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Finance News

In a first for modern SA, the annual government budget speech which was scheduled for February was postponed till March 12th.

With the ruling party having lost its majority hold on cabinet and an often called “GNU” in place, a lot more political ‘wheeler dealing’ has to take place behind the scenes to make sure all parties are happy with how government plans to generate and spend funds.

One of the hot topics, revolves around pushing up VAT to 17%. With strong pushback on this and other plans it was clear that the budget could not be announced in time. As anyone who has worked on a budget knows, if you are unsure how much you are going to ‘earn’ it is almost impossible to really plan for how much you can ‘spend’. So, without clarity on the VAT topic everything else is hard to work out.

As a result, the budget speech had to be postponed to allow more time for robust debate at cabinet level.