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NEW CARS FOR CABINET MINISTERS

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MBABANE – Has government’s finan- cial position improved to such levels that shopping for new wheels is now affordable? Well... so it seems.

Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg has decided to exercise some flexibility on one of the austerity measures that were announced by Prime Minister (PM) Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini in November 2018. As part of the austerity measures, the PM announced that government would not be buying any new vehicles for himself, Deputy Prime Minister Themba Masuku and the 20 other Cabinet ministers.

However, on Thursday morning, during the post- budget seminar organised by the Central Bank of Eswatini, the Finance minister hinted a shift from this position. The minister said government ‘definitely does need to buy a fleet of vehicles for Cabinet ministers’, and that these cars ‘will be coming’. He told the Times SUNDAY newspaper that the reason for the need to buy the new cars was because ‘the current fleet is very old’.

He said the cars they were currently using leave them stranded ‘sometimes resulting in a few min- isters currently using their personal vehicles on a full-time basis’. The minister was asked if there was any money that had been budgeted for the purchase of the new vehicles and his response was that ‘there is space or policy in the CTA allocations for the replacement of vehicles’.

The CTA is the Central Transport Administration, whose core function is to purchase, maintain and dispose of government vehicles and other related equipment as well as to provide fuel for govern- ment vehicles. Also, the CTA provides vehicles on short-term hire to government ministries and departments. The country’s workforce under the Trade Union


Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA) is the least impressed by government’s intention to purchase the new cars. Mduduzi Gina, the TUCOSWA Secretary Gen- eral, said even though they do understand that the work of Cabinet ministers requires that the nation provides them with cars, it may not yet be ideal to purchase the new vehicles. “Alternative transport means could be explored through the use of the cars that were bought for the heads of State when Eswatini was the Chair of SADC; the nation has not been briefed on what happened to those cars,” he said.

SLASHED

In March 2016, the then Minister of Finance, Martin Gobizandla Dlamini, told Parliament that government would buy 14 new cars to be used by Heads of State during the 36th SADC Summit in August of that year. Martin said an amount of E50 million had been set aside for the Summit and the cars would be bought with part of this money. He said initially, E92 million was set aside for the Summit but the budget was slashed to E50 million after consultations with various committees. Indeed 14 BMW 740i sedans and 80 motorbikes


were bought at a cost of E29 million for the two- day event. In September 2017, this publication reported that the vehicles were lying idle at the Matsapha Police College while government was contemplating whether to sell or keep them. To this date, no decision was ever publicly com- municated on these vehicles. Gina, therefore, said these cars should be utilised by the current Cabinet ministers instead of buying new ones for them. “Not unless the economic circumstances that warranted the decision not to buy the cars (for the ministers) when they got into office has adequately changed for the better,” he said. The TUCOSWA leader said they would, how- ever, appreciate a ‘first things first’ approach in government’s priority list, which, to them, would be the fixing of the challenges facing the education and health sectors.


“The EMS (Emergency Medical Services) de- partment of health has literally collapsed because of lack of cars; there are looming strikes in the public sector because of non-increase of work- ers’ salaries; there are disruptions in the tertiary institutions because of allowances; government service providers have not been paid...the list is long,” Gina said.

CHALLENGES

He said these challenges were affecting the lives and the future of the country, which was why ‘clearly that should be the starting point’. Sikelela Dlamini, the Secretary General of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT), was equally critical of the decision to buy the new vehicles. He said deciding to purchase new cars yet there were other vehicles in the government system could mean one of two things. “This could be an indication that the econom

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