South Africa’s national budget presentation, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been postponed indefinitely due to a lack of political consensus, National Assembly Speaker Thoko Didiza announced.
The delay comes as the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which lost its parliamentary majority in last year’s election, struggles to secure support from coalition partners to pass the budget.
The Democratic Alliance (DA), the ANC’s key coalition ally, attributed the postponement to its opposition to a proposed 2-percentage-point increase in value-added tax (VAT), a measure pushed by the ANC.
Didiza noted that such a postponement had not occurred in the three decades since the end of apartheid.
Following the announcement, the South African rand (ZAR) extended losses, weakening by 1% against the U.S. dollar.
