Last Friday I attended a post-budget (someone called it a post-mortem) meeting hosted by AMG Global at the Chapman golf club in Harare. Various stakeholders – largely private businessmen, finance directors and company MDs converged to discuss the economic implications of the budget presented by the Finance Minister, dubbed the ‘People’s Budget‘. Don’t worry about what I was doing there . . but just know I am no expert in Finance jargon and issues. Somehow, most of the budget implications escape me when they are presented first time around, till the Eric Blochs start interpreting the jargon later.

During breakfast a colleague couldn’t help but exclaim that he’d never come across a government that is so against the development of its people until he came to Zimbabwe – and this budget, with the unexplained financing of the $1,76 quadrillion deficit – was just a “way of the tomcats f-wording with us!” Frankly, it was my first time to hear the word quadrillion actually used in a sentence, let alone a national budget. A nun representing a local FBO had earlier stood up to comment on some of the government’s policies especially on import tax. That one cannot get donations of brand new things from abroad anymore, especially vehicles, or even shoes because the tax burden is so heavy you could almost ask the donor to first thoroughly use whatever they want to donate, so that it has a worn appearance when it passes through customs.

Dr Honest Zhou (UZ) who did the post-budget analysis stressed that the budget would be overtaken by inflation even before roll out and would really be lucky to survive the first six months. He also bemoaned the fact that the budget was ‘unfriendly’ as it based its hopes on the ‘rationalized’ anticipation of an unprecedented growth in agriculture and a bumper harvest.

One banker raised concerns that the budget deficit would probably be financed through just printing more money because there is no “shocking limit to what these guys are capable of doing.” With the PDL running at $23 million, the banker moaned the fact that the Finance Ministry are seemingly oblivious of other major drivers of inflation apart from declining industrial output and depreciating local currency. He suggested that “increased output calls for increased capacity utilization, and the country could do with a bit of fiscal discipline and cutting down on unnecessary government expenditure”. Speaking of which, does the president really need that long motorcade?

I was surprised to note that government also intends to place serious tax impositions on informal traders. But how do you identify who is an informal trader (and who isn’t) and tax them? I can see life slowly becoming more brutish for cross-border traders who will be easily identified in the tax net. Find a way of taxing the guys at Road Port and I will call you a genius, better yet, give you a standing ovation. Some people just wont stop ‘f- wording’ with us for sure.

This entry was posted on December 3rd, 2007 at 12:57 pm by Natasha Msonza and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.