Godongwana tables the mini budget today, and the fight over every rand starts in Parliament
The Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement and the Adjustments Appropriation Bill land in the National Assembly, with public hearings to follow.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana tables the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement in the National Assembly today, alongside the Adjustments Appropriation Bill, setting out government’s revised economic outlook and adjusted expenditure estimates.
The statement, widely called the mini budget, is the point in the year when departments ask for changes to their budgets and for additional funds to cover unforeseeable and unavoidable spending. It updates National Treasury’s forecasts, adjusts departmental budgets and sets the fiscal framework that the February national budget will be built on.
It is a moment of direct public consequence. The MTBPS is where the money that pays for services is reallocated, and Parliament’s finance and appropriations committees must hold public hearings with relevant stakeholders once it has been tabled. That is the opening for the public to engage with the government’s budget plans three months before the national budget is presented.
Parliament said the statement allows it and the public to engage with government’s budget plans ahead of February, and that it is a mechanism for reviewing how effectively and efficiently available resources are used. It also gives Parliament the chance to assess how government intends to balance economic growth, service delivery and fiscal sustainability against competing demands on the public purse.
The tabling is required by section 28 of the Public Finance Management Act of 1999, which obliges National Treasury to put multi-year revenue and expenditure projections and key macroeconomic forecasts before the National Assembly each year. Under Parliament’s rules it is tabled every October, after the Budgetary Review and Recommendations Reports and three months before the national budget, which follows the State of the Nation Address in February. It forms part of the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, which introduced a longer planning horizon into the budget process.
This report is drawn from SAnews (South African Government News Agency), the government’s own news agency, at https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/all-systems-go-medium-term-budget-policy-statement. It summarises what the statement is and what happens next. The revised forecasts, the adjusted allocations and the emergency spending requests themselves are in the documents Godongwana tables today, and those are the numbers South Africans will be arguing over until February.
