Times Of Swaziland: GOVT FINALLY ADMITS TO CASH FLOW CHALLENGES

GOVT FINALLY ADMITS TO CASH FLOW CHALLENGES
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The Editor on 08/12/2017 00:59:00


Sir,
The Finance minister has finally admitted, through his mid-year budget review
report for the 2017/18 financial year that government is in serious financial
trouble.
The minister reportedly also lamented the fact that as a country we continue to
rely heavily on the SACU receipts to primarily finance our day to day operations
as government. The financial challenges that government is facing are not an
accident, the warning signs have been there for several years and experts have
been warning that unless it changes its spending patterns, the country will
eventually become bankrupt.
The current Finance minister is on his last year in office and he has over the
past four years been singing one and the same song without any tangible changes
to the spending patterns of government; he has dismally failed the people of
Swaziland. As Finance minister, he has continued to pump in hundreds of millions
of Emalangeni into white elephants much against all advice and common sense.
While the admission by the minister that the country is on the verge of
insolvency is plausible, it is unfortunately not enough; the admission on its
own will not address our problems. The minister needs to tell us what concrete
plans he is putting in place to turn around our fortunes. As one philosopher put
it; “Madness is doing one and the same thing and somehow hope for a different
result.”
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to determine that our resources are
wasted on vanity projects that will have no impact on the lives of the
population; that we continue spending a huge chunk of our resources on the
recruitment of personnel who will add no value to the lives of the people; that
we have the least growing economy in Sub-Saharan Africa; that we have the lowest
attraction of FDI in Sub-Saharan Africa; that we are now regarded as the most
unequal society in Africa and at this rate we will soon be the most unequal
society in the world.
The legacy that the minister is leaving is a very horrible one where government
hospitals have no drugs, where the elderly are not paid their grants even when
they attain the stipulated age of 60 years, where while the nation is on the one
hand praying for rains, it is also praying that the horrible roads are not made
worse, the list is endless.
As a respected financial person, the minister has unfortunately tarnished his
reputation as Finance minister, he could have been bullied into making political
decisions to the detriment of our financial situation but we will never know
that, all we know is that he has failed us and he should take full
responsibility for our state of affairs, at this day and age a country cannot
survive if it has very weak Finance ministers no matter how good they may be in
the finance field. In politics you have to be firm and if the bullying gets
unbearable, resign.
Hanger
MHLUME