South Africa's Current Account Deficit Narrows Slightly

South Africa's current-account deficit narrowed slightly in the first quarter, beating expectations for it to widen.
The gap on the current account – the broadest measure of trade in goods and services – edged down to 35.6 billion rand ($2 billion) in the three months through March from a revised 39.3 billion rand in the previous period, data released Thursday by the central bank showed.

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In recent weeks, the publication of labour force statistics have reiterated perhaps more cogently than any other metric – the scale of the problem. From a working age population of 41.7 million and a labour force of 25 million, the ability to find employment for just over 16.8 million citizens illustrates the structural fractures of the country's economy. The consequential effects of these low employment numbers, is the reduced scope for tax revenues and the inevitable squeeze on spending priorities. The longstanding solution that the ANC has preferred over the past 15 years – borrowing to obscurity – has created concomitant effects on the intensity of spending squeezes. Debt service costs have outpaced key priority areas and, left unchecked, will keep displacing other priorities that are already squeezed for resource allocation. The boring answer to these problems – getting the right economic blueprint for the sociopolitical and socioeconomic canvas that we have – eluded the ANC until South Africans lost faith in its ability to unilaterally solve the problem. Over the past year, the question has moved to whether an alliance, armed with additional political persuasions and orientations, can turn the ship around. The importance of this deliberation is the simple – yet sometimes bizarrely unpopular fact – that decision-making about national resources, policies and strategies – comes with often painful tradeoffs. The tradeoffs required to address South Africa's unique problems, have often proved difficult for the ANC to countenance and rather than biting the bullet at critical decision-making points, the party preferred to defer to the future. Examples of this perpetual planning and consultation loop include the unresolved questions around the SRD grant versus the basic income grant; private sector liberalisation versus creating new state banks and state pharmaceutical institutions; and the long-term plight of state enterprises. In between the episodes on lethargy, public institutions declined, public resources were mismanaged and inefficiently managed; and the public purse was squeezed. The budget showdown in 2025, which led to three versions of the budget being drafted, was highly influenced by the need to start dealing with difficult and long-deferred questions about the right model that balances revenue generation and resource allocation in light of the state of the economy in its current form. The difficult reality is that in its current form – the economy is ill-suited to address these intersectional facets. The focus on the budget season was on the extraction of more resources from the current model. The problem evident in that, is that the primary canvas is one that is no longer suitable for the problems we seek to address. Whilst the finance minister was forced to abandon his preferred method of addressing longstanding issues with a once-off injection of pain through a VAT increase – or so he wanted us to believe – the difficulties that created the issue remain unresolved. The wide cleavage between the resources we can marshal and the priorities we wish to fund, is only getting wider. Options at narrowing it – from repurposing the state bureaucracy through incentivised attritions or simply spending less than necessary on frontline services – come with consequences that very few have mapped out yet and since they are issues that require difficult choices; they are issues that fall within the scope of the decisions that the ANC is historically reluctant to confront. And for as long as the ANC is at the heart of the GNU and remains fixated on its old habits of perpetual consultation and peripheral implementation, it is unclear how its fellow bedfellows can get it to accelerate the pace of addressing difficult issues. The one-year anniversary of the GNU has coincided with the decision of the president to initiate a National Dialogue whose purpose is said to be 'an opportunity to forge a new social compact for the development of our country, a compact that will unite all South Africans, with clear responsibilities for different stakeholders, government, business, labour, civil society, men and women, communities and citizens.' In addition, the National Dialogue 'is anticipated that the National Dialogue will drive progress towards our Vision 2030 and lay the foundation for the next phase of South Africa's National Development Plan.' Having been instrumental in the development of the current national blueprint – the National Development Plan – the President would be well versed in the mechanics and complications of trying to find any blueprint that speaks to the various persuasions of all stakeholders and maps out the right priorities for the nation. The problem of the National Development Plan, is that the government – led by the ANC – conspired to reduce it to a document whose habit of missing key milestones has become the one aspect of it where there is universal consensus. Given what we know about the limitations we have in managing multi-sectoral and intersectional national projects and priorities, it might be prudent to find the narrow range of issues and priorities that have the greatest multiplier effect on everything else we need to fix. The obvious dilemma is that whatever we end up signing for, will require resources, and we now know that in the absence of an economic fix, none of these resources will materialise. Within the spectrum of priorities, it is time to acknowledge that an economic and skills blueprint are priority issues that will aid in addressing the immediate issues – finding resources to fund everything else – and investing in the future social and economic blueprint of the nation. The old habits of trying to please everyone and turning out a document that is merely an equal opportunity policy of appeasement must for once yield to the difficult questions of what must be done immediately in order to arrest the national decline. Any model that traps us all into another consultation loop and deferral of difficult decisions will not only be a monumental waste of resources but for President Ramaphosa – the possibility of championing a National Development Plan, a government of national unity, and a National Dialogue that still all leave the country in socioeconomic and strategy limbo, will be blight on his legacy that will be hard to ignore.