South Africa has a poverty crisis, an unemployment crisis and a low economic growth crisis.

These crises are all linked to each other and the only way we release South Africans from the poverty trap is by growing our economy and creating jobs.

We need at least 5% - 6% economic growth to create employment that will meaningfully reduce the extreme poverty that nearly 18 million South Africans are trapped in.  

The current projected growth, of 1% this year and 1.3% next year, is insufficient to address unemployment and poverty.

The focus of the Minister’s Budget Speech must be our economic growth crisis.  

If he fails to comprehensively address that crisis then he will doom our country to extended low economic growth and deepening poverty and unemployment.

To get the economy growing the Minister of Finance must avoid the introduction of austerity measures – budget cuts to infrastructure, key programmes and services. 

Introducing austerity measures will exacerbate contraction of our economy and entrench the staggering suffering of the poorest people of this country.

Instead, the Minister will have to be bold and demonstrate faith in our country’s abilities to build our way out of these crises and service our debt.

The Minister must invest in the basics of economic growth - infrastructure: electricity supply, freight transport networks, water infrastructure and digital communications.  This was already planned for in the 2022 National Infrastructure Plan and it needs funding and speeding up.  

Spending on infrastructure has a multiplying effect in the economy and in job creation – and it addresses the government's most basic duty which is to create the infrastructure people need to live their lives and businesses need to trade. The conditions conducive to growth.

If the Minister remains focussed on economic growth then he must include support for entrepreneurs.  If the World Bank is correct, then South Africa can halve its unemployment rate by developing the same levels of entrepreneurship as our peer countries.

The greatest barrier to growing small businesses, and self-employment, is not red tape but access to finance. 

The Minister must address that barrier and increase accessible financing for small and micro enterprises.

Fixing infrastructure and supporting entrepreneurs would be laying the foundations upon which the economy can grow and lift South Africans out of financial distress, unemployment and poverty.

While we are working on turning the economy around millions of people will remain trapped in unemployment and poverty.

Government must prioritise getting food and dignity to the masses of people who are suffering without work and with rapidly diminishing hope for a better future. 

The R350 monthly SRD (Social Relief of Distress) grant, that more than eight million citizens receive from the State, is barely better than nothing. 

It is less than half of the money adults need just to feed themselves, according to the State’s own reckoning. Based simply on the extent to which our cost-of-living has increased so rapidly since the SRD was introduced it urgently needs to be increased.

The SRD grant must be converted into a Basic Income Grant (BIG) of just under R1000 per month placing the poorest South Africans, who would receive BIG, above the food poverty line and just below the lower bound poverty line.

South Africa needs to urgently implement a BIG. The correct question is not: “Do we have the money?” It is: “What wasteful line items in the budget can be scrapped so we do have the money?”

Providing for people’s basic needs is a Constitutional imperative. With the economy failing to generate jobs to provide peoples’ basic needs, this becomes the State’s responsibility.

As a James Carville, a strategist for former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, once said: “It’s the economy, stupid!”.

Issued by the GOOD Party