By Nomusa Garikai| When you are in a hole, stop digging because you are not doing to dig yourself out of the hole by making the hole deeper! That is obvious, common sense, but clearly not to some people; but I never thought one will need to explain this to someone like Professor Mthuli Ncube, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, no less!
“Zimbabwe’s army and police are poised to get the biggest chunks of the 2020 national budget, which finance minister Mthuli Ncube has revised to far exceed the initial ceiling of ZWL$28 billion (about US$1.77 billion or R26.1billion),” reported TimesLive.
The Army and the Police are each going to get ZWL$25 billion and ZWL$32 billion.
This must be compared and contrasted with the budgetary allocation to health, agriculture and industry which are getting ZWL$ 18, 14 and 6 billion respectively!
The first thing to note is that the budget allocation to the Police alone exceeded the initial total ceiling set by the Minister and his staff. The total allocation to the five ministries named above alone is ZWL$ 85 billion or nearly three times the set ceiling. Of course, this is bound to fuel the country’s hyperinflation estimated at between 358% to 900%.
The second obvious flaw is why oh why is the country spending fortune on security and pittance on health, agriculture and industry?
“People complain about soldiers this and that, but let me tell you, if we do not have peace we will have huge problems,” Minister Ncube explained.
“It’s very important that we should make sure that the security cluster is well funded, that soldiers have a decent meal, three meals a day, as well as the police.”
Minister Ncube should know that ever since the country attained her independence in 1980 the country has spend disproportionately more and more resources on its bloated public sector, notably the security services. Yes this was done to placate the security personal but at the price of starving the country’s wealth generating sectors. When a nation spends more than the wealth it is generating that is the root cause of economic meltdown and price inflation.
By increasing the money supply three fold without doing anything to increase the wealth the nation generates the Minister has only stoked the hyperinflation flames!
After 39 years of kicking the can of voodoo economic policies down the road the country is running out of road. Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown has pushed unemployment to the nauseating heights of 90%, basic services such as health have all but completely collapsed, etc. The country desperately need sound economic policies to revive the comatose economy and not more of the failed voodoo economics!