The country’s debts are now at E32 billion, Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg has revealed. This is more than double what the country collects as tax, which is E16.5 billion.
The minister disclosed the current debt during the ‘Finance In Focus’ session where he discussed tax collection and government revenue, outlining how the national budget was financed.
He further explained government expenditure and provided insights into the budget framework.
He said the problem with debt was not actually repaying the capital portion of it, but repaying the interest. Rijkenberg said taking debt was the first step, and this year government was paying about E2.7 billion on interest on loans that the country currently had.
The minister emphasised that even though they tried collecting E16.5 billion, the country’s expenditure for the year was about E32.3 billion.
He noted that this week’s topic of discussion was his announcement of tax collected by the Eswatini Revenue Services (ERS).
With ERS for instance, government paid the organisation to do government’s collections. Other than that, there was a long list of subvented entities that they paid money to, interest on loans repayments which he said was quite high.
“With tax going up to about E16.5 billion, questions arose if that will be enough to fund the budget. Why do we need to be loaned money if we have so much tax that is collected? We have to explain what we have and the source of the money.
“First of all, we do collect; in fact, we are planning to collect about E16.5 billion this year. Last year it was E14.5 billion so we have pushed the bar quite high for ERS to try to attain,” he said.
However, he said they felt that it should be attainable, keeping in mind that they had not hiked taxes, but were hoping to broaden tax payers including those outside the tax net.
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