South Africa: Budget 2015 - Nhlanhla Nene and the Theory of Everything

analysis

It could not have been easy having to proclaim the end of the good times to South Africans. It was Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene's first spin of the Budget wheel, a task performed adeptly by his predecessors as ANC finance ministers, Trevor Manuel and Pravin Gordhan. Unlike Manuel and Gordhan, Nene had to be the bad guy, announcing, among other things, the first tax hike since 1995 and a massive increase in fuel levies. It is clear that fiscal discipline and more squeezing of the taxpayer will have to define his term in office. Nene is not a political heavyweight, and the success of his Budget is entirely dependent on his colleagues and the government system taking him seriously. By RANJENI MUNUSAMY.

Nhlanhla Nene seemed to have a strange concern on Wednesday, the day he presented his first Budget as South Africa's Finance Minister. At a media briefing ahead of his Budget speech and then at a reception afterwards, he mentioned that some journalists in the lock-up room, where the Budget documents are studied under embargo, had told Treasury officials that the Budget was "boring".

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