On Wednesday, February 18, our Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, tabled the 2004-2005 Budget. Commenting on the 10 years of democracy we are about to complete, he said: "We have walked together, one step at a time, on our journey towards growth, towards learning, towards reconstruction, towards solidarity, towards reconciliation, towards prosperity, towards development, towards freedom.
"We have stayed together on this journey, because we share that vision, and we will continue, day by day and year by year, to translate the resources at our disposal and the opportunities before us into people-centred development, human fulfilment and freedom."
Correctly, Minister Manuel also reminded us of the tasks we had set ourselves in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). As he put it, these were:
It was correct for the Minister of Finance to draw the country's attention to these fundamental objectives. This is because the Budget must itself be judged on the basis of whether it helps to address these goals. It is not an end in itself. It is one of the principal instruments of our democratic state as we strive to meet the larger goals mentioned by Trevor Manuel.
The larger goals he mentioned were:
Taken together with the objectives we had set ourselves in the RDP, these goals mean that we are committed to the pursuit of the historic aim of the fundamental transformation of our country.
We are working to change a society that for centuries had been based on the pursuit of the selfish interests of a few at the cruel and costly expense of the overwhelming majority. Central to the value system of the old order was the pursuit of personal material gain by the dominant, and the abuse of the dominated as nothing else but sub- human agents to be used for the material benefit of the dominant. This was the very opposite of a people-centred society.
When we speak of a society that consciously and systematically pursues the expansion of the frontiers of human fulfilment, we mean that we seek to create a radically new reality, away from a past that defined the majority of our population as "surplus people".
We are striving to build a new society that will work continuously to ensure that every person in our country, regardless of race, colour, gender, class and age, achieves all-round material and spiritual fulfilment.
The extension of the frontiers of freedom marks an equally radical departure from a past during which the majority had no rights whatsoever, while, in reality, even those who thought they were free, did not enjoy true freedom. Even the minority who denied the majority their freedom were themselves imprisoned by fear of the oppressed majority and the future, constrained to subject themselves to varying degrees of regimentation to guarantee the permanence of their position as the dominant.
The society we are working to build aims to guarantee genuine freedom for all our people in conditions of peace, social solidarity, national unity and a shared destiny.
Given the past we are leaving behind, all these are truly revolutionary changes. These changes also mean that in time we will succeed to eradicate the terrible legacy of racism and sexism, which continues to define our society. They also mean that we are determined to ensure the dignity and the entrenchment of the rights of our working people, the children and the elderly.
All this signifies that after our long and painful experience of racist and sexist oppression and exploitation, we will continue to work consistently to realise the goals set in our Constitution of building a non-racial, non-sexist, egalitarian, prosperous and democratic society. To achieve this objective, more than ten years ago we decided that we would group our interventions under the various tasks contained in the RDP, as mentioned by the Minister of Finance.
To effect the revolutionary transformation of our society to which we are committed, we have to carry out specific tasks on a daily basis. This means that we must recognise and sustain the dynamic relationship between the processes of revolution and reform.
Without the revolutionary goals we have set ourselves, we would never be able to determine the correct tasks that would enable us gradually to reform our society to reflect the revolutionary perspective we have chosen.
At the same time, if we do not engage the task of reforming our society in daily struggle, we will not be able to effect the revolutionary transformation for which so many of our people sacrificed their lives during a century- long struggle for genuine liberation.
The Budget is one of the principal instruments in the hands of the democratic state to bring about the changes we need to make, to achieve our revolutionary goals. For us, the Budget is not merely an annual record of revenue and expenditure figures decided by the government to address whatever issue might seem important during a particular year.
It represents the financial interventions of the democratic state to give effect to the dialectically interconnected processes of revolution and reform. This is why we refused to treat the two Budgets immediately preceding the 1999 and 2004 general elections as "election budgets", designed to increase the popularity of the ANC during the impending elections.
On both occasions, we insisted that the 1999-2000 and the 2004-2005 Budgets must reflect our perspective with regard to our revolutionary and reform objectives and not fall victim to immediate partisan political considerations. As the Minister of Finance said after the presentation of the Budget, our movement and government will not create problems for themselves and the country by making promises that are unaffordable.
In reality, each annual Budget is a programme and instrument of reform. However innovative and groundbreaking with regard to particular items, as an annual programme and instrument it cannot assume the character of a comprehensive revolutionary process. Rather, it is the accumulation of annual Budgets that leads to such a comprehensive revolutionary process. This explains why those who think that an entire revolutionary programme can be loaded on each annual Budget would almost invariably be disappointed in their expectations.
Once the detailed and stable revolutionary and reform policy framework has been established, as we have done during our First Decade of Liberation, the funding instrument, the annual Budgets, would also reflect this detailed and stable revolutionary and reform policy framework. This is what characterises the 2004-2005 Budget.
It provides for increased expenditures to meet the needs of the people. This includes additional funds for such social grants as old age pensions and the child support grant, as well as goods and services in the areas of health, education, housing, nutrition, water and electricity, and so on.
This gives concrete expression to the objective in the RDP to meet the needs of the people, which is itself based on recognition of the imperative that the democratic state has a responsibility to intervene to improve the quality of life of the millions deliberately impoverished and marginalized by the previous social order which considered these millions as "the surplus people."
This poses the difficult challenge that while our obligations to the masses of our people would not allow that we should abandon the poor to take care of themselves, at the same time those obligations impose a requirement on us that we should not cultivate a culture of dehumanising dependency on these masses.
Neither can we just concentrate on redistributing wealth through increasing social expenditures, without attending to the central matter of the creation of the new wealth we need to achieve the goal of a better life for all.
For this reason, the Minister of Finance reiterated the objective that we should "increase the number of people in society who depend for their livelihood, not on social grants, but on normal participation in the economy." During the Second Decade of Liberation, we will have to pay particular attention to this question, to ensure that our policies and Budgets increase the possibility for our people to depend less on social grants and more on normal participation in the economy.
That is why the annual Budget contains a whole variety of interventions targeted to addressing the RDP challenge of building the economy. These include large investments in the economic infrastructure to contribute to the growth and development of the "first economy", and similarly large expenditures on the expanded public works programme to build the social and economic infrastructure in the poor and underdeveloped areas of our country, as well as raise skills levels and reduce unemployment in these areas.
They also include funding, tax and regulatory interventions to encourage the growth and development of small and medium business and the further growth of the domestic market. In this context, more resources have also been made available for the land redistribution process and support for the new black commercial farmers.
The 2004 Budget Review makes the important observation that "Capital expenditure (will grow) by 6,1 per cent in real terms over the 2004 MTEF, illustrating the government's prioritisation of investment in general, and infrastructure expenditure in particular."
Additional funds have also been provided further to improve our performance in the critical area of human resource development. This is yet another of the tasks we had set ourselves in the RDP to ensure the development and fulfilment of all our people and the availability of the skills required by a modern economy and society.
Another one of these RDP tasks is the further improvement of the democratic state machinery, to enhance its capacity to meet its developmental and social obligations and effectively implement the policies and programmes for the transformation of our country. Accordingly, the Budget contains provisions relating to a variety of matters affecting all three spheres of government.
These include strengthening our system of local government, integrating the system of traditional government, improving the effectiveness of provincial government, and enhancing the capacity of our system of governance to respond to such challenges as improved health provision, including HIV and AIDS, crime prevention and combating, economic development and the African Renaissance.
At the beginning of this Letter we quoted Minister Manuel as saying: "We have walked together, one step at a time, on our journey towards growth, towards learning, towards reconstruction, towards solidarity, towards reconciliation, towards prosperity, towards development, towards freedom.to translate the resources at our disposal and the opportunities before us into people-centred development, human fulfilment and freedom."
The 2004-2005 Budget constitutes yet another national intervention to take our country further along this journey. Despite a global and domestic economic slowdown, which has limited the resources available to the government further to advance the national strategic agenda, the latest Budget has nevertheless succeeded to take us yet another step forward, building on what we have achieved in the past.
We enter our Second Decade of Liberation confident that we will succeed to create a people-centred society, characterised by human fulfilment and freedom for all. The forthcoming elections will both confirm the health of our democratic system and contribute further to the democratisation of our state and society, a goal we set ourselves in the RDP.
This year's Budget also confirms our determination to transform our dreams about our country into reality. To ensure that it makes maximum impact in helping to change our country for the better requires that we continue to walk together, united in a People's Contract to Fight Poverty and Create Jobs. Budget 2004 has further increased our possibilities to achieve these goals.
