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Finance Minister Nangolo Mbumba presented his seventh national budget to Parliament on Thursday 6 March 2003. This budget is characterised by severe expenditure restraint as the Minister battles to meet his expenditure target of 30% of GDP and stabilise the stock of public debt. While Mr Mbumba should be congratulated for taking his fiscal targets seriously, there is a danger that important policy objectives such as fighting crime, delivering good primary and secondary education to the masses, improving access to health services and generally reducing inequality will not be achieved unless the budget process and the public sector is made vastly more efficient.
Amid much talk of treating the economy like a garden, Finance Minister Nangolo Mbumba presented his seventh main national budget to Parliament on Thursday 6 March. A constant feature of this government is that, however radical its rhetoric may often be, its actions are generally conservative, some would even say timid. The reason for this apparent paradox is not hard to find. On the one hand, SWAPO was born into a radical African nationalist tradition, fighting not only a moral and diplomatic but also an armed struggle against apartheid oppression. On the other hand, SWAPO has consistently displayed remarkable pragmatism, not least in its management of the economy since independence in 1990. While the party's heart may tell it to fight imperialists, reject capitalism and intervene in the economy, its head acknowledges that dangerous economic experiments elsewhere have turned potentially prosperous countries into economic wastelands. What we appear to be witnessing in this latest budget suggests that the conservative head is winning out over the radical heart to quite a large extent, perhaps too much.
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