The mini budget: A bad hangover and other highlights from 'Vrye Weekblad'
Here's what's hot in the latest edition of the Afrikaans digital weekly
The hangover after nine years of state capture and bad governance has not improved at all over the past 20 months.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team moan about the killer headache instead of taking the medicine: it is just too bitter a pill to swallow. This headache is now a chronic migraine and our patient — our country's economy — is on its way to the ICU.
This is how much debt SA has: R3,000,000,000,000, with another R1,000,000,000,000 on its way over the next year or so.
That is nearly double the annual national budget.
These figures drive one to drink, to stay with the hangover metaphor.
There was one speck of light in finance minister Tito Mboweni's medium-term budget policy statement — that an extra R1,3bn was allocated to the NPA. This could help the justice system to get back on its feet and recover political accountability by prosecuting corrupt politicians, officials and businessmen.
Read all about it in this week's edition of Afrikaans digital weekly Vrye Weekblad.
Mboweni didn't try to put lipstick on a pig. “Here we stand at the end of winter. The food cupboards are almost bare. We have been shuffling about in old and comfortable brown shoes,” he said. “Our expenditure continues to exceed our revenue. Our national debt is increasing at an unsustainable pace. The economy is not performing well. In these difficult times, we have turned against one another.”
Sadly, he doesn't do much about it. His colleague, Pravin Gordhan, at public enterprises, often makes similar utterances and said something similar this week at a media conference about the way forward for Eskom, but he took just as little action to tackle the issues.
It is like going to the doctor for a diagnosis for your serious condition and then driving straight back home, past the pharmacy and the hospital, like nothing at all is wrong with you.