Budget

In his Budget speech for 2024/25, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana announced policy proposals for:

Gold and Foreign Exchange Contingency Reserve Account reforms, introducing ‘a new settlement arrangement … that will reduce government borrowing and improve the Reserve Bank’s equity position’, and
‘an increase in the limit for renewable energy projects that …. qualify for the carbon offsets regime, from 15 megawatts to 30 megawatts’

He also:

committed government to continuing to ‘protect core services’ by directing 60% of non-interest spending to the social wage, and ‘preserving capital spending’
proposed adding R57.6 bn to Medium Term Budget Policy public sector wage bill projections (‘to pay for the salaries of teachers, nurses and doctors, among many other critical services’), and
announced proposals for:
- above-inflation increases of between 6.7% and 7.2% for alcohol product excise duties
- an increase in tobacco excise duties (by 4.7% for cigarettes and cigarette tobacco, and by 8.2% for pipe tobacco and cigars)
- an increase in the excise duty on electronic nicotine and non-nicotine delivery systems ‘to R3.04 per millilitre’, and
- an increase in the carbon fuel levy to 11 cents per litre for petrol and 14 cents per litre for diesel, effective from 3 April 2024 (although there will be ‘no increases to the general fuel levy for 2024/25’).

Key social support proposals included:

an increase of R100 to the monthly old age, war veterans, disability and care dependency grants (to be divided into R90 effective from April, and R10 effective from October)
a R50 increase to the monthly foster care grant
a R20 increase to the monthly child support grant, and
an allocation of R61.4 bn for employment programmes over the medium term (R7.4bn of which ‘has been identified for the Presidential Employment Initiative’).

At another level altogether, R628 m has been allocated to the Department of Justice & Constitutional Development for implementing:

According to the Minister this will bring the total spent on ‘funding these efforts’ to R2.3bn.

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