South Africa’s National Treasury on Wednesday proposed a smaller hike in value-added tax in a revised budget aimed at smoothing divisions in the ruling coalition, but uncertainty remained over whether it would get the support in parliament to pass.<\/p>\n
Last month the Treasury had proposed a 2-percentage-point hike in VAT in its initial budget, but the African National Congress’ coalition partners refused to back the move, creating\u00a0an impasse that was a first for South Africa since the end of apartheid.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday the Treasury instead proposed raising VAT by 0.5 percentage points from its current level of 15% on May 1 this year, followed by another 0.5-percentage-point increase in 2026.<\/p>\n
Minutes before the finance minister took the podium the leader of the Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in government, said his party was still opposed.<\/p>\n
“The DA will not support the budget in its current form,” said John Steenhuisen on X.<\/p>\n
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson had said earlier on Wednesday that he was “reasonably comfortable” that any remaining issues could be solved so the budget could be passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
South Africa’s National Treasury on Wednesday proposed a smaller hike in value-added tax in a revised budget aimed at smoothing divisions in the ruling coalition, but uncertainty remained over whether it would get the support in parliament to pass. Last month the Treasury had proposed a 2-percentage-point hike in VAT in its initial budget, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,30],"tags":[1274,122],"class_list":["post-15586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-southern-africa","tag-african-national-congress","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}