GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
22 November 2023
Note to editor: This is the speech that was delivered by GOOD Secretary-General and Member of Parliament, Brett Herron, during today’s debate on the Division of Revenue Amendment Bill.
South Africans have suffered the crippling effects of an under-performing economy, which has failed to create jobs or eliminate inequality and poverty, for 15 years.
Each year’s budget speech and medium term budget policy statement deliver sets of commitments that haven’t changed a thing.
This year’s MTBPS, and report, pinpoints the global economic crisis of 2008 as the turning point in our economic growth and job-creation progress.
The African Development Bank’s (ADB) Economic Outlook 2023 report places our decade-and-a-half-long stagnation into context.
The continent’s outlook remains positive and stable, with a projected rebound to 4 percent growth in 2023 and further consolidation to 4.3 percent in 2024.
The bank’s projections show that 18 African countries will experience growth rates surpassing 5 percent in 2023, increasing to 22 in 2024.
Here, our dire economic performance is almost entirely of our own making.
As the development bank says:
“Growth in Southern Africa is projected to decelerate by 1.1 percentage points… to 1.6 percent in 2023…The projected sharp decline in 2023 largely reflects continued growth weakness in South Africa, the region’s largest economy and trading partner, from an estimated 2.0 percent in 2022 to 0.2 percent in 2023, as it grapples with the impact of high interest rates and persistent power outages on economic activity.”
Millions of South Africans are struggling for their basic survival as a consequence of our rank economic performance.
That this is so is in large part due to the state’s inability to move beyond the rhetoric of implementing economic structural reforms.
This year’s Medium Term Budget Policy Statement made yet another commitment to economic structural reforms, including restructuring government – but it failed to provide us with a strategy for economic growth and job creation.
We align ourselves with the position of a number of organisations, included in the report, that South Africa has a growth crisis and not a debt crisis.
Implementing austerity measures now, given the economic quicksand we’re in, will relegate us to languishing in hardship and profound inequality for generations to come.
It will entrench and deepen poverty and trap our economy in a cycle of low growth and induced underperformance.
Media Enquiries:
Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
Cell: 082 518 3264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Janke Tolmay, GOOD Media Manager
Cell: 073 367 1223
Email: janke@forgood.org.za