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NEIL’S SERIOUS BUDGET

17/03/2021 13:40:00 Thabiso Dlamini

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It’s a shocker that the usual outrage on the minister of Finance’s national budget quickly died down this year.

This year’s budget is by far the most grown-up or serious budget that the minister has tabled so far, especially during these periods of economic instability and persistent fiscal challenges. A closer look at the budget with an objective eye, it shows that the minister has been working tirelessly in the background trying to fix the public purse. In fact, the focus of Eswatini’s 2021/22 national budget is to rethink public expenditure priorities and fix holes that have been bleeding this bucket dry, which the whole of government must try to commit to. If you haven’t been paying attention on the bleeding public purse, there are critical expenditure items that have in recent years, increasingly become the cause for sleepless nights for our minister.

These include the ever ballooning public wage bill, the external travel sprees by our politicians and civil servants, the ridiculously overpriced capital projects, and the Central Transportation Administration (CTA) trading account which has been abused to unfathomable levels of corruption. In addition to these public expenditure items, the Ministry of Finance has been trying to navigate the landmine that government has created out of the growing parastatals which require an arm and a leg through subventions and a public procurement system that is rotten to the core due to deep rooted corruption that has financed the lavish lifestyles of our bureaucrats and private sector individuals who are well connected to the government system.

What many people haven’t been paying attention to is that Neal Rijkenberg has been working quietly in the background trimming the fat, plugging the bleeding holes and reworking government’s accounts into a much more sustainable path. This is evident in the current budget speech as it provides plenty of examples of a serious and determined ministry in cracking the whip on the government gravy train that is letting the economy down. For example, the hiring of civil servants remains frozen even the forces now and again like to work up the minister’s nerves with their baseless requests for new recruits.

Suspended

The CTA no longer has a trading account to wreck up the Ministry of Public Works and Transport budget allocation. Travel remains suspended saving the economy millions of Emalangeni. Government has also worked hard to bring down the number of suppliers that it owes. Those that still haven’t gotten paid probably need to confirm their invoices and provide proof that the goods/services procured were indeed delivered. And the most important order from the Ministry of Finance is that, if you want to tender and do business with government, no money will be paid until goods/services are delivered and abiding to the agreed specifications. This will probably save government a lot of money because this is how the faux business tycoons make their money by dragging the delivery of public projects and by escalating prices so that government can keep shovelling money into the never ending pit.

Case in point is the ICC&FISH, which will never see the end of construction the way things are going currently. Government will have to keep on setting aside a handsome budget for this project in order to keep feeding the gluttonous contractors. Overall, this year’s budget is about fiscal consolidation, which means trimming the fat, and creating the fiscal space that can result in efficient spending without milking the taxpayer dry while also escalating public debt. This is very good on paper and through the changes that the minister is introducing into the system, the country could achieve more value out of the national budget.

Commitment

However, in reality the fiscal consolidation needs commitment from all our politicians and not just the Ministry of Finance. When politicians and public sector unions finally catch up to what is cooking at the Ministry of Finance, rest assured that they will push all the brakes on these plans that could save the economy. The stomach politics will quickly resurface to block any further progress and there will focus on adding more to the wage bill, cost-of-living-adjustments, etc.

What one can say to the Ministry of Finance is that there are more holes to plug in this bucket, and the Ministry of Education and Training. This ministry gets the lion’s share, but till today with all of its bloated administration still cannot figure out how to reopen schools. We also want to see more aggressive belt-tightening within government, especially when it comes to the wage bill and through consolidation the plan is to save E900 million over a space of three years. Finally, to prepare for the drop in SACU revenues next year, the minister could have stuck to a fully financed budget of E19.45 billion which is equal to the total revenue expected instead of allowing for a deficit of E4.6 billion to be able to cover the E24.04 billion budget tabled this year.