Home | Feature | THE COST OF BROKE BUDGETS

THE COST OF BROKE BUDGETS

15/08/2018 08:23:00 By Thabiso Dlamini

Font size:

Government keeps making a mess of the public purse and in so doing is robbing the nation of all possibilities of attaining Vision 2022.

A big component of achieving the goals set out in the National Development Strategy (NDS) 21 years ago depends on government’s commitment and prudence in proper management of the national budget and the year on year public funds that get allocated that budget.

A standard of living akin to the ‘first world’ requires money to be spent in priority development programmes that increase employment opportunities and people’s incomes, improves the provision of public services, and eliminates all forms of poverty and hopelessness among emaSwati. A whole lot of the country’s aspirations depend on government. How can a broke government lift and carry the nation to its promised ‘first world’ future?

What the government is proving over and over again is that it is really incapable of balancing the national accounts. It is as if government forgets or deliberately ignores the fact that a big part of the ‘first world’ is about improving the lives of the 63 per cent that live under the poverty line in Eswatini. Instead, government spending has increasingly become biased towards flashy capital projects that do nothing to improve the life of the ordinary liSwati.

The construction of flashy white elephants across the country are a huge drain on government coffers and the egg on the faces of the 63 per cent of the Eswatini population that lives under abject poverty is that they will never derive any benefits of these capital projects.
Now that government is broke, the capital projects have since been suspended. The powers responsible for economic planning should realise that capital projects such as roads and hotels have to be complete before the country can think about any return on investment on each project.

With these projects suspended, government is losing precious time while the total cost of completing the capital projects in the future keeps going up. A half complete road, a half complete hotel, is as good as no road or hotel at all! What it means it that government cannot afford not to complete these capital projects because it is as good throwing money down the drain.
This is why once government has committed to building a road it has to complete that road whether it has the money or not. This is how capital projects become money sucking machines in the economy at the expense of the social development that still needs to occur to lift 63 per cent of the population out of poverty.

Whereas social development is incremental and accrues to the next person and next person over a period of time. Take for instance, if government invests on the education of one person, who will in turn educate/empower two or three other people, it turns out to be a greater return on investment because the benefits trickle through the masses of the Eswatini population. In contrast, a capital project such as a hotel assumes that the population has the income to support the economic activities that can be generated through the hotel infrastructure.

If a majority of the population in Eswatini does not have the disposable income for productive use of the infrastructure that comes as a product of the capital projects, most of the infrastructure then turns out to be white elephants simply because the masses of the population cannot afford to use it.

When allocating money between capital projects on infrastructure, against money on social development programmes in education, health, etc., government has to think about the share of the Eswatini population that can benefit from each budget component. Moving towards the targets of attaining Vision 2022 is about funding projects and programmes that benefit the masses of the Eswatini population, not a small section of the middle class, or maybe just the most affluent of our population.
The biggest hurdle toward achieving a ‘first world’ for Eswatini is that if government’s money is not tied in capital projects that do not improve the lives of the masses in our country, it is tied on baseless promotions of civil servants, acquisition of government vehicles to be wrecked and junked at the CTA premises, and tied up in loan repayments government takes to fund the capital projects. In reality, it will be on government’s hands whether the country will or will not achieve the targets laid out in the country’s development vision, that is, Vision 2022!