Treasury continues to project that debt will stabilise and begin to decline over coming years, having decided not to take Eskom’s debt onto government’s balances sheet. Their debt projections have drifted higher since the global financial crisis, reflecting persistent primary deficits and repeated downward revisions to projections of growth and revenue. A large contribution to the improvement in the debt profile between the 2021 and 2022 Budget Reviews came from the upward revision to the level of South Africa’s GDP (by 11% in 2020, for example).
