CRISES-PRONE GOVT MUST TAP ON NDS FOR SOLUTIONS

Government's worsening fiscal position is, in all intents and purposes, self-inflicted and, therefore, not surprising since for some time now it has been surviving from hand-to-mouth through the daily auctioning of treasury bills, a fact that should have long sounded the alarm bells.

Still surprising for a government whose financial management acumen cannot be said to be any better to managing a spaza shop is that in the wake of the demand for a cost of living salary adjustment from social partners, the unions, it is now invoking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - whose advices over the years it has traditionally ridiculed - in defence of its offering of a 0.0 per cent to the demand by unions. The signs of a financial asphyxiation have been there long before the 2010/11 meltdown and all because of government’s legendary wasteful tendencies coupled to imprudent management of the fiscus.

Given, government would have avoided the cash-flow challenge that is becoming perennial had it initially taken IMF’s advices over the years in relation to the prudent management of the fiscus while cutting down on wasteful uneconomical expenditure and the need to broaden its revenue base instead of its heavy reliance on receipts from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and professionalising the civil service with a view of cutting the wage bill to manageable levels. A rerun of government’s puerile posturing and responses to IMF advices and warnings over the years would provide a full script for a night’s stand-up comedy performance. 

As I see it, it would be the height of naivety to even think the IMF-brewed solutions were singularly the catalysts to the kingdom’s fiscus challenges. The IMF interventions are superficial in the broader scheme of things because they would soothe rather than heal the financial boil by annihilating the causal agents. To lance the boil, the multitude of challenges that are manifesting themselves in wide scale poverty, disease, ever increasing unemployment especially among the youth, widespread social ills, foreign direct investment deficit, etc, are outcomes of bad governance and leadership. This position is affirmed by the mechanism, as explained by the first African, a Ghanaian, to head the United Nations system in the kingdom at the turn of the 2000 decade, of nuts and bolts of the medium income classification of this country when the majority of the people were slaves to grinding poverty.         
The attributes considered in the UN basket in determining economic classification of countries include physical size and attributes of the country, population size and literacy, human capital, availability and size of natural resources, among others.

Considering the physical size of the country and population, he had explained that owing to these attributes, the kingdom was in a unique position of handing out a million Emalangeni to every one of the million plus population in every budgeting cycle without the budget and national development imperatives taking a strain. That, however, was only possible if the country was well governed, a factor that is assumed to be automatically organic from the UN perspective yet the reality in this country is different.  
As I see it, the political question cannot be ignored when exorcising the economic woes and fiscus challenges facing the kingdom since it is central. It is, after all, bad and irrational political decisions that are responsible for the state of affairs even though the leadership often boasts of the presence of a stable political environment that is a dividend of the so-called peace that is allegedly synonymous with the kingdom. Yet research by reputable international organisations has shown that it is the unstable political environment that is largely responsible for scaring away foreign direct investments (FDIs). Lending credence to these research findings is the inordinately high and unsustainable expenditure on the military that does not correlate to the so-called peace said to be synonymous with the nation.

As it turns out, the political question became pivotal when the forgotten National Development Strategy (NDS) was constructed by government and social partners across the spectrum in the last half of the 1990 decade. The visionary policy spelt out that for its objectives to be met required fundamental political transformation. Indeed it envisaged a plural body politic by decentralizing political power to the people to ensure a predictable and stable political environment. The obtaining Tinkhundla political system has failed to achieve this hence the challenges facing the Kingdom of eSwatini today.
As I see it, had the NDS been implemented to the letter, the financial meltdown of 2010/11 and other social challenges facing the nation today could have been avoided.  If anyone, including government is looking for home-grown solutions to the multifaceted challenges facing this country today, they need not look any further than the NDS.

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: