ACTING PM RESPONDS; WHY E300M TAIWAN DEAL NOT IN BUDGET

MBABANE – Government has reacted that not all development assistance is reported in the national budget, but only the assistance that is provided for direct implementation by government which excludes grants-in-kind.

Government was responding to an article published in the Times SUNDAY on April 18, under the headline ‘government hides E300 million a year deal’. The publication reported that Taiwan was supplementing the country’s budget with a five-year grant of E300 million per annum. In a statement released by Acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku yesterday, he noted that not all development assistance was reported in the national budget, but only the assistance that was provided for direct implementation by the government which excludes grants-in-kind.

Relationship

“The Kingdom of Eswatini and the Republic of China (Taiwan) have a long-standing bilateral cooperation relationship dating back to 1968. The two countries’ governments have over the years signed periodic agreements to guide their cooperation in agreed areas of mutual interest,” Masuku said. According to the acting PM, currently, there was in place a five-year ‘Protocol on Cooperation Agreement’, that was signed on December 12, 2017. He said it became effective on January 1, 2018, and was coming to an end on December 31, 2022. The acting PM articulated that government’s actions on issues of development cooperation were guided by the Development Cooperation Policy (DCP) of 2019, the PFM Act of 2017 and the agreements signed with the respective development partners.

“These documents provide the framework for mobilising higher volumes of external resources, and for increasing the effectiveness of their use in order to drastically improve developmental outcomes,” Masuku said. He reiterated that the framework committed government to establish the requisite institutional architecture and defined the responsibilities of each stakeholder involved in development cooperation. Masuku specified State and non-State actors, as well as the development partners. He pointed out that the framework required development assistance to be aligned to national priorities, and to be channeled through the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development to improve accountability, transparency, decision-making monitoring and evaluation. The acting PM emphasised that the bilateral cooperation the kingdom had with Taiwan was above board and conformed to the Constitution and the country’s laws, specifically Section 53 (1) and (2) of the Public Finance Management Act of 2017.

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