Watch how every rand is spent

It would have been naive for anyone to expect a budget speech that promises more than what finance minister Tito Mboweni laid out this week.

Our country is in a deep financial crisis. A quarter of our 2021/22 budget comes from borrowed funds. The cost of serving such debt is not only unsustainable, it robs us of money that could otherwise be invested in other projects to promote growth.

As Mboweni bluntly stated “we owe a lot of money to a lot of people”.

All this occurs in the context of rising demands on our public purse, perhaps most pressing of which being the procurement of the vaccine to fight Covid-19. Mboweni announced that the government had set aside R10.3bn to fund our vaccination programme.

Worth noting is that the allocation is not necessarily an injection of new money, but a reprioritisation of available funds previously earmarked for other services.

This emphasises even more the need for this money to be used precisely for what it is meant to do and not siphoned into the pockets of the politically connected.

The recent PPE scandal demonstrated yet again the vulnerability of our public purse to looting, even in times of a life and death crisis. Therefore we need a far more transparent and agile system of disbursing the vaccine, especially at lower levels of government to avoid this being another cash cow for thieves in the system.

Second, we welcome the allocation of R4bn to support small businesses over the next three years. Having battled with access to capital and against often monopolised industries, small enterprises in townships and rural areas were perhaps the hardest hit by the Covid-19 lockdown in the past year. Many were left disappointed after failing to access relief packages.

Assisting these businesses will take a deliberate and well thought out process that not only helps them to recover in the short term.

Assistance should include placing them in sustainable industry value chains and opening up access to potential revenue markets to trade in, both domestically and abroad.

This budget demands a higher level of innovation in tackling social issues and prudence in how every rand is spent.