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Cape Town – South Africa needs a Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), also known as the mini budget, that is ambitious and aimed not just at balancing the books, but also at lifting the economy out of a low-growth, high-unemployment spiral.
That is according to Democratic Alliance shadow minister of finance David Maynier, who said Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene cannot deliver a business-as-usual mini budget in parliament on Wednesday.
His eight ways to do this are:
1. Deal with policy uncertainty by reinforcing the message that the National Development Plan is not open to negotiation.
2. Scrap policies preventing economic growth and jobs creation, such as the visa regulations that are crushing jobs in the tourism sector.
3. Announce significant economic policy changes to deal with the structural constraints to economic growth and job creation, including measures to deal with the inflexible labour market.
4. Avoid tax increases by implementing real cost-containment measures on consumption expenditure, including reducing the size of the executive.
5. Increase revenue by ensuring that state assets will be sold, leased, donated and written off to save costs and raise revenue to fund investment spending.
6. Rebalance spending from consumption expenditure to investment expenditure.
7. Incentivise private sector investment by privatising, or part-privatising, “zombie” state-owned enterprises.
8. Terminating unaffordable mega projects such as the proposed nuclear build programme.
