Times Of Swaziland: TROUBLESOME ISSUES FOR ESWATINI

TROUBLESOME ISSUES FOR ESWATINI
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Editor on 26/09/2022 08:18:00


Sir,
When leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) meet on issues
of peace and security in member States and reports are delivered about the
status quo of the troubled nations, you always wish that your own country never
degenerates to the level of needing to be pushed to do what is right. The common
trait with all these issues is the conflict that arises when the people become
unhappy with the way they are being governed by those they elected to power.
This extends to extremely violent levels of silencing the vocals.
Decisions
The country finds itself in a precarious economic position because of poor
decisions affecting our economy and everybody sees the need to get our house in
order. We need to change how we provide service delivery. We need more
accountability in the use of taxpayers’ money. We need to see those entrusted
with positions of authority being taken to task for violating procedures. We
need to see a change in the awarding of tenders. How can we have a national
celebration where people were handpicked to provide services instead of going
the tender route? This opens the door wide open for corruption. We need to
change the view that job creation is about bulging the civil service wage bill
with annual recruitment in the security forces. Job creation is for the private
sector. For this to be realised, we need to change how the country does
business. Our economy is in the red but the policies we have in place are
designed to put out more red tape rather than roll out a red carpet for
investors.
Change
We need to change our retrogressive taxation, which is targeted at making the
people poorer. Government should be working towards lowering the cost of doing
business to encourage the growth of SME and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from
which quality jobs and increased tax revenue could be derived. We need to
discourage ‘tenderpreneurship’. We need to change the way we develop the
national budget. It is pretty evident that this has become the prerogative of
Cabinet. The end result has always been misguided priorities and poor allocation
of resources. This has resulted in chronic shortages of essential medical
supplies and health services, poor or insufficient provision of agricultural
services, inadequate funding of our education system causing a serious decline
of quality and standards.
We need to revisit the number of parastatals we have. The minister of Finance is
on record saying there are one too many. All the above issues are nothing new
but so long as they keep appearing in newspapers as troublesome issues for the
country, it can only mean nothing has changed. If things don’t change, then we
run the risk of testing the tolerance limits of the people. The trouble with
that approach is that there is never a warning as to when the tolerance bubble
will burst. We would hate for that to happen only to find ourselves
‘governed’ by SADC.