Mboweni’s gutsy and bold budget

Charles Dickens and St Paul. Bram Fischer’s speech from the dock. Pliny the Elder, in the original Latin. The hardy Aloe ferox as a metaphor to laud the resilience of the SA economy and people.

Finance Minister Tito Mboweni has embraced with gusto the tradition of finance ministers using their budget speeches to display their erudition and wit. It’s a practice that started with Trevor Manuel in 1997.

Manuel would weave his magic against a backdrop of references to the likes of the Senegalese protest poet David Diop and Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter. To leaven this heady intellectual mix, he introduced the popular innovation of Tips for Trevor, inviting the public to send him their bright ideas.

Manuel’s artful display of the common touch has clearly hit the spot. Mboweni invited suggestions on Twitter and quoted several nuggets of submitted homespun wisdom.

In his second budget speech, Mboweni again draws extensively from “the Good Book”. Last year, it was David in Psalm 23, “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death…”. This week, it was Paul in First Corinthians: “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize?”

Aside from the refreshingly politically incorrect suggestion that in the real world there are both winners and losers, Mboweni’s budget was a gutsy contrast to Ramaphosa’s Sona. Ramaphosa’s approach was supplicatory, the tone was one of accommodation. In contrast, Mboweni’s tone is more practical, the emphasis on achieving a “capable and efficient” state apparatus.

As he put it before pulling the rug from under government employees, “Our Aloe ferox can withstand the long dry season because it is unsentimental. It sheds dead weight to direct increasingly scarce resources to what is young and vital.”

Then, confounding predictions that he would not dare take on the left of the party, he announced a R160 billion cut over three years to the public service salary bill. Rubbing further salt into Cosatu wounds, Mboweni provided some rare relief to individual taxpayers, as well as promising an unspecified future cut in the corporate tax rate.

Cosatu’s reaction has been predictable: “the battle lines are drawn.” If government dares proceed with these changes, Cosatu will “collapse” the public service and “part ways” with the government.

How a conflict between the unions and the Ramaphosa administration plays out is as important for SA as is that between the Ramaphosa faction and the state-capture remnants of the Zuma era. For SA to avoid economic implosion, Ramaphosa has to win both battles.

How the forces stack up is unclear. Ramaphosa’s position is weakened by the fact that he is indebted to Cosatu and the SACP for his election as party leader and his survival as SA’s president.

But it is, fortunately, a relationship of mutual dependency. Because there is no love lost between the unionists and communists on the one hand, and the Zuma-ites on the other, Ramaphosa is their only channel to exercising significant influence and power.

So, Cosatu and the SACP will undoubtedly huff and puff. But, one hopes, calculatedly not hard enough to bring down on everyone’s head, including their own, the roof of Ramaphosa’s rickety residence.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.