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Medium Term Budget Policy Statement Delay

Finance Minister Tito Mboweni was set to deliver the “mini budget” speech on the 21st of October 2020. He has now asked to push the speech back by a week or so (till 28 October) to allow more time to gather the needed info.

Each year there is an official budget speech given near the start of the year. Then about half the year later, the mini budget speech is given to refine, clarify, flesh out or supplement the earlier full budget speech.

‘2020 has been such an unusual year that any plans for spending given right at the start pretty soon went out the window’

2020 has been such an unusual year that any plans for spending given right at the start pretty soon went out the window as Covid-19 hit hard and threw everyone’s plans out the window. Government spending has ended up looking nothing like what was expected and income certainly has been slashed as taxpayers have not been earning and a wave of unemployment is washing across the country.

The Medium Term Budget Policy Statement normally sets out the governments plans for the next 3 years, which at this point looks like it will relate solely to dealing with the fall out of Covid-19 and will hardly resemble earlier 2020, 2021, 2022 budget plans. Especially will the income projections look very different.