VAT HIKE WILL INCREASE POVERTY LEVEL

 Sir,

After reading the budget speech delivered by Martin Dlamini, who is our Finance Minister, I was left disappointed.
As a poor Swazi, the budget will leave me poorer. To be precise, the budget was meant to rob us.

How can government decide to increase Value Added Tax (VAT)? Others call VAT consumption tax and this simply mean you pay tax for everything be it a service or commodity.  Basically, this means there would be an increase in the prices of basic commodities and this will result in the poor not affording. Adding salt to the wound, government further said it will charge VAT on electricity. What is that?

Where are the poor going to get the money? How are the elderly expected to afford electricity? The disheartening thing is that government decided to increase VAT without increasing the grants for the elderly. A sound Cabinet should have come with a solution of cushioning the poor after the hike of VAT. A cushion should have been in the form of increasing grants and salaries and also adding the number of zero rated commodities, just like in South Africa.

That would have made perfect sense. As we speak, government has done nothing in this regard. We heard the minister saying government is increasing VAT and other levies to service its debt among other obligations. To me, this was poor planning because this means all the money which would be raised will go to consumption not to develop the economy. This is a vague and a ridiculous reason. To me government just decided to increase VAT just because South Africa increased it. It is irrational to note that our government said they were increasing VAT because they want to keep it at par with that of South Africa so that the SRA can easily collect VAT. Really!

Through this, government prioritised the SRA at the detriment of us - the poor. Again, South Africa increased VAT because they want to fund free tertiary education which is part of economic developmental but Swaziland want to spend the money that would be collected on a non-development initiative. This displays government’s ruthlessness to its people, something which our King is totally against hence we now bank our hopes on Him to do something especially regarding the levying of VAT on electricity, because honestly, we will be left in the dark, literally.

Concerned Citizen 

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