JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -South Africa’s lower house of parliament on Wednesday passed the last major piece of annual budget legislation, after the two biggest parties in the coalition government found common ground after months of disagreements.
The Appropriation Bill, which allocates funds to government departments and entities, was approved by a majority vote in the 400-seat National Assembly, a presiding officer said.
The budget of Africa’s biggest economy went through repeated delays and revisions this year as it became the focus of a power struggle between the long-ruling African National Congress and its biggest coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance.
The DA, which until last year was the main opposition party, had initially refused to back the budget because of a value-added tax increase, which the ANC ultimately abandoned after it failed to secure the necessary support.
The DA then said it would not approve the budgets of departments led by ANC ministers whom it had accused of wrongdoing. President Cyril Ramaphosa fired one of those ministers on Monday, which the DA said was enough to secure its support.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has admitted that navigating the budget process under a coalition government was difficult. South Africa’s coalition, which is only a year old, followed three decades of ANC rule since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The National Treasury released new technical guidelines on Wednesday aiming to improve the process next year, saying there would be “continuous political endorsement”.
(Reporting by Nellie Peyton and Kopano Gumbi;Editing by Alexander Winning and Leslie Adler)
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