Worrying Aspects about the 2023 National Budget- Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba

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Worrying Aspects about the 2023 National Budget

By Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba

● It’s a consumption budget.

● It will rely on extensive borrowing and budget-deficit financing as seen in the 2022 Budget where treasury bills and government bonds financed the budget and the local bond debt has since ballooned to $12 billion (K203billion).

● Domestic revenue mechanism extremely poor, leaving out the mines and the mining sector.

● Relying on gambling, betting, games and lottery for increased domestic revenue and literally encouraging gambling despite its known dangers. Gambling itself is a corrosive social vice and phenomenon where the population participating in gambling suffer reduced financial savings, bankruptcy, feelings of regret and loss, stress, anxiety and mental health.

● Turning national strategic investment of TAZARA into a carrier of finished products….

Various Policy Briefs and Parliamentary Reports have researched and discussed these strategies extensively and have shown the best model is investment in turning INDENI into a full Refinery and rehabilitation of TAZAMA. A casual search of these documents show that they have rejected proposals to convert TAZAMA into a finished products carrier.

This is because the Pipeline carrying petrol or diesel can’t be policed as it is 1,700km from Kigamboni, Dar-es-Salaam to the Refinery in Ndola. This will turn the liquid gold(finished fuel products) into a corridor of large-scale theft, vandalism.l and.might even bear bandits and insurrection benefiting from vandalizing the product as seen in Nigeria.

● Abandoning completely, a strategic product- Fuel, to the private sector, which appears to be the sole motivation to abandon both TAZAMA and INDENI. These are national strategic assets especially that Zambia is a land-locked state, and the assets were built at great cost.

● Turning INDENI Refinery into a blender!

● failure to apolgise for poor implementation of the 2022 National Budget.

For example of the K25.7m Constituency Development Fund, only K5.6million was released. And of this ,only 4% has been utilized!

Napita

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