Mafutseni Member of Parliament Sabelo Mtetwa says money is not circulating because people are not paid decent salaries.
He asked how money would circulate if people were not earning decent salaries. He said one’s salary gets finished in a few hours. This was shared by the MP during the ministry of economic planning and development’s first quarter performance debate on Thursday.
Mtetwa said the Eswatini Revenue Services could not collect anything, but instead would end up taking the little that was being paid to the people.
“The ministry should look at all of these things and monitor the direction that we are taking. By the look of things, we might be just walking without direction,” he said.
He said the ministry should plan and advise whether the things that they were doing would still be good for the country in the next five years. He said there was the issue of the ICC/FISH that was still not complete.
He said they were expecting the facility to be completed because they would be told to wait for more years.
Mtetwa said the ministry should do a proper planning for the benefit of Emaswati because they wanted to see locals happy.
“The taxpayers’ money is being wasted here,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kubuta MP Masiphula Mamba asked what the ministry’s stand was on issues of loans.
He asked if the ministry was happy with the loans that the country had taken with international institutions.
He said this was because the country was getting way deep into debt. He said Eswatini compared itself to other countries, while it was not on the same standard as those. “We should also compare whether we can pay back the loans the same way that these countries do. You will recall that many projects were not completed on time.
I am worried now that we are getting into more debt, the country might not have enough funds to complete the projects,” he said. Mamba added that E1.2 billion was released, but E301million was spent on capital projects. He asked what was delaying the release of the funds so that contractors could be paid and projects completed.
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