High fuel price is a crisis of the ANC’s making
6 March 2019
South Africans are coughing up 74 cents more per litre of petrol and between 91 and 93 cents more per litre of diesel due to yesterday’s fuel increase.
This increase will have a negative impact on every South African, particularly the poor, eating into their already diminished transport budgets. The increase on input costs for numerous industries will also negatively affect businesses, agriculture and manufacturing, squeezing their profits, that means new jobs will not be created and others may be lost.
According to Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, South Africans must brace themselves for yet another fuel increase of 29 cents owing to government’s raising of taxes on fuel from 1st April 2019.
This high fuel price is a crisis of the ANC’s making. They have continually used the fuel levy to top up an ineffectual, corrupt and mismanaged fiscus that has wasted billions on problematic state-owned entities. The R59 billion used by the ANC government to bail out these state-owned entities could be used to reduce the tax on fuel.
The pace and speed by the Department of Energy to review the fuel pricing formula has been unreasonably slow; the technical team’s report into the petrol price was over 100 days late.
A DA government would look at a stabilisation fund coupled with a smoothing mechanism to reduce the impact of oil price and exchange rate fluctuations on the fuel price.
The DA would reduce the reliance on fuel levy increases to boost government revenue by cutting a bloated Cabinet, tightening government’s belt to halt wasteful spending and capping the government’s public sector wage bill. The DA would stop bailing out the bankrupt Road Accident Fund and look to institute better regulation, namely third-party insurance for all car users. In the long term, with prudent economic policy direction and sound fiscal discipline, a strengthening rand will aid the decrease in fuel costs.
The DA will continue to fight for a stable and smooth fuel price mechanism that will benefit all South Africans
Issued by Kevin Mileham, DA Shadow Minister of Energy, 6 March 2019
