CAPE TOWN - EFF leader Julius Malema said Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s 2019 budget showed that he did not know how to take South Africa out of difficult challenges.
“He did not reduce the VAT to 14% and he did not introduce a sovereign fund and it's very clear that the minister doesn’t know how to take South Africa out of these difficult challenges,” Malema said in the wake of Mboweni's speech before Parliament.
“We think that it was flat, it has nothing to offer and he just repeated exactly what he said in the past. No clear plans on job creation, no clear plans on what is going to happen on land expropriation because we are busy expropriating the land.”
During the tabling of the national budget in Parliament on Wednesday, Mboweni said state-owned enterprises (SOEs) posed significant risks to the fiscus. He said the national treasury has received funding requests from South African Airways, SABC, Denel, and Eskom.
Malema said he did not agree with the idea of selling the state-owned enterprise(SOEs), saying: "We need state-owned enterprise(SOEs), his attempt from time to time to want to sell an idea that we can sell the state-owned enterprise, we will never agree on that. We need those assets, those are strategic assets. Some of them, their purpose of existence is not to make a profit but to ensure that our people benefit from those SOEs."