Budget Speech exposes opposition's strategic vacuum in SA politics

Nkosikhulule Nyembezi

IT MIGHT have been when several dozen opposition MPs walked into Minister Enoch Godongwana’s March 12 budget speech wearing coordinated shades of red overalls and military camouflage, but it was definitely by the time that several dozen of these opposition MPs started demanding an apology for late arrival of the Speaker, and later waving hands and booing during the speech in the National Assembly that I started to seriously worry about the resistance.

Arise and do something! Approximately half of South Africans had been begging these representatives in the face of the chronic burden of poverty, inequality, and unemployment. Arise and do anything! We have cried. Opposition legislators had since last June, after all, to strategise a strong, coherent rebuttal to the early days of this administration’s chaotic term anchored on the GNU’s statement of intent. You have a plan to save our rainbow nation, do you not?

As opponents cry chaos over last month’s postponement and some in his party grow anxious over tax hikes and underperforming GDP, Godongwana appears not cowed by his critics but emboldened — determined to double down on the fiscal balancing interventions based on four pillars that this GNU has set into motion in the speech.

From an ordinary person’s perspective, it may feel like the world is falling apart: our economy has stagnated for over a decade, GDP growth has averaged less than 2 per cent and far below the level required to meet our expanding list of needs, debt-service costs will amount to R389.6 billion in the current financial year, translating to 22 cents of every rand we raise in revenue, more than what we spend on health, the police and basic education.

Yet it is a testament to Godongwana and the ANC’s political and fiscal manoeuvring that the heated debate on the mismatch of this government’s policy priorities has only marginally dented his popularity so far. And it has created an unusual and tense political dynamic as parties inside and outside parliament alike brace for the consequences to play out.

The dynamic was evident as Godongwana tabled the budget, exhorting South Africans to accept the multi-year VAT increase and to understand “this decision was not made lightly, and that “no Minister of Finance is ever happy to increase taxes.”

Throughout the nearly hour-long address, the ANC side of the National Assembly chamber erupted in raucous cheers for the increases in social grants, while the opposition sat sullenly on the other side of the room, largely refusing to cheer for what it sees as patronage.

As he continued listing realities like “corporate tax collections have declined over the last few years, an indication of falling profits and a trading environment worsened by the logistics constraints and rising electricity costs,” opposition protests escalated, and it felt to me as though we were watching the resistance to the GNU try to sort itself out in real-time.

Is an effective strategy one that stays within collective responsibility boundaries of civility and belt-tightening but then gets shouted down by a minister who knows nothing of these boundaries when it comes to removing government hurdles slowing down the economy?

One that gets angry at the passive posture of GNU partners but then risks losing the upper hand of looking like the adults in the room waiting to strike a blow to dismantle and reconfigure the GNU?

All of this lack of opposition influence to the policy direction of the country illustrates a bigger conundrum than exists in the National Assembly chamber. What is the best way to be an effective voice for change in policy in this era?

In recent years, opposition parties have tried chanting, shouting, disruptions, and litigation in courts. However, they have often been ad-hoc, lukewarm, and less effective compared to organised civil society organisations known for going high, going low, going hard, being antagonistic, marching, pleading, mocking, understanding, using facts, using force, in what ended up labelled as violent and disruptive ‘service delivery protests’.

By now, we are not talking about fashion in Parliament. We are talking about the real issue, which, of course, is that the spectacle of the budget speech did deliver a coherent message of business as usual in so far as we expected to see radical change resulting from a direct influence of the opposition lobbying. The opposition message, whether accurate or not, was: We do not know what to do with this GNU.

These are extraordinary times, and we need an extraordinary, lawful resistance to policies that slow down economic growth, perpetuate wasteful expenditure on a bloated and incompetent government, feed corruption, and impoverish citizens.

The impression that you want of your elected officials in times like this is that they know better than you how to make all spheres of government work for our prosperity. They have a serious plan for all of this that involves all social partners and all sectors of the economy. They are on the phone with one another at all hours of the night trying to figure out how to grow the economy at all levels and preserve this country’s rights, freedoms and rule of law. The impression you do not want is that they are on the phone with one another trying to figure out who can lend them a camouflage or an ox-blood red worksuit.

Nearly every person I talked to about the budget speech — mostly activists, I would bet, at drop-off lines and in text chains — told me they would have cringed through the depressing figures and underwhelming policy choices in the speech. Because Godongwana was up there bloviating about the Kaizer Chiefs’s performance in the premier league and because opposition parties seemed to have so little recourse. Because it was not clear whether the issue was that opposition parties, in their attempts to exert pressure, were trying the wrong things or, scarier, that there was nothing left to try.

Nyembezi is a policy analyst, researcher and human rights activist