YOUR BUSINESS IS OUR BUSINESS: Sidelined: Magufuli call for Budget funding
What you need to know:
One major feature of a Financial Year is the Government Budget and apurtenant ‘fiscals,’ including taxation, public revenues and public debt – lovingly referred to as the ‘National Budget.’
TANZANIA: The current Financial Year (FY-2016/17) ends on June 30, 2017 – with FY-2017/18 commencing the following day.
One major feature of a Financial Year is the Government Budget and apurtenant ‘fiscals,’ including taxation, public revenues and public debt – lovingly referred to as the ‘National Budget.’
A Budget is a statement of the financial position of a given Adminisration for a definite time-period, usually a year: a tabular register of days, weeks and months: 365 days for a regular year; 366 days for a leap year every four years.
Budgets are based on expenditure estimates for the proposed period – and also revenue estimates/proposals for financing the expenditures.
This calls for masterly coordination of resources and expenditures all the way from accessing/raising the requisite revenues to spending same in ‘executing’ the proposed expenditures!
For a Budget to be acknowledged ‘effective’ as intended – and, therefore, acclaimed ‘successful’ – the proposed expenditures must match the available resources in what’s known as a ‘Balanced Budget.’ In other words: the brains behind budgetary preparations would proverbially ‘cut their coat according to the (available) cloth’... Else – and it won’t be a ‘Balanced Budget!’
Has this been happening in Tanzania over the years?
If truth must be told – so help me, God – the last time Tanzanians basked in the glory of a ‘Surplus Budget’ was in the 1960s. That was before the country fell a-foul of its so-called ‘Development Partners,’ mostly in the Western World. This came on the back of the adoption on Feb. 5, 1967 by the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Administration (1960-85) of the Arusha Declaration & TANU Policy on Socialism & Self-reliance!
Since then, things’ve steadily regressed from bad to worse in the ‘Balanced Budget’ stakes. A glaring example of this is, indeed, the FY-2016/17 Natioal Budget, the first of the President John Pombe Magufuli Administration (Nov. 5, 2015—).
When officially tabling the FY-2017/18 Budget for debate in the ongoing National Assembly in Dodoma on June 8, Finance Minister Philip Mpango revealed that only 70.1 per cent (Tsh20,710.5bn) had been raised as budget resources by April 2017, against the projected Tsh29,539.6bn! [Mwananchi, et al: June 9, 2017].
Could the outstanding one-third be raised in the (remaining) two months of May and June 2017? Likewise, the Government planned to borrow Sh2,100.9bn from external sources for development projects. This hasn’t been possible ostensibly owing to problematic global financial markets!
In the event, the Govt. released only 38.5 per cent of the Tsh11,820.5bn projected to finance development projects in FY-2016/17!
And the Government Debt ballooned from Tsh7.8trn in Year-2008 to Tsh28trn as of April 2014; then to Tsh39.3trn in March 2016, and to Tsh42.89trn in March 2017 – bringing the total National Debt to a whopping Tsh50.8trn by last March [The Citizen: Sept. 20, 2014; Mwananchi: June 14, 2017].
Oh, I don’t know... But: will the FY-2017/18 Budget be different from – essentially: better than – the current one, soon to be tossed into the Dustbin of History on Deficit Budgets?
Obviously, rulers are imbued with the morbid temptation to habitually declare Budgets higher that previous ones in vainglorious efforts to depict a ‘growing’ Economy for hapless Citizenry! In reality, the ‘increased’ element caters for wildly-fluctuating inflation rates – hovering in the 5-6 per cent per cent region in Tanzania – and the depreciating exchange rate of the national currency (‘down’ from Tsh7.14 in 1962 to Tsh2,240 to the US dollar today!
Other budgetary ‘peccadilloes?’
Shifting the annual vehicle road licence fee – currently payable by less than a million vehicle owners [tanzania/motor-vehicles-per-1,000-people-wb-data.html>] to fuel will ‘hurt’ 99.999 per cent of the 54m-strong consumer-population through hiked transport charges, mechanised farming, industrial production, domestic fuel users (kerosene, etc)...
When launching the Electronic Revenue Collection System (eRCS) in Dar June 1, President Magufuli counselled against hiking taxes on beverages.
