SA 2017 Budget Speech and President Zuma's Cabinet Reshuffle

SOUTH AFRICA - In Brief 21 Feb 2017 by Iraj Abedian

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Tomorrow is SA's 2017 Budget Speech day! The usual annual hype around the fiscal policies is once again dominated by the political games at play surrounding the Minister, and more broadly around the control of the National Treasury. In my last commentary I warned that the probability of the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle affecting the National Treasury had raised from 20% to 50%. Events of the past week has raised this probability even beyond 50% at present. Against all internal procedures, the ANC has announced that Mr Brian Molefe, the x-CEO of Eskom, who featured prominently in the 2016 Public Protector's State of the Capture Report, is set to join the Parliament as an ANC Member of the Parliament (MP) soon. The exact date of his swearing-in is not yet confirmed. But this will be within the next few days. Although Mr Molefe resigned his Eskom post following the State of the Capture report, he has not hidden his ambition and intention to play a role in the current popular policy shift towards what President Zuma has termed: The Radical Economic Transformation. As I explained in my previous Note, this is part of a political narrative to placate those critics who place the blame for rising poverty, unemployment and lack of wide-spread black economic empowerment on the ANC broadly, and on President Zuma more specifically. This narrative is meant to frame the National Treasury as a major obstacle for the government’s developmental objectives. By so doing, within the ANC, a pro-Zuma faction has been championing this narrative consistently in the run-up to the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle, paving the way for the President to remove either the Minister or the Deputy Ministe...