Farirai Machivenyika
Senior Reporter
THE 2027 national budget should be developmental, transformative and rooted in the country’s economic blueprint, the National Development Strategy 2, Speaker of Parliament, Advocate Jacob Mudenda has said.
Advocate Mudenda said this in his opening remarks at the Parliament’s 2027 pre-budget seminar being held in Bulawayo.
The Speaker emphasised the importance of the seminars, saying they had become indispensable instruments of democratic statecraft and the prudent stewardship of public resources.
“It is the forum where hard questions must be asked before public funds are committed and where Government’s national fiscal priority choices are tested against the countervailing realities of finite resources, global shocks and mounting climate impact vulnerability,” he said. “Here, the people’s aspirations must be translated from broad policy intent into credible programmes, measurable outputs and life-changing outcomes.
“Accordingly, Parliamentarians bear a solemn responsibility of ensuring that the 2027 National Budget is developmental in design, transformative in substance and firmly anchored in an inclusive national development matrix.
“That budget faithfully reflects the NDS2, the continental vision of The Africa We Want enshrined in Agenda 2063 and the universal promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, for us being the achievement of an Upper Middle-Income Society.”
The Speaker added that MPs’ authority over the nation’s finances was neither borrowed nor bestowed by Executive benevolence but was a product of the hard-won inheritance of a long constitutional struggle that places Parliament at the epicentre of democratic control over public resources.
