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LIFE JUST GOT TOUGHER!

02/03/2018 07:30:00 By Martin Dlamini

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HIGHER taxes and higher user fees are to pick-pocket us come April. Our crime is allowing people to successfully mismanage our economy. We had woken up with hope yesterday, that the Finance Minister Martin Dlamini would make means to put more cash in our pockets, but he chose to do the exact opposite.

The message from the Throne to government was to put together a budget that would compel the State to spend on what it could afford, not to leave the people with less to spend on themselves. Electricity is going up soon yet we need it to go down and remain competitive to attracting investment, promote business growth and create more jobs. Value Added Tax is going up yet we are struggling to make ends meet given current food prices.
Minister Dlamini may claim to have heeded to His Majesty the King’s call to put together a realistic budget, but the tough action seems to be directed in one direction...the poor consumers.

What I am failing to draw from the budget are the sacrifices that government is willing to make to put things right, other than taxing people even more. The minister has, more or less, maintained last year’s budget and announced a freeze on hiring across all sectors. Really..Or is this some kind of joke? Is he saying the famous recruitment in the security forces has been suspended for five years or more? If not, this statement makes a mockery of the entire budget. The recurrent expenditure for the security services has always consumed the second largest portion of the national budget for no apparent reason, yet government keeps complaining about the wage bill.

Dlamini kept repeating the fact that government has not been able to raise enough revenues to cover the ever-increasing expenditures, saying this was a clear indication that the current government model cannot be sustained in the medium-term. So how is the current model being changed? By taxing people more? Seems like it. Dlamini says they intend to adopt a fiscal consolidation, reform and recovery strategy that will address the fiscal challenges and create the needed fiscal space for investment and social spending.

We do recall the previous economic recovery strategy at the height of the global financial crisis which hit this country hard. When the economy showed recovery, there was hope that lessons had been learnt and that we would be more prudent in the utilisation of our resources. Clearly we learnt nothing because we are right back to where we started. So how will we do things differently now?

The minister talks of establishing the right size of the public sector that would make government more agile and efficient in delivering public goods and services. He talks of re-enforcing fiscal consolidation to strategically interrogate all budget items, including the wage bill and transfers to public enterprises. Could the minister explain why we are still at ‘interrogation’ stage on public enterprises and the wage bill? We know where the problems are and what needs to be done to fix them. All we need is someone with the guts to take action.

Besides, this is all déjà vu. We do recall the voluntary exit programme that was introduced with the aim of encouraging civil servants to take early retirement. It was put on hold when government couldn’t answer how the retirees would earn a living. The same question has to be asked today; what will become of those it offloads? The speech didn’t answer this question, so it is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon.
He also cites the implementation of the newly enacted Public Finance Management Law as crucial to ensuring ‘efficiency and accountability in the use of public resources’.

To this, all we can say is, here we go again with this well rehearsed politicians’ script line. Who in Cabinet has ever been taken to task for wasting government funds? We’ve lost millions to dubious deals but the ministers walk free. Tell us something we’ve never heard before Dlamini, please. This piece of legislation will simply add a layer to all the existing government regulations that are violated at will.

We also hear the minister wants to dig deeper into people’s pension money invested outside the country by increasing the repatriation threshold from 30 per cent to 50 per cent. To bring these billions home to be used for investment purposes is a good idea - only if this cash will not be pumped into vanity projects. Pity we have no say on the use of our money. At the end of the day many of us went to sleep very sad at what came out of Parliament.

The minister may be raving and ranting about Swaziland’s first ever credit rating by Moody’s sitting at B - which is a negative rating by the way – the poor are soon to be blacklisted for failing to maintain good credit records in their day to day lives. Thanks to you Dlamini!