Finance and Economic Development Minister, Mthuli Ncube needs to relook the focus of his budget, an economic analyst has said.
Commenting on Thursday’s Midterm Budget Review Statement announced by Ncube, Gift Mugano, a Harare-based economic analyst said:
There is great need of a trajectory change if Zimbabwe is to move forward and Ncube has not been doing enough.
He bases his budget on revenue yet as a country we need to be producing goods for us to be sustainable hence the weight of the economy weighs heavily on the taxpayer.
… Mthuli was supposed to invest in the production sector and that could save us more than 2 billion dollars that we are losing through the importation of goods that we can produce locally.
We are losing 300 million to agricultural imports of the smallest of things like tomatoes and onions which we can produce locally in the country.
Zimbabwe is currently importing goods like baby diapers, sanitary ware, toothpicks, maize, the source of our staple food yet the country has the ability to produce these things and get revenue from exporting them in return.
The budget is not empowering the Ministry of Industry but instead rendering it useless.
Workers’ unions have also criticised Ncube for not consulting them before he came up with the budget review.
The Zimbabwe Secretary-General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Japhet Moyo, believes that the newly-reintroduced Zimbabwean dollar will be useless in three months, taking the country back to the 2007/08 scenario.