E5.7BN CAPITAL BUDGET TO CREATE MORE JOBS

MBABANE - The capital budget of E5.7 billion promises to be a mechanism through which the country can quickly create jobs.

This was a scholarly opinion of Sanele Sibiya, a Lecturer of economics from the University of Eswatini (UNESWA). He said Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg had allocated over E900 million for roads construction and maintenance.

“May I plead that we bring back community-led public works programmes; doing such will ensure that we empower our communities to do the small construction works and thus have a direct transfer of funds to the pockets of the population.”
Sibiya expressed hope that the minister would hold his team to make sure that they implement properly rationalised decisions in order for the country to invest in projects that would yield positive returns to the economy.
In the same breath, the economist opined that the minister had boldly come out to say that ‘if no efficiencies are built into the system and thus leading the government into situations of cash flow challenges, the government will have no choice but to cut the wage bill’.

Costs

He opined that this therefore meant that it was incumbent upon each and every employee in the civil service to ensure that they did their best to contain costs - through seeking excellence in what they do to safe guard each other’s jobs.
Further, the economics lecturer highlighted that the move by government to unlock the potential of the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) sector, had the potential to keep the nation on a positive growth path.

“We welcome the initiatives to re-capitalizing the Small-Scale Enterprise Loan Guarantee Scheme and the establishment of the Informal Traders’ Revolving Fund; it would have been lovely though for the minister to commit some Emalangeni into these initiatives.”

Hurdles

He said access to finance was one of the major hurdles faced by SMEs and given government’s initiative, it was hoped that improved access to finance would improve the resilience of the sector thus unlocking its potential to contribute to the growth of the economy.

Further, Sibiya said the concerted efforts in improving the ease of doing business in the country would go a long way in private sector development and ultimately bolster growth.
“The stimulus packages will help attract the much needed FDI. We need to get FDI back on the positive growth rate year on year.”

Also, Sibiya said the settling of arrears by government will release the much required capital into the private sector and ultimately spurring growth in the right direction.
This follows that the country’s economy had been stagnating at rates less than two per cent of year-on-year-growth.

Grow

He said the country needed to grow the economy to an extent that it should begin to create jobs.
The economist said it was imperative that government transferred jobs from the public sector into the private sector. He said this needed a vibrant and growing private sector that will assimilate those jobs.”
He said the mere fact that the minister promised that going forward, government would not allow any accumulation of arrears and was in the process of expediting clearing of arrears.

“Timely payments to vendors going forward will boost operations of the private sector and thereby creating jobs.”
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.
Sibiya said it was his strong prognosis that if the arrears clearing strategy was implemented, the economy would be well back on it growth path. The economist was optimistic as he said the country was poised to see a trend after so many years.

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