SAVE OUR ECONOMY

(Comments)

At a time when just about all the crisis we see in various sectors today is perpetuated by the lack of money from our cash-strapped government, it is consoling to learn that there is at least one body that is determined to get wasteful people to account for the loss of taxpayers’ money.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has reportedly been able to recover about E15 million owed to government over the past financial year.
According to its report, the recoveries include, among other things, money overpaid to suppliers, salary overpayments, salaries not staggered when civil servants were on study leave, uncollected stamp duties and salaries from overpayments to officers on secondments.

Other recoveries were from civil servants who embezzled the gullible public, double payments to suppliers and service providers, fines imposed on controlling officers for contempt of Parliament, rent owed to government and unauthorised housing allowances

Having done all the hard work and handed over the money to the national kitty, the immediate question that emerges is; has the embezzling, double payment to suppliers, overpayment of salaries, etc, stopped? Have the culprits been punished and handed deterrent sentences? Or is it business as usual?

The latter seems more likely, especially in light of the reaction of the prime minister (PM) to the question of what steps has government taken to cut spending to mitigate the glaring cash flow crisis that has seized government (see Interview on page 8).
The PM admits they are scraping every penny that drops into the Swaziland Revenue Authority (SRA) pot on a daily basis. However, only Cabinet knows the criteria used to set priority areas of spending. It only becomes clear to the rest of us when a new airplane lands in the country right in the middle of a severe drought with no concrete plan on how it will get this economy back on its feet in the short-term.

This flies in the face of delayed elderly grants, service providers whose payments are long overdue being turned back, patients forced to purchase medication at expensive pharmacies, schools and tertiary institutions of higher learning rocked by protests due to shortage of funds, etc. The list is endless.
Do we need to suggest that the PAC is better placed to run this government?  As a country, we’ve been down this road before and all we ask is for the PAC logic to prevail before we use any cent that remains if we are to avoid gambling our economy down beyond junk status.

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