Finance minister Trevor Manuel chose to preface his otherwise neutrally worded budget speech with a sonorous quotation from the Nigerian writer Ben Okri: "There are no joys without mountains having been climbed . . . There is always the joy of discovering, uncovering, and forging new forms, new ways . . ."
For president Thabo Mbeki, too, Okri is a favourite source of illustrative material. When Manuel undertook to "place before the nation an account of the mountains we have climbed and the frontiers before us", he was in a sense allying himself with the forces consolidating around Mbeki in the forthcoming poll. It was a way of saying: "Look at our record."
In this stance, his immediate audience was not, so to speak, in the room. The decade of Manuel's tenure has seen the slow, painstaking evolution of an economic policy that has sought to balance the need for growth with the condition of the destitute. For this reason, Manuel spoke early of the income support afforded to "vulnerable households": "This has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70bn/year, 3,4% of GDP . . ." The beneficiaries number at least 10m - an alternately defeatist and volatile element situated, nonetheless, in the moral heartland of the ANC. They must be fed.
See table of Trevor's Budget Priorities.
For the desperate 10m, it may or may not induce a warm feeling to know that from now on, their brothers and sisters who actually have employment will not have to pay income tax until the threshold of R40 000/year; that there will soon be no school fees for the poorest communities; and that the intention is to spend more on the decaying hospitals and the services to which the destitute are constitutionally entitled but so seldom receive. But there is hope.
Locked in the statistics there is a trend that is wholly to be welcomed: it signals a shift away from the creation of an endemic culture of dependency and hopelessness. Planned expenditure for 2006/2007 on social security rises from R13,5bn to R14bn - nothing like the leaps recorded for previous years, though in a R473bn budget it is rather more than a handout, and reinforces where the ANC comes from. Also, that it wants productive citizens, not the hopeless poor.
The underpinning ideology can be summed up in the truism that any society can be judged by the manner in which it treats its weakest members. That such a truism was not proclaimed with overt triumphalism mere weeks away from an election is testimony not only to the reiterated fiscal caution of the Mbeki government, but to the collective maturity of the executive.
The complaint that there should have been more consideration of those high earners clamouring for a reduction in the maximum marginal tax rate, and of company taxes - the abolition of the regional services council levy is welcome, just as when someone stops hammering your head - omits the fact that SA is a developing country, not an outpost of Western affluence. Our reliance on commodities means we are still largely a monocrop nation, like one that grows only sugar or bananas. Yet if the price of staying and doing business was truly exorbitant, no-one would do business. Manuel, rightly, spoke against the "hassle factor" impeding entrepreneurs, and the problem is partly addressed by the fading away of the regional services council levy.
Again, among the mountains Manuel has climbed is that of the national debt, the crippling problem besetting so much of Africa. Part of the answer lies in financial policy and debt management. In 1998, for every rand of revenue collected, 24c was spent on servicing state debt; in 2005 the debt cost was 15c, and by 2009 it will be 10c. With this firm focus, the funds have been liberated to permit the extension - though not, of course, the equalisation - of basic services to the bottom 20% of the population . Without this component of social duty woven into what is essentially a free-market model, the potential for incompetence, lack of capacity and corruption would be even greater than it is, though it isn't only the DA that sits counting the cost.
If one places this perception alongside that of Manuel's need (or mandate) to alleviate poverty, then his choice of those for whom tax remedies should be available makes sense - even if it seems quixotic to attempt to enlist the taxi-drivers and stall-owners in the ranks of compliance. The amnesty for small businesses announced with the budget will serve two purposes: make a major and productive sector of the population feel they have a stake in the system, giving them access to bank finance, for example; and in the longer term, expand the tax base.
This aspect of the minister's proposals needs to be read against the "appropriate policy interventions" of the accelerated and shared growth initiative. Here the long-term flow of economic planning and its well-timed execution is evident. Along with the renewal and expansion of infrastructure essential to commerce - roads, rail and ports - we find "the need to increase innovation and investment in new technology capable of competing internationally". This is a brave challenge.
None of this is possible without the human capital, a fact Manuel is acutely aware of. He announced that the Development Bank was " assembling a task force of engineers and project managers, to be called Siyenza Manje, to contribute to operational and strategic capacity in distressed municipalities, and to accelerate the roll-out of basic services". Also, "we are reinforcing our tools and procedures for fighting corruption and waste". Such ventures, coupled to functioning education structures that actually produce people with desired skills, must necessarily be welcomed; but the question of whether those who have been left behind by growth and opportunity can evade victimhood will remain the biggest question of them all in successive budgets. Manuel's comment at a press conference prior to his speech was oddly unpersuasive: "People should come forward and take responsibility."
There is a cognitive flaw here that has been underestimated. If, for example, the Gautrain project is permitted to forge ahead, there will unquestionably be a transfer of skills and the creation of work, however temporary. However, in addition, with globalisation, SA culture has inexorably become locked into the same material expectations and desire for glamour accessories that are evident on television. Whether it be instant pop stars or Lotto winners, the actual idea that a "job" such as digging a trench or weeding a mountain can have dignity has been all but lost. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan's proposal for the US to win the Vietnam war was to have the planes drop TV sets and refrigerators rather than bombs. In our case, for many, despair is too readily replaced by illusory hopes for high achievement or magical victory over circumstance or disease.
A basis in scientific thinking is essential in the schools - yet even to state this is to almost articulate an impossibility. Expenditure is quietly rising; but Okri's noble rhetoric - and Manuel's "Ode of Joy" budget - can readily be replaced by the words of W H Auden in "The Shield of Achilles":
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.
