Balancing South Africa's Budget: A pro-business, growth-focused approach

Balancing South Africa's national budget must prioritise pro-business growth with a shift to tax policies that stimulate economic growth without sacrificing essential public services. South Africa’s government, like many others, can often be inefficient in how it allocates funds. This includes high administrative costs, duplicated programme and inefficiencies in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). These inefficiencies are prime candidates that I would target for budget cuts, with a start being reducing the number of municipalities and even provincial governments. Reduce the financial burden on taxpayers by cutting funding to loss-making state-owned enterprises like Eskom, Transnet and South African Airways - focus on privatisation or public-private partnerships (PPPs) could free up significant funds. It may seem easy to cut investment in infrastructure, but this is the last thing I would do if the…