THE NATIONAL BUDGET. AN EXERCISE IN FAITH, PLENTY HOPE, ZERO CHARITY

 

In the days when the minister got one of his underlings to carry a small potted aloe to his budget speech, there was something different from the previous year to look at and wonder about during the speech. You could wonder if it was the same plant as last year. These days the aloe has gone, and the overwhelming feeling is “same old, same old”. There is so little wiggle room on both the revenue and expenditure sides of the SA government’s budget that it is getting tedious. Little tweaks here and there nothing revolutionary or exciting to try and get this nation going again and crucially decrease the government’s share of the pie.

One welcome aspect of the keeping things as they were is National Treasury’s publication of all the figures just as soon as Minister  Enoch Godongwana. begins his speech. All the usual documents in all the usual layouts are so useful.

Amongst the documents one will find is a useful two-pager focussed mainly on the revenue side and detailing all the changes to the way they have found to make the pips squeaks. The document is almost identical in format from one year to the next and provides a useful reference. It’s called the Tax Pocket Guide and while no longer printed like that it will, with coaxing, fit in a pocket and provide a source with which to bore small children and terrify taxpayers.

As remarked already there is almost no room left for bold and clever displays of policy change and incremental tweaks. Optimism, however, is rampant. Minister Godongwana  thinks he should collect R1.72 trillion in the forthcoming tax year. This is 18% higher than ever collected by Treasury in a comparable period.  He does believe that he will be able to rein in cabinet to spending just R2.09trillion yielding a deficit of a mere R356 billion. This is a heroic call. It is two years since such a small deficit was recorded.

One detail which merits comment is that Home Affairs is one of the smallest spenders in the state at R9.7bn. This suggests that it costs a mere R200 per citizen per year to capture and keep our details and share them with us whenever we need a vault copy or what ever. That’s not bad really.

Higher Education minister Blade Nzimande is determined to be in the limelight. His department will complete planning work on the formation of two new universities for South Africa this year. A university of Science and Technology sounds grand but how a campus on crime detection and fighting fits an academic program, is unclear. Blade is really excited and has all but written the course notes already. He has already declared the subjects to be Data Science, Machine-learning, Artificial intelligence, Blockchain and  Robotics. As well as his pet subject of Hydrogen-powered technologies. Now normally new university departments grow out of the enthusiasm and energy of existing staff members of a related discipline who set off down a new path where funding and their own interests take them This happened 40 years ago when writing programs for computers morphed into a whole discipline named Computer science. Simply painting the word Blockchain on the door doesn’t identify if it’s a real subject worthy of academic effort. It’s the other way round. Intriguingly Enoch’s second campus will be used to improve the quality of general and specialised South African Police Service investigations. A degree in gumshoeing. Well well!

The idea is to give every SA household 10 Gigabytes of free data. The nature of the beast is that depending on the users in the household this is either way more than required for letters to granny or a risible amount for a data miner. A market of unused allocation is bound to start up. One really does form the impression that that the decision makers mostly have no idea what this allocation is or involves but have been told this is a “good thing”.

James Greener

Friday 25^th February 2022