Budget Speech 2024 Introduction

 

ISBN: 978-0-621-51690-6

 

RP: RP03/2024

 

For more information:

 

Communications Directorate

National Treasury

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South Africa

 

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Budget documents are available at: www.treasury.gov.za

 

 

Honourable Speaker, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula

His Excellency, President Cyril Ramaphosa

His Excellency, the Deputy President Paul Mashatile

Cabinet Colleagues

Members of the Executive Committees for Finance

Honourable Members

The Governor of the South African Reserve Bank

The Commissioner of the South African Revenue

Service Fellow South Africans

 

 

Madam Speaker, according to two prominent economists, Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik, "A crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it".

 

The point, Madam Speaker, is that the size and quality of the national pie is what informs, and ultimately determines, the realisation of our political imperative of redistribution.

 

Our mission over the past 30 years has been to restore both social and economic justice to our nation, and to decisively address the inequality that was the hallmark of systemic discrimination and dispossession.

 

The budgets we have tabled since 1994, have been about securing the goal of growing the economy, so that we can do more to address the inequalities and deprivation that still scar our society and undermine the promise of democracy

 

So, it is with a great sense of privilege and purpose that I stand before you to present this last budget of the sixth democratic administration.

 

Madam Speaker, I therefore table the following documents before this House: