By Pearson Mbendera.
Harare, Zimbabwe. (News Of The South) -During one parliamentary session, Nelson Chamisa, who had just been appointed the vice president of the MDC-T suggested that Ministers and MPs should use smaller, cheaper and more fuel efficient cars for government work and the ministers laughed at him.
He was trying to borrow from a move that had been introduced by Tanzanian president John Magufuli, who when he took office, introduced some serious austerity measures that saw him merging some ministries ensuring that his cabinet had 11 ministers fewer than the previous cabinet.
And Nelson Chamisa was not the only one to come up with the idea of some austerity measures. Even the minister of Finance Patrick Chinamasa opted to introduce a similar measure, cutting on salaries and benefits. After he had presented it to the parliament, he plan was dismissed, with a memo published by the minister of information, overruling what the man tasked to handle the government’s purse had seen as a somewhat possible solution to the ongoing problem of excessive public spending in a country that is doing less in production. They said the cabinet had already voted against his austerity budget prior to him presenting it before the parliament.
Because these moves were unpopular and dismissed easily, the question is, what would happen if the country reduces spending?
The reality is, with our inability to attract funding, unless some cuts are made, our budget deficit will grow bigger and bigger.
Thomas Sankara tried it, and it resulted in Burkina Faso developing immensely. He cut government spending, got rid od fancy government vehicles and started using the cheapest cars.
Under his leadership, which unfortunately lasted for only 4 years, Burkina Faso started producing enough to feed itself, their education and health sector improved, improving the literacy rates and cutting on mortality rates respectively. His methods were a little dire but well needed at the time.
Development requires making some hard choices, and cutting back on some unnecessary expenses. But that’s hard to do when the status of government officials is more important than the economy. So the nation would rather starve for their right to a higher status to be maintained.
All the salaries that goes to the government officials, the benefits, allowances, take a huge chunk of the taxpayers money.
We have a big cabinet, with many ministries that could be merged together and have their staff reduced thereby reducing their salaries expenditure.
Up to now, many years after the senate was introduced, I’m still not sure what their relevance in the politics of Zimbabwe are. We just pay people money for nothing, yet we cry over
As if that wasn’t enough, we had to split the attorney general’s office into two, creating the position of the prosecutor general, just so we can increase our expenditure on the staff and the expenses that will be borne out of such a move. Maybe we could have found relevance for them in the future, but the time is not now, not when the economy is on its knees. Instead of merging some offices, we had to split some.
I’m not saying that the money will end all of our problems, but it will mark a good start. The budget is heavily laden with expenditure on salaries, benefits of everyone on the government’s payroll. With a lot of ghost workers, our problems only remain beyond our ability to solve them.
Our roads need repairing, hospitals need resources, education is crying for funding, the industry is performing poorly, the civil servants don’t get paid in time, and all these problems require money which we don’t have.
But we hold a lot of indabas just so we can try to lure foreign investors into investing into a our economy, when we can divert some funds from none productive use into more productive use.
We could deal with the deficit, little by little if we can just cut on some spending. Development isn’t an instant process, its a gradual one. We cannot wake up one morning and find everything better, we have to start somewhere.
Paving a road or two, fund a hospital, inject money into a few companies. But if we would rather give the money to a few individuals, we doom the nation in a bid to safeguard the livelihoods of the privileged few. If we cut on spending, we surely will have a lot of unhappy government officials, but the country will be better off.
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