South Africa's finance minister Tito Mboweni on Tuesday told members of parliament he remained committed to the structural reforms mooted in a blueprint for economic growth released by the National Treasury last year to a less-than-enthusiastic response from government's alliance partners.

Briefing Parliament's standing and select committees on finance, Mboweni said he had repeatedly been asked during the ongoing Covid-19 global health crisis whether South Africa would subject itself to structural reforms dictated by the International Monetary Fund as it seeks relief funding to weather the storm.

"This question has become more important particularly in the light that we might be approaching the International Monetary Fund for Covid-related funding because the debate then is are you going to face structural conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund or not?" he said.

However, he added, a willingness and plan for reform was evident already in a document titled "Toward an Economic Strategy for South Africa" published by the National Treasury in 2019.

"We began to speak about structural reforms a long time ago before Covid-19 and we indicated what we are talking about," the minister said, referring the committees to the document.

Mboweni singled out key reform proposals, including those on skills needed in the evolving local economy.

It was vital that South Africa "improved educational outcomes" to equip graduates with the skills sought in the economy but also to ensure companies were able to import particular skill sets lacking locally.

"[We should] bring into South Africa those skills that we don't have, and we should get out of the notion that South Africans know everything, there are things that we don't know and therefore high skills importation is very important. Low skill is not important," he said.

The comments follow a suggestion by Mboweni last month, when he was pressed on structural reforms, that South Africa would seek to impose quotas on how many foreigners South African companies could employ.

Mboweni later qualified that proposal, saying there was "nothing xenophobic" in restricting the number of legal immigrants a business may employ, but some critics said it had a whiff of nationalism.

Stressing that structural reforms were now more pressing that ever, Mboweni reminded MPs on Tuesday that the 2019 blueprint, which the government has not yet adopted, also prioritised a stable macro-economic framework, an improved transport system to facilitate the movement of both labour and goods and interventions to stabilise debt-ridden power utility Eskom.

He recalled that the mooted reform agenda set out in the document guarded against over-regulation and sought to allow healthy competition while guarding against market strangulation by monopolies.

"Market structure understanding is very important," he said.  

"We spoke about the dialectical relationship between regulation and economic dynamism. The regulations that we put in place must be such that they do not stifle business activity but promote it."

"I urge members to revisit that document so that we have an understanding of what our understanding of structural reforms are."

The 77-page document seeks to provide a roadmap for increasing economic growth by up to three percent a year. It has drawn opposition from the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party.

South Africa's economy is currently forecast to contract by more than 6 percent in 2020, largely dragged down by the impact of Covid-19.