The Sunday News
Gabriel Masvora
CONSULTATIONS for the 2016 national budget have started and input from such meetings is expected to form part of the income and expenditure that Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa will present before the end of the year.
Many organisations take this time to critique the performance of the previous budget and also outline what sort of money or even incentives they expect to be availed in the next budget in order to improve different sectors of the economy.
Business associations, like always, have been leading the chorus, outlining what they think has to be done to revitalise an industrial sector being battered by operational challenges chief among them lack of capital and crippling power shortages that are threatening to push some companies into extinction.
The public, each year is also given an opportunity to air their views on what they want to see from the national budget.
The views of the people are collected through countrywide public meetings led by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Finance and Economic Development.
The committee then comes up with a compressive report that will be forwarded to the Minister of Finance to pick certain points which will be considered when he drafts the budget.
Often, such meetings by the committee bring to the fore real challenges people and companies in specific areas face. They try to raise them so that the Minister of Finance can then allocate appropriate resources to address them.
The meetings, however, also bring out anger from the people. The most common one being unfulfilled promises that previous budgets have failed to address despite Government announcing that some money has been “set aside” for those specific projects.
The examples of unfulfilled pledges from previous budgets in Zimbabwe are many and it is also a global phenomenon that most Governments rarely meet every single pronouncement listed in their budgets.
However, there has been a growing trend in the country’s budgets over the past few years which must guide Minister Chinamasa this year to change the way he tries to allocate resources.
While it is common that most countries miss their budgets, after all budgets are estimates, what most people are worried about, from what is coming out of these public meetings, are the margins and frequencies at which Government has failed to meet these estimates.
The feeling among many people is that over the past few years, most of these estimates have been missed by a huge gap and have often misled people and institutions. In fact from the public sentiments, the Ministry of Finance has failed to even provide for half of what it has been allocating to various ministries and projects over the past few years.
Some institutions argue that they use the estimates announced by the Ministry of Finance to also craft their own budgets and it has become very challenging if the resources are not availed. What is more worrying is that generally people have taken a promise as a credit and once something is announced especially by Government there are certain expectations which people then look forward to.
If for example the Minister of Finance announces in the budget that he has set aside money for dualisation of Beitbridge-Harare Road, what gets into many people’s mind is to at least seeing some work taking place on the project. A promise of funding which is not fulfilled means a wait for whole year for a cheque from the Ministry of Finance and before anything can be done another year flies by.
This has become almost a circle and as the consultations gear forward organisations and ordinary people will continue to even demand more from fiscus especially at a time when almost every sector of the economy is not performing at optimal level.
This means every year the list of demands is growing and by the time Minister Chinamasa and his staff will try to come up with the budget, they would have to deal with a basketful of demands. It means every year the Minister of Finance is forced to deal with huge expectations and demand for money from almost every corner of the country.
As such the normal procedure will have to perform a balancing act and try to ensure that everyone is catered for. However, it is time Minister Chinamasa adopt some extra-ordinary measures because the reality is that just a balancing act on paper will not bring the intended results.
At the end the balancing act has seen institutions and organisations reportedly allocated amounts during the budgets announcements but rarely getting half if not quarter of that amount by the end of the year. By the end of the year, these small tranches which would have been thinly spread across all sectors would fail to achieve tangible intended results.
Some of the little money is absorbed in salaries and operational costs hence no progress on real projects that can change the economy. That is why the Ministry of Finance should come up with a realistic budget and not something which shows ambitious projects and allocations when it is clear that the funds will not be enough.
If the reality on the ground is that the country’s revenue is only $2 billion then there is no need to announce a budget which will show that expenditure will top $5 billion. There is no need to allocate huge and imaginary figures to projects and organisations when at the end of the day all what will be distributed is just a quarter of the amount.
Over the years, our margin of error has been too big resulting in most organisations ending up complaining that the Government is not fulfilling its promises.
Hence it is better to tell the nation that there is no money from the word go rather than promise them money which will not come.
Once some institutions know that they will not receive enough budgetary support or rather receive very little, then they can start exploring other avenues to push their projects like Private-Public Partnership or Private-Private Partnership. After all such partnerships have been key to development in many countries.
