TONY LEON: Ejecting the gods that have failed SA is only way out of our unholy mess
Tough choices are what effective, joined-up government is all about
Thursday is the most downcast budget day since the arrival of the ANC in government in 1994. Back then, the international isolation of the departing apartheid regime coupled with the minus growth of the local economy under siege had left the new administration with a bare fiscal cupboard. Indeed, incoming minister Mac Maharaj, a confidant of new president Nelson Mandela, explained the dire inheritance vividly: “There was simply no money to do what we had planned … we had to dump our blueprints and start from the beginning.” These dismal financial straits are well remembered by the former head of the ANC economic desk during the transition, Tito Mboweni, who entered the 1994 cabinet as minister of labour. There are no shortages or irony and frissons of déjà vu that the same Mboweni, today 25 years older and doubtless wiser, has to table a hardship budget with a huge hole in it called Eskom. And, how and with what measures in parliament on Thursday afternoon he will bail out the state...
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