Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe budget 2001 'not easy to manage'

afrol.com, 17 November - Zimbabwe's Finance minister, Simba Makoni, yesterday presented his Government's budget for 2001, trying to way to handle the economic crisis. Next year's budget "was never going to be a very easy document to prepare and even less easy to manage in the year ahead," opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai criticizes.

According to an analysis by the press agency IPS, the Zimbabwean budget "tries to appease an increasingly restless population angered by the country's sharp economic erosion." Not with success, if one is to take the word of the opposition.

- Twenty years of excessive appropriation of national resources by ZANU-PF governments has now saddled the country with such high levels of debt that, contrary to the Minister’s ambitious claims today, the MDC expects interest payments on the national debt will absorb the total projected revenues of government next year, Tsvangirai today stated. 

Indeed the situation is critical. Overall, this year, the economy is projected to decline by 4.2 percent, according to information from IPS. Apart from agriculture, mining is expected to fall by minus 14 percent, transport and communications by minus 13 percent and construction by minus 4.5 percent.

The opposition explains this by the "unwillingness of the present government to take the measures needed to start putting the economy back on its feet is undermining domestic and international confidence and preventing any kind of economic recovery." 

Also economists expect that next year's situation only will get worse. Apart from the opposition's point of bad governing, current political events see to a deepening of the crisis. Agricultural production will drop even more nest year, due to the Government praised farm occupations. Oppression of the opposition, which is not likely to decline under the foreseen mass action, has scared of donors and investors. Zimbabwe is close to isolated.

Even if the National Bank has been mass-producing Zimbabwe dollars, soon there is nothing left to fill up the warehouses and local shops. There are no more foreign exchanges, fuel has almost run out and the foreign aid has been curbed. Bread prices have increased threefold only this year, enough to sparkle riots even without opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's appeal for "mass action" against the Government.

It has been clear therefore, from the start that the Minister of Finance had little room for maneuver in designing the national budget for 2001.

- Zimbabwe’s economic crisis is now so great that we cannot expect any kind of recovery until we have regained the confidence of the international community, says Tsvangirai. "To do this we would have to curb all non essential expenditure, restore the rule of law and take the land reform exercise back to the basis previously agreed with the international community and local stakeholders in 1998." 

There is no sign that government is willing to take the steps necessary to achieve this situation. "Therefore the Minister of Finance has no choice but to project his budget for the year 2001 without the benefit of any kind of foreign assistance," Tsvangirai concludes.

Presenting his budget, Makoni appealed to all Zimbabweans for the budget's success. "We wish citizens to believe in Government, that government means what it says, Government will do what is says, and government will share the hardships the people are enduring," Minister Makoni said, still rather optimistic. 

Sources: MDC, IPS and afrol archives

 

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