 May.
Godongwana said that the Budget of 12 March 2025 and the proposed VAT increase sparked rigorous debate.
'This is welcomed in a healthy democracy. Today there is clarity that VAT will remain at 15%. This decision was shaped not only by political debate but by the voices of the South African people.'
Godongwana added that we are all new in South Africa to what is called coalition politics. 'There are lessons to be learnt by cabinet, legislature and ourselves. I'm pleased that we have agreed that we will balance the budget without raising VAT while protecting vital sectors such as education, health, and social grants.'
Godongwana said that the National Treasury has already commenced work on developing a new fiscal framework that will maintain their trajectory toward debt stabilisation, a crucial element in strengthening our public finances.
'The revised budget will adhere to all established technical processes and consultations as set out in the Money Bills and Related Matters Act. This includes formal consultations with the Financial and Fiscal Commission, thorough consultations with all political parties within the Government of National Unity (GNU), as well as Cabinet approval before presentation to Parliament.'
Godongwana added that this comprehensive review will include the Fiscal Framework, the Appropriation Bill, Division of Revenue Bill, and the already tabled Rates and Monetary Amounts and Amendment of Revenue Laws Bill.
'Until the new budget is passed, government services will continue to be funded under section 29 of the Public Finance Management Act. This allows spending of up to 45 per cent of last year's budget during the first four months, and up to 10 per cent for each month after that.'
Godongwana said that while we wait for the 2025 Division of Revenue Act to be passed, funding for provinces and municipalities will continue under the 2024 Act, allowing transfers of up to 45 per cent of their allocated funds. 'While the postponement of the budget's passage is not ideal, the circumstances leading to this decision have highlighted the importance of meaningful engagement on fiscal matters.'
Godongwana added that this situation has provided a valuable opportunity for all stakeholders—citizens, Members of Parliament, labour organisations, and civil society—to thoroughly engage with the complex challenge of achieving fiscal sustainability while promoting economic growth and protecting essential public services within very limited resources.
Godongwana said that the revised process includes:
Revising economic assumptions using the latest available data
Generating updated fiscal projections
Recalculating revenue projections and tax implications
Determining appropriate borrowing strategies
Consolidating these elements into a coherent and sustainable fiscal framework.
Godongwana added that they will soon develop a new consultation process for the Budget speech to accommodate the GNU. 'This process will start in September before the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS). The MTBS is a key milestone as it shapes the content of the February budget.'
Professor Andre Thomashausen, a renowned expert in international law from the University of South Africa, said that the survival of the GNU is crucial to safeguarding South Africa's reputation as a reliable trading partner and safe investment destination.
'The VAT compromise is a small price to pay for giving the GNU a longer chance to fix the many governance issues that the GNU inherited. It is positive that the VAT debate has now encouraged a more rigorous engagement to combat corruption and the wasting of funds in the upkeep of mismanaged State Owned Enterprises.'
Johann Els, Old Mutual Group chief economist, said that the cancellation of the VAT rate increase has created a R75 billion funding gap over the next three years, putting pressure on the Treasury to maintain its fiscal consolidation targets. 'These include narrowing the budget deficit from -5.0% to -4.6%, raising the primary surplus from +0.5% to +0.9%, and peaking the debt-to-GDP ratio at 76.2% this year.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Citizen
2 hours ago
- The Citizen
Top 10 stories of the day: K-word teacher loses labour case
Here's your daily news update for Friday, 6 June 2025: An easy-to-read selection of our top stories. In the news today, a teacher in the Northern Cape has failed in his attempt to return to work after being dismissed for using a racial slur against two black pupils. Meanwhile, the future of 49 South Africans who have taken up refugee status in the United States is uncertain, as developments in the White House point towards Donald Trump being disillusioned over the white genocide claims. Furthermore, National Director of Public Prosecutions Advocate Shamila Batohi claims the National Prosecuting Authority has been infiltrated by those against the rule of law. Weather tomorrow: 7 June 2025 Weather conditions across South Africa will include frost in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, rain in the Western Cape, and isolated showers and wind in the Free State and Northern Cape. Full weather forecast here. Stay up to date with The Citizen – More News, Your Way. 'Using k-word is illegal': Northern Cape teacher fired for racist outburst loses reinstatement battle A teacher in the Northern Cape has failed in his attempt to return to work after being dismissed for using a racial slur against two black pupils. Gerhard Louw took the Northern Cape department of education to the Education Labour Relations Council, arguing that his dismissal was unfair. Picture: iStock At the time, Louw was employed at Technical High School Kimberley, where he taught technology and automotive subjects. He was dismissed in November last year after being found guilty at a disciplinary hearing of calling two African pupils the k-word. CONTINUE READING: 'Using k-word is illegal': Northern Cape teacher fired for racist outburst loses reinstatement battle Trump-Musk breakup: Will 49 'refugees' return to South Africa? The future of 49 South Africans who have taken up refugee status in the United States is uncertain, as developments in the White House point towards Donald Trump being disillusioned over the white genocide claims he has made about South Africa. On Thursday, a public spat broke out between Trump and South African-born billionaire Elon Musk. The two figures even made serious threats against each other on social media. The first group of Afrikaners from South Africa to arrive for resettlement in the US. Picture: Saul Loeb / AFP International relations expert Anthoni van Nieuwkerk told The Citizen the 49 refugees were in a precarious situation with the uncertainty of what Trump would do next. 'They will be left with no home and they might even want to return home, because if the appetite for accommodating Afrikaners goes away and it loses its importance, then those people will be left stranded. CONTINUE READING: Trump-Musk breakup: Will 49 'refugees' return to South Africa? WATCH: NPA 'infiltrated by those against the rule of law' – Batohi National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) Advocate Shamila Batohi claims the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has been infiltrated by those against the rule of law. The NPA has recently come under fire for its handling of high-profile cases, including that of former Free State premier Ace Magashule's personal assistant and corruption co-accused, Moroadi Cholota, who was allowed to walk free. National Director of Public Prosecutions Advocate Shamila Batohi. Picture: Gallo Images / Phill Magakoe The Free State High Court in Bloemfontein ruled that it does not have jurisdiction to try Cholota. The NPA has continued to stumble through a series of high-profile legal bungles, including the long-running Timothy Omotoso sex trafficking trial that has dragged on for years, and the Shepherd Bushiri extradition matter. CONTINUE READING: WATCH: NPA 'infiltrated by those against the rule of law' – Batohi Mpumalanga teen girl sends police on a hunt for her rapist, but she lied On Wednesday, Mpumalanga police were sent on a manhunt for two men who were driving a black VW Polo from Dullstroom to Lydenburg on Sunday on allegations of rape. However, this turned out to be a smokescreen. According to Brigadier Donald Mdhluli, a 16-year-old girl reported to police that she was hitchhiking on Sunday and got raped after being given a lift by strangers. Picture: iStock A case docket was opened and assigned to the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences (FCS) Unit for investigation. However, there was no rape case to investigate and consequently, no suspects to arrest because this was a fabricated story. Lieutenant Colonel Jabu Ndubane said on Friday that the 16-year-old girl had been charged with perjury after investigations revealed that she fabricated the entire story. CONTINUE READING: Mpumalanga teen girl sends police on a hunt for her rapist, but she lied Pick n Pay CEO receives the highest salary in retail. Here's how much others get At the top of the corporate ladder, the CEO stands as the face of pressure and power, a single person trusted with steering a company through stormy seas of inflation, consumer hesitancy and relentless competition. Those at the helm of retail companies are paid handsomely due to several factors, including qualifications, experience and responsibilities. These are the people whose vision keeps customers walking through the doors despite the crushing cost of living. Picture: Supplied The lowest-paid CEO in grocery retail is Marek Masojada, CEO of Boxer, with R5.6 million, while the highest-paid is Sean Summers, CEO of Pick n Pay, with R24.9 million. CONTINUE READING: Pick n Pay CEO receives the highest salary in retail. Here's how much others get Here are five more stories of the day: Yesterday's News recap READ HERE: Top 10 stories of the day: Kids hurt in jumping castle accident | Will SA run out of beef and chicken? | Rassie names nine new Boks
IOL News
3 hours ago
- IOL News
Trump dismisses Musk's call after public fallout, considers selling Tesla
US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk (R) speak in the Oval Office before departing the White House in Washington, DC, on the way to Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida US President Donald Trump has no plans to speak to billionaire Elon Musk and may even ditch his red Tesla car, the White House said Friday after a stunning public divorce fraught with risk for both men. Trump's camp insisted that he wanted to move on from the row with the South African-born Musk, with officials telling AFP that the tech tycoon had requested a call but that the president was not interested. The Republican instead intended to focus on getting the US Congress to pass his "big, beautiful" spending bill -- Musk's harsh criticisms of which had triggered the astonishing meltdown on Thursday. Fallout from the blow-up between the world's richest person and its most powerful could be significant, as Trump risks political damage and Musk faces the loss of huge US government contracts. Trump phoned reporters at several US broadcast networks to insist that he was looking past the row. He called Musk "the man who has lost his mind" in a call to ABC and told CBS he was "totally" focused on the presidency. The White House meanwhile, squashed earlier reports that they would talk. "The president does not intend to speak to Musk today," a senior White House official told AFP on condition of anonymity. A second official said it was "true" that Musk had requested a call.
TimesLIVE
3 hours ago
- TimesLIVE
Ngugi was simply ordinary — a man of the people
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan playwright, novelist and thinker, who died on May 28, has left a huge intellectual gap in Africa's cultural and political landscape. Instead of mourning him, I have chosen to celebrate the intellectual legacy of this generous and authoritative African sage I was privileged to have encountered during my undergraduate days at Nairobi University and much later as a scholar of Ngugi and African literature. When I arrived in South Africa in 1991, Ngugi was the most widely known African writer in the academy, in spite of apartheid. As early as 1981, the widely respected South African journal, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to his works. His most widely referenced text then, was Decolonising the Mind. Indeed, he is the most widely taught African writer in the global north and the global south, alongside Chinua Achebe — the man who published his award winning novel, Weep Not, Child under Heinemann African Writers Series. When the prestigious Cambridge University Press decided to publish worldwide series on 'Leading Writers in Context', again it is Achebe and Ngugi who featured from Africa, and I am deeply privileged to have been asked to serve as the editor of the volume on Ngugi in Context. His works have been widely translated in several languages across the globe: Japanese, German, Chinese and in many parts of Asia. I hope we will soon see his works getting translated into African languages across the continent. During his last days, he had embarked on translating his novels written in English into Gikuyu. It needs no emphasis that Ngugi remains one of the most influential African writers over the past few decades of Africa's independence, not only for his creative works but also for his wide-ranging contributions on Africa's cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people is an enduring theme in all his works. He was concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he was also interested in narrative, specifically imaginative literature, as an agent of history and self-definition, an instrument for taming and naming one's environment. He was concerned with literature's role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and the repressive postcolonial states that followed. As early as 1972, Ngugi was already drawing attention to how the tyranny of the past exerts itself on his works. He wrote: 'The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been,' a struggle as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history' (Homecoming, 39). For Ngugi then, the novel was an instrument that wills history into being and therefore, as a writer, he always located himself at the intersection of history and literary imagination. Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe. For him, the search for Africa's identity therefore lay in a reconstructive project to reassert a radical form of Africa's historiography conceived from below. At the heart of his restorative project was also his call for a return to the source, which would also involve the privileging of African languages in the production and consumption of local cultures. For him, it was only African languages that had the capacity to recover those African cultures repressed by colonialism and to equally carry the weight of a national history and memory. Genuine national literature, Ngugi argued, can only flower in local indigenous languages because literature as a cultural institution works through images and language embodied in the collective experience of a people. Ngugi always positioned himself as a writer in politics. He was hounded at home by one Kenyan political regime after the other and eventually driven into exile in the eighties by the repressive Moi regime in Kenya in the 80s. Little wonder then, that themes of dislocation, abandonment and exile dominates his works, written against the backdrop of authoritarian structures of control and imprisonment. Ngugi's early works are heavily weighted towards fiction, and the later lean towards non-fiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the publication of four novels, two plays and a collection of short stories, Ngugi produced only one volume of essays, Homecoming. But after his last major work of fiction in English, Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi wrote a total of five collections of essays as opposed to only three novels, Devil on the Cross (1981), Matigari (1986), and his latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow (Murogi wa Kagogo (2005), written first Gikuyu before translation. But it was the establishment of a community theatre in his home village of Kamiriithu, and the staging of the play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), that really raised the ire of the Kenyan authorities, leading to the banning of the play, his arrest and detention without trial. It also marked a major turning point in Ngugi's life when in prison, he used the language of his incarceration to write his first Gikuyu novel: Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross), on rolls of toilet paper. Subsequently, it is only Ngugi's collection of essays that he would continue to write in English, obviously aimed at the academy, with whom he continued to wrestle with over a range of cultural and political issues. The joy of reading Ngugi's essays is that they serve as a theoretical elaboration of themes and topics akin to his narrative. If Writers in Politics (1981), and Barrel of a Pen (1983) essays seek to question the colonial traditions of English and Englishness inherited at independence, Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Moving the Centre (1993) push the debate to its limits by insisting that the roots to Africa's freedom lay in the articulation of a new idiom of nationalism that would liberate the African identities from the prison house of European languages and cultures. The project should not only involve the privileging of African languages in the making of African cultures, but also the struggle for the realignment of global forces such that societies, which have been confined to the margins will gradually move to the centre, to become not just consumers but producers of global culture. It is the denial of the cultural space by the postcolonial state tyranny and global imperialism that Ngugi elaborates on in Penpoints, Gunpoint, and Dreams. Here the culture of violence and silence that has come to define the postcolonial state; the state's desire to saturate the public space with its propaganda, is counterpoised against a radically redemptive art that seeks to erect a new regime of truth by reclaiming and colonising those spaces through the barrel of the pen. In his most eloquent collection of essays, symbolically entitled Moving the Centre, Ngugi draws attention to the effect of the colonial archive in arrogating what constitutes the real historical subject to the imperial centre. When Ngugi calls for moving of the centre, he is in essence trying to suggest that in terms of history and discursive knowledges, the West has always positioned itself as the true self — the centre — while the empire remains the Other and on the periphery. Indeed, one of the legacies of the colonial encounter is a notion of history as 'the few privileged monuments' of achievement, which serves either to arrogate 'history' wholesale to the imperial centre or to erase it from the colonial archive and produce, especially in the Empire or the so-called New World Cultures, a condition of 'history-lessness', of 'no visible history'. Both notions are part of the imperial myth of history because history is defined by what is central, not what is peripheral and those not central to an assumed teleology or belief system, are without history. It seems to me that even a superficial reading of Ngugi's narrative and his critical essays over the years, point to a conscious project of transforming our inherited notions of history, especially the position of the colonial subjects as inscribed within imperial discursive practices. If the imperial narrative attempted to fix history and to read the empires history as the history of the other, by making reference to its set of signs located in its cultural landscape, Ngugi's position is that the history of Africa need not be contingent upon the imperial allegorising. Allegory here is used to mean a way of representing, of speaking for the 'other', especially in the enterprise of imperialism. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in his body of work, Ngugi's fundamental belief is in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures — the return of the other to the self. This is what he celebrates in his theory of globalectics — a theory that seek seeks to destabilise the privileging Western ways of knowing and instead celebrates those many streams of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as humanities collective experience. The creation of a humanistic wholeness and healing, has been at the core of his poetics over the years. The return to memoirs over the last decade or so was perhaps his last attempt to lay bare his soul and spirit; his life history as fragments of many forces — a rich tapestry into a life crafted around complex and layered forces of family and larger biographical universe. As a person, Ngugi was profoundly warm and down-to-earth, and always carried himself around with a deep sense of humility and ease, not to mention his infectious laughter and humour. He was simply ordinary — a man of the people. May his legacy live on and his soul rest in peace until we meet again in the land our ancestors. James Ogude, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures. Professor and Senior Research Fellow, and author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa
