By Dr. Siphesihle Qange, Programme Manager at Seriti Institute
As South Africa awaits the national budget speech, the debate is already framed around familiar themes: fiscal consolidation, debt stabilisation, and constrained revenue. These are legitimate concerns. But the deeper question is whether this budget will meaningfully shift the development model toward communities, where unemployment, hunger, and climate shocks are most acutely felt.
A credible budget in 2026 cannot be based solely on spreadsheets. It must rebalance power and investment toward the local economies that sustain the majority of South Africans.
For too long, our fiscal framework has leaned heavily toward centralised programmes and capital-intensive infrastructure, often with weak linkages to local employment creation. While infrastructure investment remains essential, it cannot substitute for targeted support to smallholder farmers, township enterprises, youth cooperatives, and community-based organisations. These actors generate high employment multipliers per rand spent and anchor economic resilience at the household level.
In rural districts and peri-urban settlements, food insecurity is not an abstract statistic; it is a daily reality. Budget allocations must therefore treat community-based agriculture, irrigation schemes, agro-processing hubs, and extension services as core economic investments, not peripheral social programmes. Strengthening local food systems reduces vulnerability to price shocks, creates jobs, and improves nutritional outcomes. It is a fiscally prudent intervention with measurable social returns.
Youth unemployment remains South Africa’s most destabilising economic fault line. Temporary public employment programmes provide relief, but they are not structural solutions, particularly when they are short-term, intermittent, and disconnected from sustainable livelihood pathways. These programmes must be extended in duration and redesigned to provide longer-term security, skills deepening, and opportunities for transition into enterprise or formal employment. A community-centred budget should expand enterprise-linked grants, ringfence procurement for youth-owned businesses, and scale digital and green economy initiatives that create asset-building pathways rather than dependency cycles.
If the Just Energy Transition is to mean anything beyond policy rhetoric, it must include community ownership models in renewable energy, waste management, and climate adaptation projects. Otherwise, the green economy risks replicating the inequalities of the old one.
Climate adaptation itself must move from conference commitments to ward-level implementation. Floods, droughts, and extreme weather events disproportionately affect small-scale farmers and informal settlements. Targeted adaptation grants, subsidised agricultural insurance, water harvesting systems, and responsive disaster funds should feature prominently in the fiscal framework. Investing upfront in resilience reduces the long-term cost of crisis response.
Equally important is governance. A community-centred budget requires transparent allocation, timely disbursement, and strengthened municipal capacity. Under-spending, irregular procurement, and fragmented implementation erode public trust and blunt developmental impact. Participatory budgeting pilots and improved grant oversight could begin restoring accountability where it matters most, at the local level.
Social protection must also evolve. Grants remain indispensable in a country with entrenched inequality. But integrating productive pathways, linking beneficiaries to training, micro-enterprise development, and local economic opportunities, would enhance long-term sustainability without undermining the social safety net.
South Africa’s fiscal space is undeniably tight. Yet austerity alone cannot deliver growth. Strategic investment in community systems is not fiscally reckless; it is economically rational. Stronger local economies reduce future welfare burdens, expand the tax base, and build resilience against shocks.
This budget speech offers an opportunity to redefine what recovery means. Not recovery measured only by debt-to-GDP ratios, but recovery visible in thriving local markets, food-secure households, youth-owned enterprises, and climate-resilient communities.
The numbers will matter. But the signal will matter more.
Will this be a budget that manages decline — or one that seeds renewal from the ground up?
South Africans should expect the latter.
