MEMORANDUM NATIONAL TREASURY @KASIBCNEWS
We, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), acting on behalf of millions of the unemployed, economically suffocated, landless, indebted, and structurally excluded working-class majority of South Africa, have come to the National Treasury — the very centre of economic policy formulation and fiscal control — to register our total rejection of austerity, our resolute opposition to the increase in VAT, and our demand for a complete transformation of fiscal policy.
The EFF is leading this mass action because South Africa is on the verge of collapse, and it is the National Treasury that has for three decades engineered, enforced, and now intensified this collapse under the pretence of “fiscal consolidation,” “budget discipline,” and “market confidence.” South Africa economy has not grown by more than 1% per annum for over a decade.
There is no coherent, credible, or macro-economic plan from the National Treasury to suggest that this is going to change. Every budget speech in the past ten years has been a list of failed predictions, false optimism, and austerity. The Minister of Finance now admits what we have long warned: that austerity has failed. Yet the same logic is repeated — cut spending, weaken the state, increase regressive taxes like VAT, and protect the rich and powerful.
The Minister confirmed the loss of over 9,000 doctors in the public health system due to budget constraints. Across provinces, schools could not fill vacancies at the beginning of 2025. Police stations are collapsing, operating in rented facilities at exorbitant costs, while our defence and military capabilities are in terminal decline.
This is the outcome of a budgetary framework designed to serve the financial sector, not the people. The social consequences of the National Treasury’s budgetary and economic policy choices are not theoretical. They are felt daily by the vast majority of South Africans, particularly by the Black working class, who carry the heaviest burden of unemployment, poverty, and structural exclusion. Today, South Africa sits with over 12 million unemployed people, the overwhelming majority of whom are Black and under the age of 35. These are not people who are unwilling to work — they are people who have been deliberately shut out of the economy by a policy regime that privileges capital over labour, speculation over production, and fiscal restraint over inclusive development.
Even those with post-matric qualifications — young people who have followed the script and pursued education in the hope of employment — are faced with the grim reality of lifetime unemployment. The economy simply does not produce the kind of jobs they were promised, and the few available opportunities are concentrated in racialised networks and elite spaces to which most Black youth are denied access.
This situation has created a generation of structurally excluded people, whose potential contributions to society and the economy are wasted, while the National Treasury continues to cut budgets under the false guise of stability. The result is a deep psychological and emotional crisis. Debt levels have reached unsustainable proportions, with more than half of credit-active South Africans being over-indebted.
One of the clearest examples of this systemic cruelty is the manner in which the state, under National Treasury’s guidance, continues to punish Black students and graduates with the burden of historical student debt. Thousands of Black graduates, having completed their degrees academically, are unable to receive their certificates because they are blacklisted over fees. This prevents them from entering regulated professions that require formal registration, such as engineering, architecture, and geology. It is for this reason that, even in the face of crisis, white graduates continue to dominate high-skilled professional spaces, while their Black counterparts — equally qualified — are locked out, forced into underemployment, or permanently displaced from their fields of study.
This is not an oversight. It is a deliberate structural inequality upheld by the failure to cancel student debt, and the refusal of the National Treasury to fund education as a public good. Beyond the crisis of work and education lies the broader reality that over 65% of South Africans cannot cover their basic monthly expenses, including rent, food, transport, and school fees. Yet, despite this mass impoverishment, the National Treasury continues to implement policies that protect the wealthy and punish the poor — raising VAT while leaving corporate taxes untouched, slashing public service posts while banks announce record profits, and insisting that there is “no money” while billions are paid in debt service to global financiers.
The National Treasury’s policy regime is not neutral, and it is not failing by accident. It is succeeding in its real mission — to protect elite interests, preserve white economic power, and maintain the colonial structure of the South African economy.
It is for this reason that the EFF demands an end to this unjust regime and the implementation of a People’s Budget that puts human dignity, racial justice, and structural transformation at the centre of economic planning.
We come with a clear message: transform or face permanent revolt. These demands are not negotiable. They represent the minimum conditions for a People’s Budget and a sovereign developmental state.
We demand:
1. Transformation of the leadership, senior management, and strategic functions of National Treasury.
2. Reverse budget cuts and increase funding to the public health system, basic education, policing, and military infrastructure. These are not bailouts — they are investments in state capacity and sovereignty.
3. Reject the ideological refusal to fund SOEs. National Treasury must finance the recovery of strategic entities like Transnet, PRASA, Denel, and Eskom. This must be paired with strict anti-corruption and anti-capture mechanisms, including parliamentary oversight and community boards.
4. Draft budgets must reflect the will and needs of the people. This means: Employment of doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers, and soldiers; build public infrastructure driven by the state, not outsourced to tenders; increased allocations to housing, food security, and sanitation.
5. Immediate cancellation of historic student debt. Fund all undergraduates’ students and support postgraduate studies for all students.
6. Legislate a progressive tax on high net-worth individuals and luxury landholdings. Introduce an apartheid redress tax on inherited white wealth. Use revenues to establish a Sovereign Wealth Fund, to insulate the country from IMF dependence.
7. Immediately legislate aggressive anti-avoidance laws, crack down on transfer pricing and base erosion by multinational corporations, and build SARS capacity to recover billions hidden in tax havens.
8. Raise the equitable share for municipalities from the current 9.5% to at least 14%. Conditional grants must support the insourcing of workers, municipal infrastructure renewal, and reliable service delivery in distressed towns and cities.
9. We reject the 2025 VAT increase, which unfairly burdens the poor. Instead, we demand a Wealth Tax, a Luxury Land Tax, and an Apartheid Redress Tax on inherited white wealth to ensure that the rich pay their fair share and the economy is made just.
10. Cancel the privatisation of essential services, water boards, SOEs, and core infrastructure.
11. End the policy capture of the state by international financial institutions, IMF and the World Bank. All new loans must be tabled in Parliament before being signed.
12. We demand an immediate investigation into exorbitant bank charges, which exploit grant recipients, workers, and the unemployed, and serve only to enrich financial institutions at the expense of the poor.
13. Force telecommunications companies to end data and airtime expiry policies that exploit the working class. Regulate the sector to align with public interest.
The National Treasury is not a neutral institution. It is a contested site. Today it stands on the side of financial capital, privatisation, and anti-Black austerity.
We are here to say: no more. South Africa cannot be governed by accountants. We cannot build an industrial economy with Excel spreadsheets and IMF loan agreements.
We cannot end poverty while we continue to write laws for banks and cut services for the poor. The National Treasury’s power must be returned to the people, through Parliament, through democratic mobilisation, and through a state that understands its revolutionary obligations.
We are not here to negotiate our humanity.
We are not here to ask nicely. We are here to say that the working class majority of this country will no longer subsidise the comfort of the rich.
We give the National Treasury 30 days to respond to these demands. Failure to respond will result in intensified mass action, litigation, and targeted protests against the architects of economic oppression.
The suffering of the people is not a budget item. It is a reality. If this National Treasury will not change, it must be changed by the power of the people.
