BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – Loans and public private partnerships (PPP) are some of the tools that will be used by to fund the 2023 to 2028 Government Policy Statement.
Prime Minister Russell Mmiso Dlamini said such tools would help Government get the much-needed cash to implement the statement. He said this yesterday (Thursday, October 17, 2024) when stating how such an ambitious statement was going to be funded.
He was responding to Members of Parliament (MPs). Most of the legislators doubted that the statement would be implemented. They felt it was too ambitious yet Government could not do anything to improve service delivery, which was at 0.35 percent. One of the questions they asked was how the policy statement was going to be funded, as the country had no money.
They even made examples of sectors such as health and education, stating that they were in shambles. The legislators reminded the premier that there were no drugs in hospitals and tertiary institutions were closed due to non-availability of allowances for students.
Responding to the MPs, Dlamini said the statement aimed at addressing all of the problems the country was facing. Concerning the funding of the policy statement, the premier said it was seen how the PPP could be effective in implementing infrastructure development projects.
An example of a project that used the PPP funding model is the construction of Nhlangano-Sicunusa Highway, which was constructed by Inyatsi Construction, having obtained funding from Public Service Pension Fund (PSPF), through Stanlib. However, the premier did say anything about this project in Parliament.
The prime minister also mentioned that Government planned to establish what is known as the Sovereign Wealth Fund. According to Wikipedia, a sovereign wealth fund, or sovereign investment fund, is a state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, or in alternative investments such as private equity funds or hedge funds. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally.
According to Yorkshire Bylines (yorkshirebylines.co.uk), sovereign wealth funds protect countries from economic uncertainties. They do so because they provide guaranteed capital in case of future funding needs. Dlamini also mentioned the use of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to fund the policy statement. He said they would help the SOEs borrow so that they could improve their production, which could, in turn, boost the country’s economy.
Dlamini also mentioned that they would come up with way of getting what he termed as concessional loans from some international financial institutions that had agreed to give such loans to the country.
