There will be no dramatic tax shocks. VAT stays at 15%. Personal income tax brackets are modified in accordance with inflation to mitigate the effects of bracket creep. Corporate tax rates are untouched.
Image: Timothy Bernard / Independent Newspapers
SOUTH Africans will tune in tomorrow not for fireworks, but for reassurance. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s Budget Speech arrives like a doctor delivering test results that are “stable”.
No immediate catastrophe. No cure either. The message will be calm and measured: fiscal consolidation is working, debt is stabilising, and the Government of National Unity (GNU) is holding the line.
All of that is technically true. None of it is enough.
The numbers will look better than many feared. Gross debt is expected to stabilise at just under 78% of GDP, edging down only slowly in the years ahead. The main budget deficit narrows to around 4.4% of gross domestic product (GDP), helped by a welcome but fragile boost from higher gold and platinum prices.
A primary surplus of approximately 1% is expected to strengthen further. Debt service costs remain brutal, swallowing more public money than health or policing, but at least they are no longer spiralling.
There will be no dramatic tax shocks. VAT stays at 15%. Personal income tax brackets are modified in accordance with inflation to mitigate the effects of bracket creep. Corporate tax rates are untouched.
Instead, the speech will emphasise enforcement, compliance, and administrative fixes at the SA Revenue Service (Sars). The burden is not raised. It is quietly tightened.
Godongwana will point to practical wins as proof that discipline works. Load shedding has been absent for more than 200 days. Freight logistics are inching forward through private sector participation. Social grants are paid on time, every month, with remarkable reliability.
These are not illusions. They are real achievements, and they matter. They reveal what happens when ideology takes a backseat and execution takes over.
Markets will respond positively. Borrowing costs should remain contained. The coalition will breathe a little easier. In a volatile world, calm counts for something.
But stability is not the same as progress. A primary surplus slows the rise of debt. It does not reverse it. Interest payments still crowd out the very investments that would change lives on the ground. Municipal water systems fail while money is spent servicing past mistakes. Infrastructure crumbles while budgets promise future upgrades that never fully arrive.
Across the country, communities know this gap intimately. Taps run dry for days, sometimes weeks. Sewage leaks into rivers that supply clinics and schools. Roads collapse under trucks rerouted from dysfunctional rail lines. These are not abstract governance failures. They are daily reminders that the state can balance spreadsheets while failing to deliver basics.
The budget will allocate funds to water security, energy transmission, and logistics recovery. The speech will sound ambitious. The documents will look impressive. Yet the underlying institutional rot remains untouched. Municipalities that cannot bill residents or maintain assets continue to control essential services.
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) limp along on bailouts rather than reform. Private capital steps in where it can, especially in energy and ports, but water reform remains trapped in constitutional fog and fragmented accountability.
This is the central illusion of Budget 2026. It celebrates the absence of collapse while avoiding the choices required for renewal.
Those choices are avoided for political reasons that everyone understands. The ANC cannot slash the public wage bill without rupturing its labour alliance. It cannot end perpetual bailouts without dismantling entrenched patronage networks.
The DA cannot force deep restructuring without risking the collapse of the coalition and being blamed for the social consequences. So, the path of least resistance prevails. Spread the pain thinly. Rely on favourable commodity prices. Enforce compliance quietly. Push the reckoning into the future.
Tomorrow’s speech will succeed on its own narrow terms. The ship will not list. No crisis will erupt. Time will be bought, especially valuable in a year shadowed by electoral anxiety.
But time without strategy is not progress. It is delayed.
Every year of avoidance makes future reform more painful. When commodity prices cool, the cuts will be deeper. When promises wear thin, social unrest will be sharper. When structural blockages persist, growth will remain anaemic.
South Africa currently has tailwinds it rarely enjoys. Lower inflation. Energy relief. Revenue surprises. Yet there is no willingness to use these gains as leverage for decisive reform.
Why not condition municipal funding on performance? Why not legislate operational control in water and logistics, where failure is chronic? Why protect social grants, rightly, but not the infrastructure that makes dignity possible?
South Africa has faced moments like this before. There have been times when pressure forced early, difficult decisions that laid the foundations for recovery. What makes this moment unsettling is not crisis, but comfort. The danger is not incompetence but settling for it being good enough.
Budget 2026 will be careful. It will be competent. In parts, it will be quietly effective. It will reassure markets and steady the coalition. But countries do not thrive by treading water. They thrive by choosing, early and decisively, to change direction.
South Africans deserve more than managed stability. They deserve a budget that names the illness, prescribes the painful medicine, and commits to recovery. Tomorrow, we will hear much about holding the line. The real question is how much longer a country can afford to stand still.
* Nyaniso Qwesha is a writer with a background in risk management, governance, and sustainability. He explores how power, accountability, and innovation intersect in South Africa’s landscape.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.