TIME TO SIMPLIFY AND GOVERN

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Cometh the hour, cometh the man in Prime Minister Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini and his team, as they launch the much anticipated Eswatini Strategic Roadmap 2019 -2023 in Ezulwini today.

After six months of planning, with a nation anxious to see the blueprint, we hope to finally get a clearer picture of what form, shape or size the transformation propeller will take to drive this country out of the economic quagmire in which it is sinking.
We challenge the PM to do the right thing and stick to what governments of highly successful nations do best – govern. It is time to leave business to the businesspeople.

For decades government has usurped the economy from the private sector to become the goose that lays the golden egg; breeding ‘tenderpreneurs’ instead of businesses that could develop a resilient foundation for our economy.

Dipping into the SACU receipts basket also rendered government lazy to diversify our income. Instead, it has only succeeded in making it harder to do business in Eswatini with countless regulations and red tape that have kept investors away. The new strategy must untangle all this to make it simple to do business here. 

Previous governments misinterpreted job creation to mean bulging the civil service, to top government expenditure gobble up 60 per cent of the budget.
 It became an estate agent of a mass civil servant housing project and only has a dilapidated property portfolio to show for it. The less said about fleet management, the better; CTA is the taxpayer’s biggest nightmare.

Misguided priorities and luxury spending count among the biggest contributors to our economic downfall.
We expect the new plan to correct this mismanagement by placing first things first.

And when all is said and done, corruption will always be lurking in the vicinity to rob us of all the gains that come with grand plans. It becomes imperative that any strategy launched today has a very effective technique of succeeding where others have failed. Anything less would render the grand plan an exercise in futility. 

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