Mnangagwa budget means business

Highlights of today’s Budget

Fiscal Imbalances

• At the heart of the economy’s fundamental economic challenges is an unsustainable Budget deficit, whose financing through issuance of Treasury bills and recourse to the overdraft with the Reserve Bank is untenable.
• This is also at the core of factors driving the demand for foreign exchange, as well as creation of excess money supply, which is largely in the form of electronic RTGS and mobile money balances.
• These money balances are accessible through RTGS transactions, card swipes, as well as such mobile platforms as Eco-Cash, One-Money and Tele-Cash. Physical cash is a small proportion of the economy’s overall financial sector liquidity.
• Money creation, through domestic money market instruments which do not match with available foreign currency, only serves to weaken the value of the same instruments, translating into rapid build-up in inflationary pressures, to the detriment of financial and macro-economic stability.
• This has seen growing mis-matches between electronic money balances and the stock of real foreign exchange balances, as reflected by cash holdings and nostro balances of banks.

15:51 Government has adopted a zero tolerance on land barons.

15:36 On indigenisation, Government is, through the Finance Bill being submitted to this August House for the 2018 financial year, amending the Indigenisation and Empowerment Act, to bring the following into effect from April 2018:

Diamonds and platinum are the only sub-sectors designated as ‘extractive.’

Accordingly, the proposed Amendments will confine the 51/49 Indigenisation threshold to only the two minerals, namely diamonds and platinum, in the extractive sector.

The 51/49 threshold will not apply to the rest of the extractive sector, nor will it apply to the other sectors of the economy, which will be open to any investor regardless of nationality.

15:30 State Enterprises that exhibit potential will be reformed, while those which cannot be rehabilitated will be privatized or face outright closure.