BUDGET STATEMENT
HILARY JOFFE: Hairy decisions needed for Gigaba’s bald numbers — before it is too late
Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba looked unusually subdued as he briefed journalists ahead of his maiden medium-term budget policy speech on Wednesday — and no wonder. Though he claimed tough decisions had been made to maintain the fiscal framework and the expenditure ceiling, the numbers he announced made it clear the government has crashed off the fiscal consolidation path it had been following for the past few years and has breached its own self-imposed expenditure ceiling. Nor was there much evidence, in the minister’s sometimes garbled answers to technical questions, that any decisions about SA’s fiscal trajectory had been made. Instead, the tough stuff has been flipped to a new committee of ministers that was set up at the beginning of October, reporting directly to the president, and will "develop proposals to stabilise the national debt over the medium term", the budget document said.The message seemed to be that this was just the curtain-raiser and taxpayers, investors and rat...
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