How South Africa can tame its debt beast
Triple-budget bust-up may be worth it if lessons have really been learnt, but the government will have to tackle the underlying imbalance between revenue and expenditure
29 May 2025 - 05:00
South Africa has suffered through three budgets in three months. The debacle nearly broke the GNU, has undermined the authority of the National Treasury, and unnerved society. Was it all worth it?
The short answer is yes, maybe, but only if upcoming budgets show that the government realises it cannot continue to hike taxes or increase borrowing each year to compensate for a failure to make hard political trade-offs over things that endlessly inflate the size of the state...
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