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ActionSA met with the ANC on Sunday evening, 30 March 2025, to discuss the approach to the 2025/26 national budget, which we centred on ensuring it protects every South African from excessive taxation, worsening economic pressures, and declining service delivery.

Recognising the imperfect nature of the budget and the crisis that the GNU partners themselves have created with uncertainty around the country’s fiscal framework— which will have disastrous consequences if an impasse continues—ActionSA set aside a long list of budget reforms in exchange for its conditional support of the budget’s passage, with strict conditions. 

The final explicit requirement for ActionSA’s strict conditional support of the budget is the removal of the VAT increase and the lack of an inflation-based adjustment to income tax brackets. ActionSA has put forward viable alternatives to cover the revenue gap, which we have done to show that protecting South Africans from unnecessary tax hikes is both possible and necessary without political grandstanding. 

ActionSA concluded the meeting with the ANC on the understanding that our strict conditions would be supported in a manner that ensures the committee’s report directs the Finance Minister to remove these tax increases.

It is clear that the ANC has engaged with ActionSA while simultaneously engaging other political parties, both within and outside the Government of National Unity, as is their right.

Notwithstanding any arrangements the ANC may have entered into subsequently, ActionSA will approach the committee meeting in a manner consistent with our public commitments to date. As such, ActionSA will propose an amendment to the fiscal framework to remove the VAT and income tax increases for 2025/2026. All that remains is for South Africans to observe which political parties acted to protect their already strained household income and which parties saw them as collateral damage in political manoeuvring. 

ActionSA has served as a constructive opposition to a GNU that has achieved no reforms since coming into office and has demonstrated a level of incoherence that offers little hope of providing solutions to the complex challenges facing South Africans. 

Whether political parties accept our constructive inputs made in the interests of the South African people, or whether they push forward with tax proposals against their interests, will be up to those parties. 

ActionSA will be one of the few parties today and tomorrow that will have remained consistent to its commitments to the South African people.

Issued by ActionSA Member of Parliament Alan Beesley