Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana will deliver the 2023 Budget on Wednesday afternoon. Picture: Phando Jikelo, African News Agency (ANA)
ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana will present the Budget at the Cape Town City Hall.
The minister is set to begin presenting his speech at 2pm, with many economists saying that the finance boss is once again faced with a difficult task with the compilation of this year’s national Budget.
Godongwana’s speech comes hot on the heels of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (Sona).
During the president’s Sona, he said that the finance minister would elaborate on how the government planned to take on some of Eskom’s debt burden.
Ramaphosa declared the ongoing energy crisis a national state of disaster and that he would be appointing a new minister of electricity dedicated to ending load shedding.
He also announced tax relief measures for solar power, one of the solutions that the government has proposed to help South Africans deal with the rolling blackouts that they are forced to contend with on a daily basis, as the country finds itself in the worst energy crisis in history.
He said the country would proceed with the roll-out of rooftop solar panels and that the minister of finance would outline how households would be assisted and how businesses would be able to benefit from a tax incentive.
Mark Boshoff, the head of transformation and climate resilience strategy at Nedbank, said on Monday that he, like the rest of the country, was waiting for details as industry had not been consulted so far.
Counting down to the #Budget2023 tabling. The Minister will deliver a much anticipated Budget Speech tomorrow. Tune in on @GovernmentZA & National Treasury social media platforms. pic.twitter.com/WsWM153kq8
— National Treasury (@TreasuryRSA) February 21, 2023
“The finance minister is going to have his work cut out for him to find a model that works in this economic environment,” he said.
The country now had an estimated 250 days of load shedding in 2023, up from 100 previously forecast, following 157 days of power cuts in 2022.
Many economic commentators have said that a key focus of Godongwana’s national Budget will be the tax incentives for solar power.
Buying diesel for generators comes at a prohibitive cost, so companies and consumers are looking at the affordability of installing solar power systems to mitigate the knock-on effects of the power crisis in South Africa.
And while Eskom has spent billions on diesel, so too have companies, with many JSE-listed companies detailing the diesel spend on their trading updates.
For example, Pick n Pay said this month it had spent nearly R350 million year-on-year on diesel to run generators in the first 10 months of its year in a bid to counter load shedding. Dis-Chem reported on Friday that its diesel costs across its stores had increased by 54% over the past six months, while its diesel bill came to R36m as it tried to mitigate load shedding in its stores.
The 2023 Budget speech will be available on all major news channels in South Africa, as well as on Parliament South Africa’s YouTube channel.
– BUSINESS REPORT