SONA unlikely to offer anything we haven't heard before
Bruce Whitfield and Krutham's Peter Attard Montalto make some predictions around this month's SONA and the finance minister's 21 February budget.
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There's less than a week to go until President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers the SONA 2024 address.
The joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament is scheduled to take place on 8 February at 7pm.
'You can expect the President to keep applying lipstick and glitter to anything he can dress up as good news', predicts The Money Show's Bruce Whitfield.
Next week's address marks the last before the 2024 national elections which are set to be the most significant since 1994.
But, Peter Attard Montalto, managing director at financial services and capital markets research and consulting house Krutham doesn't think we'll see anything groundbreaking:
'SONA is unlikely to offer anything particularly new new'
Peter Attard Montalto, Managing director - Krutham
'It's actually quite hard to say anything new on electricity or logistics, for instance'
Peter Attard Montalto, Managing director - Krutham
I wonder whether or not the speech will be able to provide an upbeat view of the future of South Africa, ponders Whitfield.
'I think it will try and that's what we saw in the 8th of January statement, which was fact checked actually, to death and was found to be a mixed bag of stuff that was on the mark and stuff that wasn't.
Peter Attard Montalto, Managing director - Krutham
So while SONA 2024 may not offer anything we haven't heard before, finance minister Enoch Godongwana's budget speech on February 21 is a different story suggests Attard Montalto.
There's a lot more 'juice' for the markets in the budget than in SONA, he suggests.
'The budget can offer quite a lot of very interesting information, particularly people are watching the utilisation of things like the foreign exchange currency reserve accounts, Transnet, things like fiscal rules and sticking to expenditure cuts.'
Peter Attard Montalto, Managing director - Krutham
Stay tuned to 702/CapeTalk on February 8, at 18:00-20:00 as Mandy Wiener and Clement Manyathela will be unpacking the President's SONA 2024 live.