PETER BRUCE: In the twilight gloom, the outline of an uncertain future
'His relentless calculation is at what point he falls over. His calculation is about when his own party irreversibly turns on him'
Initially, The Twilight Zone was a US TV series in the '60s. Since then it has come to mean the mental state between reality and fantasy - roughly where South Africa is at the moment. Think about it. On Wednesday, President Jacob Zuma's finance minister, Malusi Gigaba, gave his first medium-term budget policy statement, a rough three-year rolling assessment of our fiscal position. He had hideous news. Tax revenue, under his boss's hand-picked tax commissioner, Tom Moyane, would be R51-billion behind target this financial year. The final figure will probably be even worse.That R51-billion is roughly the amount the government needs every 90 days to keep up repayments of its debt - for now. But on November 24, Moody's and S&P will issue their latest ratings of our debt, and after Gigaba failed to signal any prospect of turning the economy around to keep debt from rising any further, they will downgrade us further. Gigaba tried, I believe, his best but it was not nearly enough. New down...
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