Minister of Finance Ipumbu Shiimi has said that the 2021 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) assumes no pensionable salary increases for public servants in the 2022-2023 financial year (FY).
This emerged in Shiimi’s mid-term budget review speech on Wednesday in which he stressed the government intends to tighten the noose on unnecessary expenditure while also keeping the public wage bill, which gobbles up over 50 per cent of public expenditure, under control.
“I would like to extend specific gratitude to the trade unions and indeed all civil servants for heeding our call and keeping their belts tightened. We still plead with them to maintain patience especially in the next fiscal year, which promises to be more difficult, so we allow the economy to recover more firmly,” Shiimi said as he walked the tightrope.
The government has also put a moratorium on mass personnel recruitment in the civil service while concurrently speeding up the work of the steering committee on wage bill reforms, aimed at reducing personnel expenditure over the MTEF.
In its resolve to curtail wastage, the government recently took a decision to close down Southern Times newspaper, Shiimi revealed.
The government had put aside over N.dollars 10 million for the financial needs of the now-defunct paper.
In addition, a team of consultants has been appointed by the Office of the Prime Minister to map out and finalise the wage bill reforms.
The 2021/22 mid-year budget review exercise focused on reallocating the realised resource envelope across critical expenditure items that could not be postponed to future FYs.
The reallocated amount constitutes of N.dollars 41.4 million and N.dollars 279.8 million realised from suspensions on the operational and development budgets.
Overall, a total of N.dollars 2.2 billion has been made available for reallocation against total funding requests of N.dollars 7.1 billion received from government offices, ministries and agencies.
The budget is anchored on three pillars, namely the steady improvement in consumer demand both domestically and globally “as economic activity normalises, improved momentum in exports driven by upbeat production levels and complemented by the projected gradual recovery in commodity prices”.
The other is to reinvigorate in investments, both by the private and public sectors.
“Anchored on assumption that the COVID-19 pandemic will remain contained, and the economy will gradually open up, growth is projected to accelerate further to 2.8 per cent by 2022.”
However, speedier implementation of the second Harambee Prosperity Plan will add further impetus to these prospects, Shiimi said.
“The key premise of our medium-term fiscal framework is that in the absence of strong economic growth, revenue will remain subdued. And without revenue growth, expenditure cannot be increased,” he said.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency
