WRONG TIMING BY GOVT

Sir,

The recent tabling of the national budget has shocked me especially regarding the introduction of taxes which I feel is going to make my fellow citizens poorer than ever.
Firstly, I want to state that I feel it is wrong timing by our government.  Currently, it is obvious to everyone that the country is not doing well in terms of finances and the economy is not good at all. To then introduce such high taxes at such a bad time is just not the right way to go.
Secondly, we are all aware of the many reasons why the economy is bad. One of them is corruption and the second one is that public funds have not been used wisely.

Decisions

The third one is that our country has not been taking the right decisions when it comes to taking advantage of some of the resources and opportunities that it has, which can lure in investors.
The main one of course is the mining sector. Government has not done enough to generate income from the mining sector but instead gave licences to investors who did not deserve.

Now, back to the issue at hand. My take is that government should have corrected those wrongs first before rushing to introduce high taxes. Regarding corruption, government needed to go back to the drawing board and determine why corruption continued to thrive despite the many strategies that were introduced to fight it.

Corruption

Instead of seeing corruption go down we have seen in increase to the highest level with each passing year and those involved in it get away with it just like that. How then do you expect the economy to improve when such is not dealt with?

Coming to our mining sector, I believe we have a commission or Board that is tasked with ensuring that licences are awarded to deserving investors and that this will benefit the country. Sadly, the country has benefitted little from this sector. Seeing that we are benefitting little, there is therefore a need to find out the reasons why and work on a strategy that will correct that.

Public funds

Lastly, we cannot beat around the bush and run away from the fact that in most instances public funds are wasted. Government needs to enforce serious measures to deal with wasteful expenditure so that all government officials are made to account for every cent.
We have people who are untouchable and have been wasting public funds for years but nothing has been done to them. Deal with those people first before you demand tax from the poor emaSwati.

Mahlindza
Mbabane

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: