REASONS FOR LOW BUDGET ALLOCATION FOR AGRICULTURE

There will not be a significant increase during budget allocations for the Ministry of Agriculture and they shall always complain about it.

The reason is simple; they don’t do what we call demand creation. If you do not hire more people, why increase your injection? If you don’t come up with innovative and productive projects, why give you more money? Money is given not to the dormant but to the dominant. I loved agriculture since day one and I hope one day we, the rightful generation, will get a chance to occupy our rightful seats and move our Agriculture Ministry in the right direction so that when 2022 comes, we may have pride in showing what we contributed. Recently I saw posts advertised by the Ministry of Agriculture and I was very excited mainly because I am an unemployed Agricultural Economist. Even though none of these posts wanted my BSc in Agricultural Economics, I dragged myself to Mbabane to submit my application at the Civil Service Commission (CSC).

As I filled the blue form outside the CSC offices, I got reminded of a similar case when I filled a similar form years ago from the same Ministry of Agriculture. I am a rural smart guy who excels anywhere I am placed. It is very disheartening to see our parent ministry being served by people from other faculties for jobs well deserved by the Faculty of Agriculture graduates. Where should we go as agriculture graduates? We want to reach First World status as a country and one fundamental characteristic of a First World State is a low unemployment rate and even distribution of income. I am an economist, I know this. The Ministry of Agriculture is doing nothing to fight unemployment. How can you hire once in four years? They will say there are no posts. The Ministry of Education hires teachers every year, the Ministry of Health hires nurses every year.

Where do they get the posts? Worth noting also is that other ministries do not even use CSC to hire their staff. Why are we, the agriculture graduates, being frustrated? We need the jobs too. We want to contribute to the economy; we want to contribute towards food security and His Majesty’s 2022 dream. First World countries have what we call high GDP, high GNP and high per capita income. Who will help us when economists like me are idle, unemployed five years after graduation? We want to repay the government scholarship loans. May our ministry be more active and more productive; increased budget allocations will be inevitable.

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