A Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement of avoidable trade-offs

Budget Justice Coalition press statement: An MTBPS of avoidable trade-offs

In his State of the Nation Address in February 2026, President Ramaphosa placed malnutrition and child stunting firmly on the national agenda. However, this is an inadequately funded agenda - the MTBPS responded to it with a ‘reprioritisation’ of R1.6 billion, over the MTEF period ahead, to strengthen high-impact primary healthcare interventions to improve maternal nutrition, support healthy pregnancies and promote optimal child development during the first 1000 days of life. It’s critical to note that this is a reprioritisation of funding from social grants ‘savings’ to fund nutrition for pregnant women and young children. In fact, the social grant system is being purged to reduce beneficiary numbers through what National Treasury calls Targeted and Responsible Savings.

There is no clear evidence that the ‘savings’ have been achieved through “strengthened verification measures” – rather, they have been achieved by implementing a review system that places an unfamiliar administrative burden on beneficiaries who have already been through the application and screening process. Simply put, most of the savings have been achieved by suspending grants when beneficiaries do not come forward for review (often due to structural barriers to doing so), removing lifeline support across the Child Support Grant, Older Person’s Grant and SRD Grant.

These relief measures create impossible trade-offs that actively erode social protection under the guise of savings. No investment was announced for public employment, and budgets for basic education, Early Childhood Development and other social services are growing below inflation over the MTEF, effectively declining. These budget items are the crucial social infrastructure that drives our present and future development. In the language of Treasury, our fiscus faces ballooning debts of much higher future social service costs, which will be a direct consequence of underfunding today.

Read the full statement.