2015

Budget Speech

Nhlanhla Nene

Minister of Finance

25 February 2015

Honourable Speaker—

I have the honour to present the first budget of our fifth democratic Parliament.

Members of the House, and fellow South Africans—

Over the past twenty years we have built houses, delivered water and electricity, improved access to schools and health care. Yet there are people living in shacks, there are schools without sanitation, there are patients without care.

We have made progress in dismantling apartheid divisions. Yet there are still fault-lines across our social landscape.

We have agreed on a National Development Plan. But there is still hard work ahead in its implementation.

Though we continue to register positive growth rates, many businesses have struggled to maintain profitability, unemployment remains high and government has had to adjust to slower revenue growth.

Today’s budget is constrained by the need to consolidate our public finances, in the context of slower growth and rising debt.

And so we must intensify our efforts to address economic constraints, improve our growth performance, create work opportunities and broaden economic participation. We need to achieve these goals if our National Development Plan is to be realised.

On the one hand, our development path is limited by the resource constraints of the current economic outlook. On the other hand, it seeks to lift these constraints by strengthening public institutions, supporting innovation and making markets work better and investing in infrastructure and our people.

The 2015 budget is aimed at rebalancing fiscal policy to give greater impetus to investment, to support enterprise development, to promote agriculture and industry and to make our cities engines of growth.