Farirai Machivenyika
Senior Reporter
Government Ministries submitted approximately ZiG600 billion in budget bids for the 2027 financial year, double the amount Treasury expects to collect in the coming year, Finance Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube has said.
He this while addressing a press conference on Wednesday at the end of the first day of the 2027 Parliament’s pre-budget seminar in Bulawayo.
The minister said Treasury could not support the bids due to constrained resources.
“For next year we expect to raise about ZiG300 billion, in terms of what we can raise but their requests are double that, so we are not able to actually meet that because we just wouldn’t have the revenue to meet the double that figure,” he said.
“We have communicated ceilings for each ministry that we recommend, which are based on past budgets usually or on absorptive capacity, and it is those ceilings that we’ve seen the reaction to, to say, oh, why don’t we increase this ceiling or that ceiling? But of course we do listen.”.
He added that despite inadequate resources there were instances they were willing to make adjustments like in the education and health sectors.
“But of course we do listen in certain areas where we feel, oh, maybe we could do more, more here, more there, especially in education, just building more schools, allowing for a higher number of teachers to be recruited, all those are sensitive areas,” he said.
“And for instance, if you look at the health sector budget, building more health centres, there are certain areas where we’ll allow for the ceiling to move up a bit to accommodate certain requests.”
On the issue of late disbursements of budget allocations, Prof Ncube said the releases were determined by the rate of revenue generation.
He added that they have to play a balancing act as Government’s budget demands were huge in relation to revenue inflows.
“We run a cash budget, so we basically spend what we’ve collected. So, that’s why then we have these challenges in terms of quantum of disbursements, because if you run a cash budget, we don’t have the luxury of external resources, special resources to borrow to run our Government,” he said.
“Other countries are luckier, because they don’t have the areas of challenge that we have, so they can borrow offshore to support government problems.”
Prof Ncube said the resolution of the country’s debt arrears was one way Government could unlock opportunities to access cheap international finances.
