EFF Statement on the Third Tabling of the 2025 Budget @@KASIBC_NEWS
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) rejects the third version of the 2025 Budget tabled today by the Minister of Finance as weak, misguided, and utterly disconnected from the lived reality of South Africans. It is a budget that ignores the worsening unemployment crisis, fails to address poor economic growth, and continues the failed orthodoxy that has plunged our country into austerity, despair, and underdevelopment.
It has also ignored all proposals by stakeholders in their majority and of all political parties in particular, rubbishing the claims by the African National Congress (ANC), Action SA, Rise Mzansi, Build One South Africa (BOSA), Patriotic Alliance (PA), United Democratic Movement (UDM), Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), Good Party and Al Jamah-Ah, that the scrapping of the VAT Increases was a product of consultation and consideration of alternative revenue generation mechanisms.
Not a single alternative revenue generation mechanism proposed by any political party is present in this third budget, proving once again that the VAT increases were scrapped solely due to the court intervention which was initiated by the EFF.
The VAT increases have simply been substituted with austerity. We note the deliberate silencing of public discourse around this budget, with mainstream media choosing to focus obsessively on political coalitions and cabinet appointments, while ignoring one of the most consequential events in South Africa’s governance calendar.
This is not accidental — it forms part of a broader campaign to depoliticise the budget and shield the National Treasury from democratic scrutiny and public accountability. For the first time in our democratic history, a national budget was tabled in the absence of both the President and the Deputy President from the National Assembly — an indication of how disconnected the Executive has become from the economic realities facing the poor and working class.
This is now the third attempt to table a credible 2025 Budget. The first attempt, on 19 February, collapsed due to the Minister’s ill-advised proposal to raise VAT by two percentage points. The second attempt, on 12 March, retained a smaller but still regressive 0.5% VAT hike.
This latest version scraps the VAT increase but replaces it with a deeper crisis: massive expenditure cuts. Instead of revising the budget to expand state capacity and fight unemployment, the Minister has simply slashed spending, pretending this is a solution. What is now tabled is not only weaker than the previous budgets — it is a declaration of surrender by the National Treasury. It demonstrates complete incompetence and an ideological commitment to failed neoliberal austerity, despite the claim by the Minister of Finance and the former liberation movement that this is not an austerity budget.
The EFF rejects outright the reductions in government expenditure that accompany this revised budget. Between the March version and today, over R28 billion has been cut from non-interest spending, including significant reductions in education, health, social development, and the criminal justice system. These cuts are not marginal — they confirm a deliberate weakening of the state’s ability to deliver basic services at a time when unemployment, poverty, and the collapse of public infrastructure are at their worst in democratic history. Reductions in frontline sectors such as basic education, healthcare, and public safety expose the government’s growing detachment from the lived reality of the majority and its refusal to invest in people over spreadsheets.
Unemployment, using the expanded definition, now exceeds 42%, and more than 12 million people are jobless. The country has lost over 9,000 public sector doctors due to budget constraints. Clinics are without nurses, schools are unable to fill teacher posts, and defence capability has collapsed, with no effort to redirect funds saved from the DRC withdrawal to rebuild it.
This budget will not absorb a single unemployed doctor into the healthcare system. It will not build the frontline capacity the state so desperately needs.
The EFF maintains that the National Treasury’s downward revision of economic growth from 1.8% in February to 1.4% today is an open admission of its own forecasting failure. Yet, even this lower projection is still overly optimistic. The same conditions — collapsing municipalities, weak global demand, high real interest rates, geopolitics and trade wars between China and the USA, new trade tariffs, and the withdrawal of AGOA — were already present in February and March. It is not new data that has changed; it is public pressure that has forced Treasury to acknowledge reality.
The EFF has consistently warned that National Treasury’s growth estimates are detached from both empirical evidence and common sense. Today, even Treasury’s own “downside scenario” projects 1% growth, thereby vindicating our argument that South Africa is in a deep stagnation crisis and National Treasury is in denial.
Once again, the Minister has refused to adjust personal income tax brackets in line with inflation. This silent form of taxation forces workers who receive modest inflationrelated increases into higher tax brackets. It is nothing less than a tax increase on the working class, imposed without a word.
The EFF proposed a 4.5% adjustment to personal income tax brackets, not as a tax cut, but as a protection against bracket creep.
National Treasury’s refusal to implement this is part of a broader strategy to make workers pay for its economic mismanagement. We reject the National Treasury’s attempt to deceive the public by announcing a R4 billion increase in funding to SARS over the medium term. But this figure is meaningless if it is not front-loaded. SARS needs the R4 billion in the current financial year — not over three years. We know from SARS’s own pilot project that an immediate R2 billion investment can yield R25–50 billion annually, and R4 billion would unlock even more revenue.
While the EFF maintains that we will not tax our way out of the current economic crisis, the lack of urgency demonstrates that National Treasury is not serious about addressing the R800 billion tax gap.
On 19 May 2025, the EFF led thousands to the National Treasury and handed over a memorandum demanding a complete transformation of fiscal policy. Those demands were not just ignored — they were spat on. Not a single proposal in our People’s Budget was taken seriously, including our call for a wealth tax, a land tax, a once-off apartheid tax, and an aggressive fiscal stimulus.
We call on the Standing Committee on Finance and the Appropriations Committee to use their full legislative powers to propose amendments, increase frontline spending, and reject this technocratic betrayal of the people.
If Parliament does not act decisively, it risks becoming complicit in the destruction of state capacity and the perpetuation of stagnant economic growth, unemployment, and poverty.
