Several things about the budget annoy me intensely. Too many people compare it with the previous year. Have they forgotten the medium-term budget policy statement of a few months ago, in which revenue expectations were updated and expenditure policy choices made? You would never guess it reading last weekend’s papers.

We already know there’s been a terms of trade boon and in the data between the medium-term budget and now it has not been dramatically bigger than expected. What has been more supportive is a general delinking between soft growth and revenues, which is important and only partly down to South African Revenue Service efficiencies.

Another thing that gets my goat is people saying, “the budget must give clarity on reforms” or “the budget must announce this or that reform”. Why? The budget is an important speech, but the Treasury is involved in many reform issues, often in concert with the presidency through Operation Vulindlela and with other departments. Communicating that to investors in a single place has value from a signalling perspective, but fundamentally, most of these reforms were announced in the president’s state of the nation address (Sona) and are the responsibility of line departments.

There seems to be a residual hangover from the Jacob Zuma state capture years that insists the Treasury is the only institution of government that can be trusted and must handhold everyone all the time. It’s time to go back to this being a normal government in which line departments also deliver — the focus being on electricity and transport, of course, but also justice, home affairs and trade, industry & competition.

The number of times you hear people saying things such as, “the budget said x about y” when a line department or minister was talking about it for a year beforehand proves the point.

Finally, the issue of “the Sona provided the political direction — the budget must provide the funds”. It is simply not how most issues work. Most reforms have less to do with availability of funds than with finding the people with the right skill sets who don’t exist in most levels of government. It is about getting processes, responsibilities and relationships working between institutions.

In the medium-term budget the Treasury already started to provide some funds to fill gaps, such as setting up the new transport regulator. We can expect to see a bit more of that in today’s budget, but it is wrong to say “electricity is a priority so the budget should have a slew of new cash for an issue”.

Why this rant? Because we are at a positive and important moment as debt as a share of GDP peaks and starts to fall (albeit slowly) and as debt service costs as a share of GDP stop rising. To do anything new and interesting on the social wage (as we must) requires a large expansion of the tax base and so growth. To do that needs reforms to be completed, not just ongoing, so the focus must be on line departments and what they are doing.

Questions become more complex and harder to follow: who is issuing a request for quotation (RFQ) and why; is the detail of a policy reform, like unbundling, consistent with the political intent already expressed by the president; and what is needed to achieve the policy end? Is a department able to manage three hats (regulator overseer, shareholder of a state-owned enterprise and policymaker), and is a state holding company able to push private sector privatisation when it is against its underlying self-interests?

These are dull issues regardless of how important they are, nothing like a flash bang from a budget or Sona speech and a lovely budget review document that is well formatted, with nifty little memes in the margins.

We are now into the weeds — the “middle” chunk of reforms — after the easy levers have all been pulled and departments must now do the hard work that requires capacity and implementation.

Operation Vulindlela provides detailed updates once a quarter, but the work happens in between. For instance, the release of an RFQ last Friday on Richard’s Bay dry bulk terminal only received limited coverage of the event itself, rather than the underlying story, or if it was even fit for purpose.

We saw this arise on the unbundling issue too, in which the reportage was “organised business said” and “Eskom said” more than what was actually going on or best suited to our current setup.

The media generally face off against slick state-owned enterprise media and PR machines, which want to push a narrative that crises are over and everything is fine. This is not helped by many large customers and companies that have optimised their outputs and operations around subpar network industries and so are able to keep shareholders and stakeholders happy.

This is why we are at a dangerous point in reforms, despite so much positivity about the Sona, the president’s political will to back reforms and progress so far. We are now into the weeds — the “middle” chunk of reforms — after the easy levers have all been pulled and departments must now do the hard work that requires capacity and implementation.

The time it has taken to get to this point on electricity and logistics (about three and two years, respectively) shows the risks associated with creating a national water committee after previous, more direct, interventions failed to get water into metros.

Immediate stabilisation of situations in some reform areas now requires long, hard slogs that have relatively little to do with money and more with speed, capacity, systems and institutionalisations — and in many cases simply knowing what happens where and by whom.

The Treasury is a crucial stakeholder in so much of this work, especially through Operation Vulindlela, but the budget itself is just a stepping stone. The focus, attention and accountability must be elsewhere.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.

This article first appeared in Business Day.