Mthuli Ncube’s 2024 budget concessions in full

Maybe I can give a comment on the wealth tax on how it is done in other countries. They do a whole lifestyle audit of an individual – how many houses, how many cars, how much money you have in your bank account minus your liabilities which are mortgages and things like that. What we should do is for us to adopt the French model which is simpler. We target one major asset of an individual which is a house beyond their primary dwelling, that is what I propose. If you check the new French wealth tax, it looks like that. There are other models as I said for Spain, Switzerland, Columbia and Norway. Those are the leading ones. Take a look at them if you have time to see the variations. I think that ours and the French are the simplest because you focus on the one type of asset and concentrate all your systems around it.

Turning to youth empowerment from Hon M. Ziyambi, the issue there was the toll fees having to prejudice the youth. We have lowered the increases. We have responded.

For mines, one issue has come up Mr. Speaker Sir. The issue of the Cadastre system. Maybe this was not loud enough in the presentation. There are some brilliant ideas coming from your Chairs and backbenchers. They are proposing that we should set up a national Cadastral system which should not be under the Ministry of Mines, but perhaps under the Surveyor General’s Office and then make use of Zimsat, our space agency to then do the mapping. They did a great job in Caledonia in terms of mapping when we were trying to see which are the wet areas and which ones are no, I bought into this. We are not having much progress with this Cadastral system. We have been on it for the last seven years and there is no progress. What I am hearing now might be the best way to go. Let us consolidate these budgets and focus on building one national cadastral system.

It is worth mentioning that I got a very professional contribution from Hon Wilson Mhuri who is the Member of Parliament for Shurugwi South. He gave a very professional contribution on how this could be done. That Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Water, Fisheries and Rural Development, Hon. Maburutse also made a comment about the Cadastral system as well as the other comment that we must climate proof our agriculture. I think we are working hard on this one because El Nino is upon us. Investing in irrigation and supporting Pfumvudza/Intwasa programme as well as matching the type of seed to the agro ecological region, we have done that mapping and the Ministry of Agriculture has that map which I think is a good idea. All that is being done.

We have also been speaking to the Ministry of Agriculture to say could you find another 100 hectares to put maize under irrigation in this season. Can you imagine our average yield for maize is about 5 tonnes per hectare? We are talking about 500 000 tonnes of maize that we could harvest under irrigation. That is our typical reserve that we always target at GMB. Just by doing that, we would have solved the reserves issue and cushioned our citizens who may need food because of this El Nino issue. I fully agree with what Hon. Maburutse is saying and we are doing everything we can.

When we came to the open debate, Hon. Mushoriwa made the point that we should budget in US dollars. I want to say Zimbabwe dollar is our currency. So, we are budgeting in our currency.

Hon. Mukomberi’s comments were around the wealth tax. Again, that is a welcome development, but we needed to make adjustments. We have made some adjustments. The same applies to the sugar levy that he mentioned. The issue around being focused on taxing the SMEs, eventually they will contribute to the fiscus as well.

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