Alec Hogg: My day in “lockup” – and losing Nene link at critical moment

By Alec Hogg

Mine is a fantastic job, one you just have to love. Some days more than others. Like yesterday.

Up at 4:15am, I was on the highway to Pretoria before five and parked ahead of the shuttle arriving at six. Spent most of the next seven hours poring over Treasury documents interspersed by the video link to Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene’s Cape Town Press Conference with a Budget record of 170 journalists. Mine was the only question from Pretoria to be aired, but as luck would have it, the line dropped as Nene started to answer. That seals it. Just have to be in the Mother City next year.

Will be going through my notes (and the excellent stories on BizNews.com) in detail ahead of hosting a webcast for Standard Bank Online Share Trading at noon today and then joining the Deputy Finance Minister and others at a Sizwe Ntsaluba Gobodo breakfast on Friday. But in short, it was a smart, opportunistic Budget. Smart because Nene stayed away from raising dividend, capital gains and other wealth taxes. Opportunistic because he grabbed a drop of R4 a litre in the fuel price to claw back almost a Rand of that in tax. There was enough redistribution to delight the poor. Not enough to overcome Home Bias for the highly mobile rich.

This had been billed as the most challenging Budget since 1994. Next to what is in store next year, though, it may turn out to be a tea party. Unless we have another windfall of crude oil crash proportions.

Yesterday’s top stories: