FINANCE minister Patrick Chinamasa yesterday said government would soon consider rationalising and cutting foreign travel costs, and maintain a civil service jobs and wage freeze, as part of measures to reduce public expenditure.
By VENERANDA LANGA
Chinamasa made the remarks as he presented his Mid-Year Fiscal Review Statement which curiously was silent on current cash shortages and high-level public corruption recently highlighted by Auditor-General Mildred Chiri in her 2016 report.
“Even at this level, the wage bill remains unsustainable as it still deprives other essential areas such as capital development programmes and social services in health and education, and, therefore, the government will continue to implement the recommendations of the civil service skills audit, maintain the freeze on salary reviews and filling of vacancies, and will undertake rationalisation of benefits and foreign travel,” he said.
Despite the continuous economic challenges being faced by the country, Chinamasa said he was optimistic that the economy was on the rebound, projecting a gross domestic product growth rate of 3,7% this year against the growth of 0,7% achieved last year.
He attributed the projected growth to the bumper harvest.
Chinamasa said the public service wage bill continued to be a huge drain in the fiscus.
“For example, the education budget, including allocations towards ensuring availability of the education service providers, that is 148 449 teaching staff in our primary and secondary schools as well as tertiary institutions, absorbed $1,11 billion during 2016, this notwithstanding that both primary and secondary schools across the provinces continue to experience high teacher-pupil ratios,” he said.
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He said 37 332 workers at public health institutions gobbled $295 million during 2016.
In 2016, total employment costs were close to the budget at $3,2 billion out of the $4,9 billion budget in 2016.
Government last year introduced a 5% levy on airtime to fund the health sector, and Chinamasa said this had yielded positive results, contributing an additional $4,8 million per month.
Despite massive corruption exposed by Chiri in her audit reports of ministries and State enterprises, Chinamasa said he bailed out struggling SEPs to the tune of $134 million. This contributed to an expenditure overrun of $902 million in 2016.
Chinamasa said government spent $2,7 million on 23 council and five parliamentary by-elections.
He added that the newly-formed Zimbabwe Diamond Mining Company was also capitalised to the tune of $80 million with diamond output during the first half of this year pegged at 1,1 million carats against 690 000 carats realised during the same period last year.
The Finance minister said government interventions towards protecting locally-produced products contributed towards the revival of the manufacturing sector after Statutory Instrument 164 of 2016 was introduced as a domestic financial system export incentive.
Chinamasa also hailed the command agriculture programme, saying it yielded positive results, with this year’s strong recovery of agriculture estimated at a commendable 21,6% growth.
Meanwhile, opposition legislators yesterday criticised Chinamasa’s budget review, describing it as “empty”, because it did not explain how he was going to curb extravagant spending by government and address the cash crisis bedevilling the country.
MDC-T shadow minister of finance Tapiwa Mashakada said he had expected Chinamasa in his statement to dwell a little more on cash shortages, but surprisingly he ignored the issue.
“If you go to the banks, people are still queuing and have no access to their cash and I had expected the minister in his budget review and economic outlook statement to go deeper to unveil measures to solve the cash shortages,” Mashakada said.
He said it was also worrying that Chinamasa ignored the issue of corruption.
Norton MP Temba Mliswa (Independent) slammed Chinamasa for failing to announce measures to curb overspending by the Executive, as well as the government policy discord on command agriculture.
He berated Chinamasa for funding loss-making government institutions.
“Go and tell the President that we cannot continue to put money into the loss-making Air Zimbabwe. Parliament made that recommendation, but for some reason you continue to disregard Parliament’s recommendations,” he said.
