A rhetorical analysis of the budget speeches of South Africa : 1985, 1993, 1994, 2002
The annual national Budget Speeches made by the Ministers of Finance of South Africa are epideictic (ceremonious) speeches that praise the government's economic policy for the coming year, recommend it to the nation, and also present the proposed Budget to the world. This speech contains information that is the policy of the government since it is ultimately written into law and so affects the fortunes of every citizen of South Africa. The Ministers of Finance have to persuade the nation to adopt a plan for distributing the wealth of the nation which becomes a greatly significant exercise in the context of a developing third world country like South Africa where there is still great inequality. The Ministers of Finance do this by using ceremonious rhetoric that attempts to unite the people of South Africa under a common vision for the economy. In this thesis, I provide an analysis of the political rhetoric of four Budget Speeches of South Africa, each selected because of their importance in the various stages of South Africa's political history. This thesis is not an economic analysis; it is a rhetorical analysis of the speeches since the technique of rhetoric is used to analyse the Budget Speech. The selection of speeches is as follows: the Budget Speech of 1985 represents the apartheid era, even though at that time there were some moves towards reform. The peculiar two-pronged apartheid rhetoric of providing a place for all South Africans, of working together to build the nation and the economy, while there is still racial oppression is present in the introduction and conclusion of this speech. With the development of negotiations in the early 1990s which culminated in the first democratically elected Government of National Unity in 1994, the Budget Speeches of 1993 and 1994 became more representative of the interests of all South African citizens. In these speeches there is the rhetoric of hope for the future, transparency and nation-building. The 2002 Budget Speech represents a mature Budget Speech of a post-1994 South Africa where a democratically elected majority black party is in power. In the 2002 speech there is the rhetoric of solidarity, poverty and nation building. In the chapters containing the rhetorical analysis for each speech there is a description of the rhetorical situation, a summary of the speech, and then an analysis of the inventio, dispositio, and elocutio of the speech. In the final section of the thesis I provide a comparison of the four speeches analysed. Included in this dissertation are illustrations of the Ministers of Finance, the official print version of their speeches, a selection of media articles published on or around the day that each of the Budget Speeches were delivered, and also the transcripts of two interviews that I conducted with two of the former Ministers of Finance.
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