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MPS VOTE POVERTY INTO POWER

25/03/2019 08:35:00 Vusi Sibisi

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People's elected representatives in the House of Assembly, Members of Parliament (MPs), effectively voted to entrench the tyranny of poverty, unemployment, disease, social and economic decay, crime as well as corruption while by the same stroke enthroning the haves as the exclusive inheritors of the national wealth when they passed, without any amendment whatsoever, the Appropriation Bill of 2019/2020, the budget in simpler terms.

Now the electorate has a window into the kind of baggage - to which they parceled and sold their votes - they will have to contend with for the next five years. Indeed the prognosis is a very gloomy one for the future of the kingdom whose potential is being sacrificed by an apparent lack of human capacity and a mindset starved of scholarship, ideas and innovation, as amply mirrored by the pathetic display of MPs, occasioned by a retrogressive and suicidal political system.

Not that there were no holes in the budget, they were there aplenty, such as pouring hundreds of millions of the taxpayers’ money into the failed Royal Swazi National Airways – now reduced to a travel agent - and a vain bid to legitimise the financial drain that is the King Mswati III International Airport; unchecked expenditure on the military in the face of a remote possibility of the kingdom ever going to war with anyone except as a tool of oppression to silence internal political dissent; continuing typical wastages on ill-conceived projects such as the strategic oil reserve when the country is, after a long 50 years of independence, still importing from South Africa the bulk of its electricity requirements; the least said about the massive investments on the international convention centre and five-star hotel in the face of a constricting economy and deepening poverty and disease the better.

But our so-called honourable ones, the MPs, save for expending too much time attracting attention to their inflated egos, passed the budget plus all its inherent wastages as outlined above and more. There is no chance that this budget can address the multiple challenges of a dysfunctional healthcare system, a perennially constricting economy, ever increasing unemployment, deepening poverty, rocketing criminal activity and structural as well as institutional corruption. As I see it, with South Africa convulsing from the phenomenon of state capture that has compromised its energy generation capacity leading to phased power outages, the primary focus of our MPs should have been on efforts to break the dependency syndrome and ensuring that we produce enough power for our needs and even for export.

The failure to prioritise electricity power generation, which is the primary vehicle for economic and human development, speaks volumes about the mindsets of the governing minority who have arrogated to themselves the right to think and speak for the people in perpetuity.
Instead, MPs voted for government to further pick-pocket an already overburdened taxpayer with the three percentage points increase on pay-as-you-earn tax as well as imposing taxes on basic consumables, such as electricity, while slashing corporate tax. That this approach worked for President Donald Trump in the United States and increased domestic investments whose domino effect was the creation of more jobs does not mean it will also work in Eswatini. For starters, America is a vast country with a huge domestic market that, on its own, makes it competitive even before factoring the global economy.

The same cannot be said of Eswatini whose market size militates against replicating the American dynamics on the domestic front. As such, reducing corporate tax is no silver bullet to the ailing economy, job creation and poverty alleviation. Neither will this be a magnet to attract foreign direct investments (FDIs) to these shores. To attract FDIs requires a lot more than that, including political reforms that unfortunately are a no-go area as they are the nemesis of the ruling elite. MPs also failed to coerce government to at least suspend money-draining national celebrations until such time that the economy is in good shape or government’s cash-flow challenges have improved. Why, the elected ones would rather be bogged down by their self-importance and demand seats on the high table just to be conspicuous during these wasteful events.

On a positive note, however, was the assurance of Prime Minister Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini that government would not be filling the 550 existing posts in the police service. This was reassuring indeed especially in the wake of idiotic calls from some sycophantic MPs for these positions to be filled even when government had issued a moratorium on hiring owing to the fiscus crisis. That said, there appears to be some contradictions in government’s approach to the challenges facing the country. For in one breath the PM announced last year that utilities would not be increasing their tariffs yet the budget carries a 15 per cent VAT on electricity, which is tantamount to an increase without even engaging stakeholders as has become the norm when an increase is envisaged.

In the end, there can be no mistaking the intention of the budget, continued plunder by the haves while the have-nots will get worse off. And this seems to be in sync with Frederic Bastiat when he wrote: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Regrettably, that realm Bastiat was referring to is upon us in this, the Kingdom of Eswatini as personified by the budget.