The Sunday Times reports that the Treasury and the Reserve Bank are preparing to lower the inflation target to 3 percent, confirming everything SAFTU has warned about for years: South Africa’s economic policy establishment is trapped in a failed neoliberal script, completely detached from the lived reality of workers and the poor.
The Reserve Bank continues to insist that lowering the target is “pro-poor.”
But this is the logic of a surgeon who proudly announces a “successful operation” while the patient lies dead on the table. It is the fiction of technocrats who congratulate themselves while the economy flatlines.
For more than a decade, South Africa has dipped in and out of recession, shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, watched its industrial base collapse, and endured the most severe infrastructure decay of the democratic era. Our ports and railways are failing. Municipal water systems are collapsing. Schools and hospitals are overcrowded and understaffed. Electricity supply is unstable. And nearly half of the labour force is unemployed using the expanded definition.
Yet Treasury and the Reserve Bank believe the solution is to tighten the screws even further. SARB’s own monetary-policy framework makes it clear that monetary tightening works by cooling demand, slowing spending, raising borrowing costs, and deliberately restraining economic activity. That is the mechanism. It is designed to slow the economy. And yet the very tool meant to suppress economic activity is now being sold to us as a gift to the poor.
Instead of confronting monopoly food pricing, tackling corporate hoarding of over R2 trillion in unused surpluses, repairing collapsing infrastructure, or reversing deindustrialisation, the government is doubling down on the same anti-worker policies that have already failed.
Einstein reminded us that insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. South Africa is living that insanity.
We have tried austerity.
We have tried high interest rates.
We have tried inflation targeting.
We have tried bending to the will of “the markets.” And the results are everywhere: rising hunger, deepening unemployment, collapsing municipalities, and the highest inequality on earth.
Lowering the inflation target to 3 percent is not a neutral technical adjustment. It is a political attack. It will deepen unemployment, suffocate household demand, undermine wages, cripple small business borrowing, and justify yet another round of budget cuts. It will intensify the suffering of the working class while protecting the wealth of the elite. It is sold as “helping the poor,” when in reality it removes the oxygen from an economy already gasping for air.
SAFTU’s Call to Struggle
South Africa needs a completely different direction:
• a Reserve Bank mandate that includes employment and development
• massive public investment to rebuild collapsing infrastructure
• wage-led growth to revive domestic demand
• industrial policy to rebuild manufacturing
• regulation of food, fuel, and administered prices
• taxing the rich and ending austerity
The working class cannot survive another decade of neoliberal experiments that strip away dignity and destroy livelihoods.
Join the Nationwide Mobilisation: Budget Speak-Out Outside Parliament
SAFTU is not making a general call. We are issuing a specific, united, and urgent mobilisation. On 12 November at 10 AM, outside Parliament in Cape Town, SAFTU will join the Budget Speak-Out under the banner:
FIX & FUND OUR PUBLIC SERVICES.
This action is driven by clear working-class demands:
• End Poverty
• Tax the Rich
• Fill All Vacant Posts – from teachers to nurses, doctors, social workers, and frontline staff
• Provide Dignified Public Services
• Implement a Universal Basic Income Grant
The mobilisation is organised by a broad united coalition that includes:
AIDC, Black Sash, Equal Education, Housing Assembly, Cry of the Excluded, Youth Capital, Back-2-Work Campaign, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Budget Justice Coalition, COSATU, the SACP, SAFTU, and other movements building a people’s front under the banner People Against Budget Cuts.
SAFTU calls on:
• All affiliates
• All shop steward councils in the Western Cape,
• Community structures,
• Unemployed workers’ organisations,
• Students, pensioners, and all progressive forces to gather in disciplined, determined numbers on 12 November at 10 AM
outside Parliament.
Let the streets of Cape Town thunder with the demands of the working class:
Fix and fund our public services. Tax the rich. End austerity now.
Technocrats may declare another “successful operation,” but SAFTU refuses to let them do so while the country is dying on the table. The working class has paid enough. Now we fight back.
For media inquiries, contact the National Spokesperson at
Newton Masuku at:
Newton@saftu.org.za
0661682157
Media Officer
Asive Dyani
0719019564
