GOVT EXPENDITURE CONTAINED – NEAL

MBABANE – Government has retained its expenditure in this financial year.

Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg was ecstatic that despite the financial challenges experienced by the country, government was able to contain its expenditure.

According to educalingo.com, a recurrent expenditure means all payments other than for capital assets, including on goods and services, (wages and salaries, employer contributions), interest payments, subsidies and transfers.

The politician said: “This is a huge success.” To contain the expenditure, the minister said the budget committee used actual instead of estimated or projected expenditure. The expenditure anticipated to be shouldered by government has increased by E230 million.
This is the increment of the budget from E21.6 billion to E21.83 billion this year.

The minister further said despite that his budget was not specific, hard decisions were yet to come from government. He said the recovery strategy to be presented by the Prime Minister, Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini, would be more detailed on the journey government was being steered to. Rijkenberg said the country was moving into being a high net worth individual country. He said it was government’s stance to stand against double taxation but to improve the prospects of increasing the foreign direct investment (FDI).

Attracting investors into the country would also uplift those who are currently unemployed. To date, the unemployment rate in the country is said to be 26.4 per cent.

Lowest

He said the country was striving to be one of the lowest when it came to corporate tax. This, he said, would allow investors to know that their investments were safe – as they moved into the country.

The minister was optimistic that such a move would deal with the high employment rate. He said it would further deal with the disparities in the economy as the country was marked among those with high inequality.

To this, Economics Lecturer from the University of Eswatini (UNESWA) Sanele Sibiya, said for almost two decades, the country’s economy had been stagnating at rates less than two per cent of year-on-year-growth.
He said given this state of affairs, decisive action needed to be taken.

“We need to grow the economy to an extent that it should begin to create jobs, it is imperative that we are able to transfer jobs from the public sector into the private sector and that can only be done if we have a vibrant and growing private sector that will assimilate those jobs.”

Sibiya applauded Rijkenberg on tackling the issue of accumulated arrears against the public sector head-on. He said the minister promised that going forward, government would not allow any accumulation of arrears and was in the process of expediting clearing of arrears

“This will release the much required capital into the private sector and ultimately spurring growth in the right direction. Timely payments to vendors going forward will boost operations of the private sector and thereby creating jobs.”

Economics

The economics scholar said if the decisions touched upon by the minister in his maiden budget speech were implemented swiftly, the private sector would also be in a position to take advantage of the favourable financial conditions, bolstering credit creation within the financial sector.

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