Times Of Swaziland: BUDGET SETTING PEOPLE UP AGAINST STATE

BUDGET SETTING PEOPLE UP AGAINST STATE
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By Vusi Sibisi on 11/03/2019 07:58:00


THERE was no intention to make the budget the subject matter of today’s column
yet again but certain developments, including some odd and puerile
pronouncements and, of course, as well as the unsaid has made it unavoidable to
move on to other issues such as the draft legal and regulation framework on
farming and processing of marijuana for medicinal and allied purposes.
If I didn’t know any better and lacked intimate understanding and knowledge of
not only Eswatini polity but as well as the social and economic order, I would
have come to the conclusion that the Cabinet, through the proposed budget, was
consciously setting up the people against the State by making them worse off.
Yes, that is the net effect of the extra burden, in respect of tax and other
increases that will further escalate the already extremely high cost of living,
with which government wants to further encumber the people, a majority of whom
are already under strain of tyranny of poverty. Just for how long the leadership
expects the people to be tolerant and to bottle this anger and frustration can
only be referenced to some historical epochs whose aftermaths included the total
destruction of political edifices that were hitherto believed to be
indestructible and reengineering of whole societies.
A close scrutiny of the proposed budget shows that it is not a radical departure
from previous successive budgets where people were and still are not at the core
but a by the way side issue. That is the budget should have been nuanced towards
addressing endemic poverty by putting people ahead of anything else instead of
setting out to further widen the schism between the privileged minority of the
haves and the majority of have nots. Of course this deliberately skewed budget
further cements the already established fact that except for the change of faces
in Cabinet after each cyclical elections, nothing else changes in the mandate of
the government under the obtaining Tinkhundla political system. Additionally,
that Cabinet is devoid of any decision making authority but merely exists to
project a veneer of a modern State when in all earnest this country is
manifestly more of a 16th century fiefdom.
The small deviation in the budget being the reduction of corporate tax that, as
can be expected, must have been influenced by those faces in Cabinet who come
from the private sector, which, among others, include Prime Minister Ambrose
Mandvulo Dlamini, Finance Minister Neal Rijkenberg and Minister of Commerce
Industry and Trade Manqoba Khumalo.
But the reduction of corporate tax is not the silver bullet to the
socio-economic woes facing this country but a particle in a whole body of what
needs and ought to be done. It certainly will not, on its own, expand an economy
that has been constricting for years now. But even Cabinet is constrained in
what it, as a collective and as well as individual ministers, can and cannot do
courtesy of the restraining political status quo in which real power is vested
and exercised by a minority elsewhere. And looking at the composition of and
talent available in the Cabinet, I am almost sure that given a free hand, they
would do a much better job than expending much of their time and energies
skirting around real and crucial issues for fear of burning their fingers.
Yet it would be prudent to those charged with the stewardship of this country to
be warned that today’s emaSwati are well aware of what is happening around
them, including the excesses and abuse of power, but what they lack is the
political space to ventilate and their frustrations with the system and how they
are rather be governed. I am sure members of the Cabinet are pretty much aware
of this fact, since some of them are from the less privileged class of the have
nots, which is why this country is today facing an economic precipice.
Not surprisingly, Members of Parliament (MPs) have been scathing in their
reaction to the proposed budget, even if some have been somewhat contradictory.
Yet still they are more inclined to pass it with very little changes if any –
that is the nature of Swati polity. We already know, for instance, that the
biggest slice of the budget goes towards recurrent expenditure on salaries for
civil servants. Mind you, servant is not a particularly likeable term when
referencing a human being providing certain skills and services in exchange for
financial benefit, a term that is negatively nuanced in an undemocratic
class-structured environment such as that obtaining in this the Kingdom of
Eswatini.
As I see it, while it is true that in a majority of countries, developing
countries to be specific, governments are the employers of choice and therefore
account for the largest workforce, this is not always justifiable.
This particularly applies in Eswatini, where it has been repeatedly acknowledged
from multiple quarters that there is a lot of deadwood - these would also
encompass ghost employees - that are a drain to government. And in a set-up
rooted on political patronage, positions are created willy-nilly to accommodate
relatives, praise singers, bootlickers, sycophants, the list is endless – even
if they do not qualify to be anything - hence the public workforce has
ballooned, disproportionately to requirements, to unsustainable levels.
By the time the term of office of this government, no Cabinet comes to a close
recurrent expenditure would in all likelihood have expanded considerably. Yes,
more uneconomical white elephant vanity projects would have been completed and
joined the already existing ones whose maintenances are entirely dependent on
the taxpayer that would have to be budgeted for.
In real terms this country will be poorer for these extravagant projects that
are and were undertaken against all advices simply because decision making is
not tested against rationality, reality, viability and sustainability but is
largely infantile and ostentatious.