HOW MUCH WILL IT COST TO ERADICATE POVERTY IN SD?

How much MONEY will it take to eradicate poverty in Swaziland? E21 billion or maybe E50 billion?

The numbers do not really matter if government keeps spending money on things that add no value to the economy. A very smart person (Albert Einstein) once said; “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”

Swaziland has in the past decade struggled to ignite and sustain high economic growth yet the country is at the cusp of Vision 2022, less than five years remain before the promised First World and a comfortable standard of living.

If anything, these last five years should have been about self-reflection and about directing every bit of government effort and every last cent of money collected by government into making sure that we achieve what we set out to achieve 20 years ago when the country first coined the National Development Strategy (NDS).

In case government suffers from a bit of amnesia, the NDS was meant to be a long term framework which identified action programmes for development in order to achieve Vision 2022, that is, “By the year 2022, the Kingdom of Swaziland will have attained a level of development akin to that of developed countries while ensuring that all citizens are able to sustainably pursue their goals, enjoy lives of value and dignity in a safe and secure environment with the objectives of Sustainable Development.”

The NDS gave birth to the Poverty Reduction Strategy and Action Plan (PRSAP) which tasked government to address poverty and all challenges related to it, such that by 2015 government should have cut poverty by more than 50 per cent and ultimately eradicate it by 2022.

It is now 2018 and we are still lamenting poverty levels higher than 50 per cent; to be precise, poverty is still at a high 63 per cent. What has government learned over the past 20 years, and did the fiscal crisis in 2010/11 really teach government anything?

We were hoping the Economic Recovery Strategy would see government use its resources much more sparingly and wisely to address issues of sluggish growth and contribute to the creation of jobs, at least 30 000 and an annual GDP growth rate of five per cent. In fact, the Fiscal Adjustment Roadmap put in place by government in 2010 to restore financial sustainability only achieved one thing: it increased taxes without any real reforms on public finance management and reforms in expenditure policy.

It gave us SRA which has been very good at taking money from every individual and business, and even introducing a value added tax (VAT) system in 2012. VAT is set to increase by one per cent as of April 2018, and yet again government will be collecting more money.

Government is in the business of collecting and collecting, but what do we get in return? Besides free primary education, antiretroviral medications to treat HIV, and for those of us who have cars maybe we get a nice network of freeways, but really, it is hard to pin-point how government invests in poverty reduction and employment creation so that every Swazi can live a life of value and dignity.

Ok, to be fair, government has constructed new Tinkhundla Centres, approved and implemented a total of 101 projects under the Regional Development Fund, rehabilitated rural water systems (refurbished 57 boreholes and constructed eight dip tanks), launched the high technology dairy farm at Sidvokodvo to produce over 25 million litres of milk a year, completed a feasibility study for Mpakeni and Ethemba Dam, and extended electricity coverage to 2 444 households, eight schools, one clinic, and one hammer mill, and completed the upgrading of the access road to the Phuzumoya Strategic Oil Reserve facility.

But are all of these milestones worth the E21 billion national budget? Couldn’t we have achieved a lot more? Instead, someone somewhere in the ministry of something within the lopsided public sector is being promoted, someone is being added to an already out of control public service wage bill milking the system dry. Hey, BMWs are much more important to government than all the job creation and food security challenges that we face in the country.

Seriously, government cannot keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. To achieve a standard of living that is akin to the First World, perhaps BMWs need to be at the bottom of government’s priority list and start prioritising things that will change the lives of the ordinary Swazi.

Of the E21 billion government spends each year, how much of that money is strictly dedicated to poverty reduction and growing the economy, particularly, growing a vibrant private sector?

Unless government starts formulating and implementing a rational expenditure structure focusing on critical social and capital spending, the economy will continue to slow down, jobs will disappear, more and more Swazis will find it difficult to afford the goods and services offered by the economy in Swaziland, and government through its irrational spending would be deliberately sabotaging our Vision 2022.

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