The Swaziland budget announced last week will do nothing to help relieve poverty
in the kingdom, economist Christopher Fakudze has said.
There will be no reach out to the poor and hungry.
‘Approximately 68 percent of people in the country live
below poverty thresholds,’ Fakudze said.
‘One expected a budget that ought to see food security or
agriculture as one of the top priorities,’ he said, but instead food security
came fifth in the priorities of Finance Minister Majozi Sithole. This was a
long way behind education and health.
Fakudze, who was quoted in an analysis of the budget,
published in the Swazi Observer newspaper, said the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development (NEPAD) resolved to have its member states contribute at least 10
percent of their total budgets to agriculture, but Swaziland was failing to
honour this commitment.
According to the report Poverty in a Decade of Slow Economic Growth: Swaziland in the
2000s published by Swazi Ministry of Economic Planning and Development
in 2011 there 641,000 people in poverty in Swaziland, living in households an
income of less than E461 (US$65) per month, per adult: or US$2 per day. There
are about 1.1 million people living in Swaziland.
A total of 115,712 people face food shortages in
2012/2013, according to the Swaziland Vulnerability Assessment Committee. The
number has increased by 88,511 from 2011.
Fakudze said in Swaziland measures to achieve food
security were ‘more urgent and more important than any other sectors.’
Fakudze said it was not clear in the budget speech how
government would seek to make direct interventions to transform Swazi
agriculture from subsistence farming to high productive commercialised farming
enterprises.
He added that the government had not said how it would
bring all unused land (and all factors of production) to full production,
through farmer support and development programmes.
He said, ‘The agriculture sector stays the same as
previous years and as such, will render the country food insecure in years to
come.’
He added, ‘A food insecure country will never realise the
Millennium Development Goal 1 which primarily aims at reducing poverty and
hunger by 2015.’
See also
KING’S VANITY COMES BEFORE THE POOR
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