THEBE MABANGA
FINANCE Minister Tito Mboweni will lay out spending plans at a mid-term budget on Wednesday before Parliament in what has been described as a defining moment for the South African economy.
But let’s take a few steps back.
In 1996, when he was presenting the country’s budget, then Finance Minister Chris Liebenberg tapped into the mood at the time when South Africa had just won the Rugby World Cup a year earlier, and soccer’s African Cup of Nations months earlier, and a cricket team that was riding high before match-fixing took away the game’s innocence.
Liebenberg used a sports metaphor to tell the country that it’s time to “start putting points on the scoreboard”.
But his overriding message was that the country, two years into its tenure as a democracy and banishing apartheid, cannot afford to fail again.
In the period since, South Africa has stated into the
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