MDC says 2014 budget is a wish list

The Movement for Democratic Change has described Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa’s 2014 budget presented yesterday as a wish list, full of promises with no solutions in place.

In a statement today the party said the budget will result in the already suffering ordinary person being taxed more.

It said that any caring government should strive to create an enabling, inclusive, environmentally sustainable economy that delivers food security, happiness, social services, eliminates poverty and creates wealth.

Full statement:

Friday, 20 December 2013

2014 national budget only a wish list

The 2014 National Budget that was presented on Thursday by Patrick Chinamasa will have a serious negative impact on the ordinary person as it does not have measures in place to fund critical sectors that will improve the economy and the people’s livelihoods.

The MDC notes with serious concern that the 2014 US$4, 1 billion budget is a wish list full of assumptions that will not result in meaningful revenue being collected by the government and it does not have measures in place to attract Foreign Direct Investment.

The 2014 national budget is not pro-poor and the ordinary person will be the most affected by increases on import duty that have been placed on various basic consumables such as milk and milk products.

Worse still, Chinamasa does not tackle the issue of increasing and supporting the local production in order to boost employment and providing affordable prices.

Of great concern is the fact that the budget celebrates the death of the formal economy when in reality the informal and formal economies are intertwined. The disappearance of the formal economy goes with the disappearance of the informal economy.

It is imperative that Chinamasa’s budget should have included measures on how best to grow both the informal and formal sectors. It is also not proper for Chinamasa to put in place measures that cushion only small scale miners at the expense of other informal sectors.

The measures that have been put in place on diamonds are not strong enough to ensure that remittances from the mineral find their way into government coffers. On indigenisation, the Zanu PF government wants to put in place a patronage system by insisting that for investment purposes, Zimbabweans will use the natural resource as their equity.

This will result in the partisan distribution of the country’s resources to people who are only aligned to Zanu PF as is happening in the government funded grain loan scheme and no foreign investors will come in to invest in these capital projects.

Chinamasa fails to tell the nation how he will bring back confidence in the banking sector, which has seen a crunching liquidity crisis with customers failing to access their hard earned cash. What is required is for Chinamasa not to undermine the banking system but to put in place measures to address the problem.

Chinamasa’s budget statement is full of promises with no solutions in place and will result in the already suffering ordinary person being taxed more.

The MDC believes that any caring government should strive to create an enabling, inclusive, environmentally sustainable economy that delivers food security, happiness, social services, eliminates poverty and creates wealth.

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