South Africa’s rand remained stable on Friday after a volatile week. It initially weakened due to the postponement of the national budget before recovering, thanks to rising global gold prices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rand ended the week trading at 18.32 against the dollar, remaining relatively stable since the budget hiccup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The budget delay, caused by disagreements within the coalition government over a proposed increase in value-added tax, is the first in South Africa\u2019s post-apartheid history and creates uncertainty ahead of the expected mid-March presentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
TreasuryONE\u2019s Andre Cilliers said<\/a><\/strong> that markets will be watching for a focus on debt consolidation and expenditure cuts in the revised budget, which could strengthen the rand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Friday (21 February), the rand strengthened slightly, trading at R18.33 to the dollar, R23.23 to the pound and R19.27 to the euro. Oil is trading lower at $74.30 a barrel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are five other news stories making waves in South Africa today:<\/p>\n\n\n\n South Africa is in deep trouble:<\/strong>\u00a0Ann Bernstein, the executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), believes that South Africa is facing a potential “catastrophic unemployment crisis” if it does not urgently eliminate barriers to economic growth. She stated, “We\u2019re in deep trouble, and simply continuing with our usual practices or making slow, hesitant reforms is not enough.”[MyBroadband<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plan for private help for Eskom:<\/strong>\u00a0The Cabinet plans to hold a special meeting after the cancellation of Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana\u2019s budget policy statement. Reports indicate that the budget will be the only item on the agenda as parties in the Government of National Unity (GNU) seek to address concerns about the proposed tax hike.[EWN<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Good news over greylisting:<\/strong> The Treasury is confident that South Africa will exit the FATF’s money-laundering greylist by October, as only two items on their agreed plan remain to be addressed. [Business Day<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mantashe in charge of saving SA from high power prices:<\/strong>\u00a0Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources Gwede Mantashe will lead a newly established task team of four ministers aimed at addressing the obstacles to industrial development in South Africa, particularly the high cost of electricity.<\/span> [News24<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Load shedding reduced to stage 4:<\/strong>\u00a0Power utility Eskom says that load shedding will be\u00a0reduced to stage 4 from 00h30\u00a0on Monday (24 February) following the successful return of most downed units. [BusinessTech<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here are 5 important things happening in South Africa today (24 February 2025).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":790595,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20398],"tags":[18993,853],"class_list":["post-813752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5-things","tag-5-important-things-happening-in-south-africa-today","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813752"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":813758,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813752\/revisions\/813758"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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