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2024 Budget: Moving the Zimbabwean clock back to 1894 period

A $59.5 trillion 2024 budget is what Prof Mthuli Ncube has offered to Zimbabwe. The great question of the day is whether this is a viable budget or a retrogressive budget, more so when we consider the regional, continental and global best practices?

The budget gives 13% of total budget to the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, 10.5% to the Ministry of Health and Child care, 7% to the Ministry of Lands & Agriculture etc.

 This is against the UNESCO best practice of 22% allocation to education, Regional and Continental Dakar framework of over 20% of total budget allocation or 6% of GDP to Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, Abuja Declaration of 15% allocation to Health, and Maputo Declaration of 10% allocation to Agriculture. Figures do not lie, the budget falls far short of regional, continental and global best practices.

While a pensionable salary is a welcome development given the current poverty and penury of pensioners who are former gvt employees, 13% of total budget will not guarantee competitive basic salaries to 140 000 employees in the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education.

Above all, such a budget cannot accommodate the employment of a deficit of more than 50000 teachers in the line Ministry, guarantee the construction of additional 3000 schools needed in Zimbabwe, let alone electrification or solarisation of 75% of Primary and 65% of Secondary Schools that currently have no power in order to guarantee ICT in all schools in Zimbabwe.

The issue of equalisation funds, infrastructural development, learning materials and intrinsic motivation of teachers, let alone offering of quality public education will remain pipe dreams in Zimbabwe.

The hike of fees on premium roads, increase of passport and CVR fees, introduction of 1% Wealth Tax on residential properties with a minimum value of US$100k, and income tax will cumulatively lead to saddling of poor teachers with exorbitant rentals, transport costs etc as transport & housing owners will simply pass on the taxes to tenants and custormers.

 This is a resurrection of the 1894 period characterised by exorbitant taxes, parlous labour remuneration, elite brutality and confiscation of the general populace’s source of livelihood that cumulatively forced the Shona and Ndebele into the 1896-97 Rising.

The Second Republic promised to usher in a better Zimbabwe when it delivered a coup de grace against Robert Mugabe’s regime in 2017. But if Prof Mthuli Ncube’s 2024 budget is any yardstick to measure the Second Republic, it is clear that his prescription is a treatment of an ailment by killing the patient.

Prof Ncube is taking the teachers in particular, and civil servants in general, back to the old stone age and poverty, from which our ancestors had elevated us.

Rather than saddling the general populace with myriads of taxes, much focus must be placed on win-win investment ventures, tapping and harnessing our natural and human resources for sustainable development, rekitting our industries for greater productivity, local processing of natural resources, balance between export and import, investment in quality public education, etc.

There is no greater investment than that of investing in pupils and those who manage them, viz, teachers. The 2024 budget is nothing more than a tissue of misrepresentation, a traversity, and a monument of Zimbabwean injustice.

Dr Takavafira M. Zhou

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