THE BUDGET TUSSLES MIGHT BE DEMOCRACY IN ACTION.

This was published in the TimesLive 10 April 2025

The GNU Budget debacle will go down in history, arguably alongside the JZ stretching of the criminal justice system, as a watershed moment that demonstrates to what lengths the RSA constitutional order can go to make its democratic character a reality.  The coalition arrangements of the ANC and the DA, after no party received an absolute mandate to govern, are the single most test of the RSA's resolve to put the nation's interests above those of political parties.

The brute truth is that politics' prize is government, which is the state's most active and primary agent, responsible for allocating public goods and services. Those who control the government will have the authority to reconcile society's conflicting interests through instruments like the budget, a core component of the fiscal framework. 

In RSA, freely elected public representatives carry the will of the people and the legitimacy to govern by default. Unless a party polls more than 50% of the vote, power to govern will be shared. This is where coalition governments become necessary. The essence of entering into coalitions is about influencing the allocative power of state organs, and the National Treasury is the apex institution that will attract the interests of coalition members as the currency of political influence. 

The Budget, as projected by the government of the day, in this case the GNU, outlines the expected income (revenue) and planned spending (expenditure) for a specific period. It is, by definition, the most political of state power instruments, as it defines the future through present-day allocations. Tempering with its multi-year cadence will always signal the arrival of new players in the power architecture. It would be foolhardy for any political party that is part of a coalition arrangement and wields the power and influence within such a coalition not to demand the right to be involved in determining the granularity of the budget.

The income and expenditure relationship in a government's budget directly affects economic growth indicators, such as projected GDP growth, associated inflationary pressures, and investment or consumption spending patterns that can spur further growth. The Budget affects the lives of all South Africans by determining how national revenue is spent. In a context where political power is a shared reality, the granularities of the budget will always be assumed to reflect the interests of those the nation considers the government of the day.

South Africa has been a one-party to multiparty democracy for more than thirty years, under the National Party and the ANC, since 1948. Citizens had, in essence, lost their ability to question the basis of previous budgets at the level at which the GNU is operating. There is therefore no precedent to judge the correctness or otherwise of what the DA, as a member of the GNU, is currently doing to oppose aspects of the budget. It might well be a characteristic of the democratic order we operate under that there was no need to exercise in the past thirty years. Questioning the basis of budgeting in a state might be an outstanding matter in transferring political power to the people.

The GNU coalition arrangements, a function of the democratic order, came with the facility which enhances the accountability ecosystem beyond the traditional 'what happened with the budget' to 'why this approach of budgeting'. We have been a post-facto society on this matter. The concept of freely elected public representatives imposes an obligation to view public policy from the vantage point of how it affects society's bread-and-butter issues. The assumptions of the past thirty years, some of which might have been a function of the majority rule honeymoon, cannot be expected to obtain in the new context.

Holding no brief for the DA's questioning of the budget, the questioning of the taxation powers of the National Treasury about the role of public representatives in decision-making is a democracy-enhancing act that debunks the 'till Jesus comes' paradigm of public policy approaches we saw in the past three decades. With prospects of no political party securing over 40% of the national vote in 2029, the democratic checks and balances that stem from the DA's questioning of the budget process may be a first step towards a people's budget, grounded in the technical expertise of the public representatives we send to Parliament. 

The time for democrats and revolutionaries to have a relationship with post-Apartheid state power, from the perspective of a player rather than a referee, may be arriving through a medium least expected: the thirty-year-old leader of the opposition, with a 60-year history of experience in the opposition party. It cannot be correct that those on the 'so-called' left of the DA do not see the advantage that came with the truncation of the 2% VAT increase, and we are now at 1%, assuming the DA does not win its urgent Constitutional Court case. True democracy includes calling your political party to order if it takes decisions that prejudice you as its members. 

The democratic character of the budget should encompass its spatial expression and, by default, the introduction of constituency-based representation, which is hindered by a skewed party-political proportional system that marginalises the weak at the centre of society. The discourse on the DA's opposition to the fiscal framework underpinning the budget, notably the VAT hike, has been analysed through the binaries to determine why they and not the other party raised it. From a layman's perspective, few in society understand what is happening with the VAT hike, and freely elected representatives are bickering over political point scoring. 

The legislation that goes with the budgeting process will henceforth become part of the National Discourse. The Division of National Revenue Act formula, the Taxation determination legislative frameworks, the various appropriation legislations in the national and provincial spheres of government, and many other appropriations that were ordinarily not in the public's purview must also enter the new vortex of analysis and questioning.

If any advantage has accrued to society from the GNU arrangements, the emphasis on power dynamics within the budgeting process is one of them. The focal point for lobbying on taxation and state expenditure matters can no longer be the National Treasury alone. It is a comprehensive government affair. This should enable effective and practical state-wide planning. The Church Square Consensus of the national budget may face one of its most significant challenges since 1994. The Budget has been the template with which the promise of liberation in the Constitution could either have been suppressed or unleashed. 

The dysfunctions of the democratic order are now affecting constituencies that were or are still receiving benefits. As the clamour for power to have a say in the budget intensifies, those in the liberation movement should highlight the opening of democratic space, which might have been stifled by the obligations of the 1990-1996 political settlement. 

We must acknowledge that our transformation paradigm has created, in many democrats, an unquestioning culture within the liberation movement that may have contributed to the state's chronic dysfunction. Oligarchs or kleptocrats may be building—and to a frightening extent, have already built—a new social order managed through intraparty dysfunctions, over which the public has little to no control. There is a need to embrace acts that expand the freedoms gained through politics. It is essential to recognise that tyrannies are anything but natural, and they ultimately fail those whose interests they were never intended to serve. Democratic centralism and majority rule can be tyrannies. CUT!!!

Dr FM Lucky Mathebula is from the Thinc Foundation, a Tshwane-based think tank. He is the Head of Faculty for Management of People at The Da Vinci Institute and a Research Associate with TUT.