Budget Speech 2025

Madam Speaker, the incentives in our current disaster management system are skewed towards relief and rehabilitation, when mitigation and readiness to minimise damage is the most cost effective response.

Our municipalities stand at the frontline of disaster response yet they are hamstrung by aging infrastructure, bureaucratic fragmentation, and limited access to emergency funds.

The priority is to reduce the administrative burden to access emergency funds. Every hour of delay costs lives and livelihoods.

Continuous improvements are made to the grant system to incentivise municipalities to access a variety of funding instruments for disasters. These include their own budget, the contingency reserve, conditional grant funding and insurance.

The Budget allocates R1.7 billion to respond to future disasters over the medium term, while R4 billion is provisionally allocated to address backlogs in recovery efforts for provinces and municipalities.