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ALLOCATE BUDGET FOR NDS

07/11/2018 01:49:00 By Thabiso Dlamini

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Finally, Hospital Hill has a new Cabinet ready to tackle the country’s white elephant in the room, that is, Vision 2022. Unfortunately, we are racing against time, yet a lot of ground still needs to be covered before Eswatini can safely call herself a ‘First World’ country.

Even though a lot of people have grown accustomed to Vision 2022 as part of the development discourse in all corners and streets of Eswatini, still a majority of people miss the point that the National Development Strategy coined in 1997, is, in fact, the country’s Vision for 2022.

The purpose of the NDS, which by the way is a well-articulated vision, was to formulate a vision that would provide appropriate strategies for socioeconomic development for the next 25 years, as well as provide a blueprint for the formulation of development plans for equitable allocation of resources. The key macro strategic areas of focus include; sound economic management, economic empowerment, human resource development, agricultural development, industrialisation, research and development, and environmental management.

It is 21 years later, and the very same issues still resonate for socioeconomic development priorities for Eswatini. It is as if the previous governments simply tossed the NDS aside and ran with their own construed development priorities, culminating in a collapse of our economy in 2010/11, just like we find ourselves in another economic downturn in 2017/18.

Where did government drop the ball? We should in fact now be thinking about a new and contemporary 25-year development strategy that would perhaps make us the Singapore of Southern Africa or a totally new and unimagined goliath of the South. Unfortunately, we cannot do that because thanks to the previous governments, we threw away 20 of our best years doing nothing to gain ground on the current NDS.

Like many policies and strategies in Eswatini, the country drops the ball when it comes to allocating money/resources to implement what is written and promised to the nation on paper. A policy or development vision without a serious and dedicated financial commitment is simply a document to be signed and shelved, so that it can collect dust in many of the government ministries.

Implementation

Every year government sets a budget but there seems to be a disconnect between that generic budget that sees many ministries and parastatals fighting for a piece of that pie than the programmes that should be deliberately allocated a budget to be part of the implementation of the NDS. In short, the NDS is just lip-service. When it comes to government putting money and allocating resources where they are mostly needed, it is an extremely difficult and different ball game altogether.

The new Cabinet should, therefore, ensure that when it allocates a budget to the different government ministries, departments and parastatals, a chunk of that money goes specifically to funding the NDS. Each ministry and its implementing parastatals should be accountable to targets set in the NDS so that overall cash-flow within the g-wallet is reflective of the country’s vision for 2022.

Here is the other problem. Yes, we have a new Cabinet and a relatively new Parliament; however, we still have principal secretaries, undersecretaries, senior officers, officer, etc, who still make up a significant part of the stodgy government system that is preventing traction towards the promised First World status. There are just a lot of people who are still part of the old government system who need to be cut to make way for real progress towards Vision 2022.

At the same time, government should not be run as a person’s playpen, where the programmes that get funded become those of ministers or senior officials who have good-for-nothing relations with the head of Cabinet. Running government should have been a relay race to Vision 2022 where the programmes stipulated in the NDS take priority and seamlessly get passed on from one Cabinet to the next.

That way, government should not really start afresh every five years, it should gain momentum every five years with fresh and new brains to cement and implement the country’s development targets.

So yes, we have a new Cabinet that will definitely change in the next five years. The onus is on the head of the current government to make sure that the politics of Cabinet do not stifle the implementation of the NDS. The g-wallet should shell out money with a strict focus on the NDS so that the many ministers and their ministries can align and strip their spending habits solely for the implementation of the NDS.

The story of Eswatini is that every five years, our Cabinet leaves a huge dent on the g-wallet through their remuneration and exit packages, while progress on the NDS suffers. Moving forward, every money spent by government needs serious justification on how it contributes to and enhances the implementation of the National Development Strategy – Vision 2022. At least they owe us that much.