By Phephile Motau
Without any grant from development partners, the Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg has about E25 billion to finance the 2023/24 national budget, the Eswatini Financial Times has reliably established.
This amount comprises the record-high E11 billion SACU receipts announced by Rijkenberg on Monday and the over E12 billion that would be raised from the collection of domestic taxes by the Eswatini Revenue Service (ERS).
When delivering the Mid-Term Budget Review Report 2022/23, the minister projected that total domestic tax collection was expected to increase by an average of 6.0 per cent in the medium term, amounting to E12.98 billion in 2023/24.
This would bring the total revenue excluding grants to E24.73 billion. At the time of the Mid-Term Budget Review, the minister had estimated that SACU receipts would be at E9.96 billion.
The available revenue without grants is the highest since 2019 and it is also surpassing the total budgets of the past four years (2019 – 2022). The budget for 2019 was E21.83 billion, for 2020 it was E24.08 billion, E24.04 billion for 2021, and E23.2 billion for 2022.
With the E24.73 billion revenue without grants, this suggests Rijkenberg could have easily fully financed the budgets for 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 without having to borrow money from the domestic and international financial markets.
Having this amount of revenue means the finance minister will deliver a more realistic budget because he knows where the money will come from unlike in the previous budgets where he announced budgets with huge deficits. Read MoreÂ
