SA Budget Speech 2016: Minister Heralds a Serious Change of Course

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 26 Feb 2016 by Iraj Abedian

SA Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, hardly a full two months in the job, stood at the Parliament yesterday to deliver the toughest budget of the post-Apartheid era. His budget speech had one over-arching objective and faced many challenges. The strategic imperative was to ward off the looming prospect of the country’s sovereign credit rating downgrade to the junk status. Ironically, moments prior to his speech, Brazil had been downgraded to junk rating. The Minister made a serious and sobering reference to this fresh development in the global capital market. His primary target was the majority of his fellow Cabinet Ministers and the President and his parties’ fellow members of Parliament (MPs), who have proven obstinate over the past seven years – all in the face of irrefutable facts about the loss of investor confidence and evident fall in GDP growth from a high of 4.2% in 2009 to the current estimated level of 0.5% per annum.

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