Home | Feature | BUDGET SETTING PEOPLE UP AGAINST STATE

BUDGET SETTING PEOPLE UP AGAINST STATE

11/03/2019 07:58:00 By Vusi Sibisi

Font size:

THERE was no intention to make the budget the subject matter of today’s column yet again but certain developments, including some odd and puerile pronouncements and, of course, as well as the unsaid has made it unavoidable to move on to other issues such as the draft legal and regulation framework on farming and processing of marijuana for medicinal and allied purposes.

If I didn’t know any better and lacked intimate understanding and knowledge of not only Eswatini polity but as well as the social and economic order, I would have come to the conclusion that the Cabinet, through the proposed budget, was consciously setting up the people against the State by making them worse off. Yes, that is the net effect of the extra burden, in respect of tax and other increases that will further escalate the already extremely high cost of living, with which government wants to further encumber the people, a majority of whom are already under strain of tyranny of poverty. Just for how long the leadership expects the people to be tolerant and to bottle this anger and frustration can only be referenced to some historical epochs whose aftermaths included the total destruction of political edifices that were hitherto believed to be indestructible and reengineering of whole societies.

A close scrutiny of the proposed budget shows that it is not a radical departure from previous successive budgets where people were and still are not at the core but a by the way side issue. That is the budget should have been nuanced towards addressing endemic poverty by putting people ahead of anything else instead of setting out to further widen the schism between the privileged minority of the haves and the majority of have nots. Of course this deliberately skewed budget further cements the already established fact that except for the change of faces in Cabinet after each cyclical elections, nothing else changes in the mandate of the government under the obtaining Tinkhundla political system. Additionally, that Cabinet is devoid of any decision making authority but merely exists to project a veneer of a modern State when in all earnest this country is manifestly more of a 16th century fiefdom.

The small deviation in the budget being the reduction of corporate tax that, as can be expected, must have been influenced by those faces in Cabinet who come from the private sector, which, among others, include Prime Minister Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini, Finance Minister Neal Rijkenberg and Minister of Commerce Industry and Trade Manqoba Khumalo.
But the reduction of corporate tax is not the silver bullet to the socio-economic woes facing this country but a particle in a whole body of what needs and ought to be done. It certainly will not, on its own, expand an economy that has been constricting for years now. But even Cabinet is constrained in what it, as a collective and as well as individual ministers, can and cannot do courtesy of the restraining political status quo in which real power is vested and exercised by a minority elsewhere. And looking at the composition of and talent available in the Cabinet, I am almost sure that given a free hand, they would do a much better job than expending much of their time and energies skirting around real and crucial issues for fear of burning their fingers.

Yet it would be prudent to those charged with the stewardship of this country to be warned that today’s emaSwati are well aware of what is happening around them, including the excesses and abuse of power, but what they lack is the political space to ventilate and their frustrations with the system and how they are rather be governed. I am sure members of the Cabinet are pretty much aware of this fact, since some of them are from the less privileged class of the have nots, which is why this country is today facing an economic precipice.

Not surprisingly, Members of Parliament (MPs) have been scathing in their reaction to the proposed budget, even if some have been somewhat contradictory. Yet still they are more inclined to pass it with very little changes if any – that is the nature of Swati polity. We already know, for instance, that the biggest slice of the budget goes towards recurrent expenditure on salaries for civil servants. Mind you, servant is not a particularly likeable term when referencing a human being providing certain skills and services in exchange for financial benefit, a term that is negatively nuanced in an undemocratic class-structured environment such as that obtaining in this the Kingdom of Eswatini.

As I see it, while it is true that in a majority of countries, developing countries to be specific, governments are the employers of choice and therefore account for the largest workforce, this is not always justifiable.
This particularly applies in Eswatini, where it has been repeatedly acknowledged from multiple quarters that there is a lot of deadwood - these would also encompass ghost employees - that are a drain to government. And in a set-up rooted on political patronage, positions are created willy-nilly to accommodate relatives, praise singers, bootlickers, sycophants, the list is endless – even if they do not qualify to be anything - hence the public workforce has ballooned, disproportionately to requirements, to unsustainable levels.

By the time the term of office of this government, no Cabinet comes to a close recurrent expenditure would in all likelihood have expanded considerably. Yes, more uneconomical white elephant vanity projects would have been completed and joined the already existing ones whose maintenances are entirely dependent on the taxpayer that would have to be budgeted for.
In real terms this country will be poorer for these extravagant projects that are and were undertaken against all advices simply because decision making is not tested against rationality, reality, viability and sustainability but is largely infantile and ostentatious.