The mini budget keeps SA diplomacy afloat, but structural rot still festers

The Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), presented by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana on Wednesday, handed the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) an extra R793-million, lifting its budget vote (the allocation Parliament approves for it) from R7.23-billion to R8-billion. This may look like a vote of confidence, but reading the fine print reveals it’s closer to a life-support drip.

Almost none of that increase expands what South Africa can do abroad. R346-million simply covers foreign exchange losses, the extra rand cost of running 115 missions whose bills are paid in foreign currency. Another R304-million pays for South Africa’s interim chairship of the Southern African Development Community, a role it picked up off the normal rotation in November 2025 when Madagascar’s government collapsed, and which the main Budget never fully funded. Treasury classifies both as expenditure of an exceptional nature, which is Budget language for money a department could not plan for and cannot avoid.

In the same window, the Auditor-General handed Dirco its second consecutive qualified audit, meaning the auditors could not vouch for parts of its accounts and, for the first time, a “material irregularity” – the formal finding that a breach of rules has caused or is likely to cause financial loss. The cause was ordinary neglect.

South Africa owns embassies, residences and chanceries across the world, and has neglected several to the extent that they are no longer fit to live in. Officials are housed in rented flats while state property stands empty and decaying. The department’s own estimate to repair the portfolio is more than R830-million while its annual maintenance budget sits at R170-million. The MTBPS lets Dirco sell properties in Namibia and Switzerland to raise R123-million for building elsewhere, an admission that the capital budget can’t maintain the estate through normal channels.

Then there is the problem no budget line admits. The department’s own answers to Parliament put its vacancy rate at 28.6%, rising to 32.3% at head office, with 22 missions operating without a permanently appointed head of mission – the ambassador or high commissioner who leads them.

The diplomatic network is running at roughly two-thirds strength. The budget’s response is to fund early retirement and hold the salary ceiling flat: the MTBPS routes R20.3-million into the government’s voluntary exit programme while lifting compensation by just R115-million, too little to grow the establishment. 

The state is funding exits at one end while it cannot fill the posts standing empty at the other. Parliament’s own committee has now asked Dirco to model which missions it should close to stay inside that ceiling.

The deeper problem

Dirco met 32 of its 34 planned annual targets in its 2025/26 performance report. This looks like a good and defensible record, but it exposes the deeper problem rather than answering it. The indicators used in these annual reports measure activity, not results: the number of engagements convened, meetings attended and Op-eds published. 

Dirco’s own 2025-2030 Strategic Plan sets out a column it calls “outcome indicators”, counting 300 structured bilateral engagements over five years and 300 economic diplomacy engagements. The impact they are meant to serve carries no measure at all. None of that tells a South African whether an engagement secured an investment, opened a market or created a job. A service can hit 94% of its targets and still not say what the country got for the money. That’s a measurement problem dressed up as success. Reforming the indicators to measure what the activity achieves, rather than the activity itself, would reveal the real return on investment.

For South Africa’s foreign service, the MTBPS is a choice to keep the lights on without repairing the wiring. The exceptional allocations treat symptoms the Auditor-General and Parliament have already diagnosed as governance failures, and leave the causes untouched. A middle power can’t be represented indefinitely on a shrinking, politicised, under-audited footing, and this budget does nothing to stop the slide.

Three markers will show whether this is a temporary floor or a downward slope: whether the February Budget continues forcing exits while posts stand empty; whether Treasury gives Dirco a way to budget for unpredictable exchange rate swings; and whether Parliament ever resolves the R1.43-billion in accumulated unauthorised expenditure shadowing the department’s accounts.

A country’s diplomacy is the cheapest insurance it buys. South Africa is quietly letting the policy lapse, one adjustment budget at a time. DM