S’THEMBISO MSOMI | Parliament must do its work and engage in serious, meaningful discussions about the budget

If there is an upside to the ongoing debacle surrounding the proposed national budget, it is this: MPs will, for a change, get to fight over what really matters to ordinary South Africans. 

Keen observers of our National Assembly will agree that there is usually more drama in the House than one would find in a Kaizer Chiefs vs Cape Town City game.  

But just as a Chiefs vs City match has no effect on who will end up winning the Premier Soccer League Championship, the parliamentary drama usually has no bearing on whether ordinary people’s lives improve or not. 

Over the past decade, especially after the entry of the EFF with its red overalls in the parliamentary arena, the National Assembly has enjoyed heightened attention from a public that is always on the lookout for a bit of drama and loads of humour.  

And the House never disappointed – MPs trying to block a sitting president from delivering his state of the nation address, white-shirted security marshals forcibly ejecting MPs from the assembly, party members walking out in protest, and politicians from rival parties calling each other names so crude they were ruled “unparliamentary” by the presiding officers. 

Through all the theatrics, however, as the Zondo commission would later point out, parliament failed in one of its most basic tasks – holding the executive to account, especially during the shameful period that has come to be known as the state capture era. 

There were many reasons for this, and this column space is too short to try to list and explain all of them. But one of them was that parliament had grown so accustomed to deferring to the cabinet so often that it mostly rubber-stamped executive decisions without much scrutiny. Hence, whoever captured the country’s president also controlled not only his ministers but the majority in parliament too. 

But the post-May 2024 parliament looks radically different from the ones we’ve had since 1994. For the first time since SA started holding democratic elections, we have a parliament where not a single party controls a majority of the seats in the House. 

As the experience of the past three weeks has shown, this changed environment has dramatically reduced the executive’s ability to impose its will on MPs. No longer can a president just send his party’s secretary-general to a party parliamentary caucus to instruct MPs to vote in favour of an issue, whether they agree or not, and be confident that his wish will carry the day. 

The new reality requires persuading enough political parties and MPs to support your point of view. 

On Wednesday, finance minister Enoch Godongwana finally tabled his proposed budget for the 2025/26 fiscal year after his speech was postponed three weeks ago due to disagreements in the cabinet over his then plan to increase VAT by two percentage points to 17%.   

Though there is still no agreement in the government of national unity (GNU) over the budget, with one of the main partners – the DA – saying it will vote against it because it remains opposed to any form of a VAT increase, Godongwana was given the green light to table his proposed budget.  

This was with the understanding that further horse-trading will happen between GNU members from now until May, when the House is scheduled to put the budget to the vote. 

We can only hope that the parties, within and outside the GNU, use the period to engage in serious and meaningful discussions about this year’s budget. 

They should turn parliament into a forum where there would be less grandstanding and theatrics, but more well-thought-out alternative proposals to Godongwana’s 0.50 percentage point increase this year, followed by another one next year.  

It should not be enough for the likes of the DA and the EFF to say they reject the proposed successive 50-basis-point VAT hikes – they should be able to say where the additional money needed to meet the country’s needs would come from. 

It is in the parliamentary committees discussing various aspects of the budget that fresh proposals would have to be seriously scrutinised alongside those tabled by the minister. That is, after all, the work of parliament – to put every proposal under the microscope and, in the end, choose those that make sense for the country, even if they are different from those put forward by the executive. 

What one is uneasy about is the suggestion by Godongwana at a pre-budget media briefing on Wednesday that the DA was only holding out on backing the budget in its current form as a bargaining tool with President Cyril Ramaphosa over non-budgetary issues such as the Expropriation Act as well as the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act which were both recently signed into law. 

If that is the case and, given that, put together, the ANC and the DA can easily meet the 50% plus one parliamentary threshold without needing any other party’s support, it means a  “gentleman’s agreement” between the president and DA leader John Steenhuisen can end up imposing the budget on the nation in its current form without parliament being allowed to meaningfully interrogate it like it is meant to.

That would not only be a missed opportunity for parliament, but would also create an impression in the minds of many that even the budgeting process is merely another opportunity for political football in this country.