An ‘out of control’ economy – MDC

get presented on 6 September 2007 is an indictment not just on the person of Sam Mumbengegwi but on the regime in Harare.
“That the supplementary budget can exceed the original budget presented in December 2006 by 800 percent betrays a fundamental lack of elementary understanding of the nuts and bolts of economics,” he said.
He added: “But even more importantly, it exposes the fact that the regime has no control over this failing economy and worse still, that they do not care. The very appointment of Mumbengegwi as a replacement of the affable and whisky-loving Hebert Murerwa is a reflection that Robert Mugabe does not give a hoot about basic economic housekeeping fundamentals such as budget balancing and macro-economic stability.  
“A number of critical issues arise with this supplementary budget. The first is that as a supplementary budget, it is not located in any policy or ideological framework. The budget is a major fiscal tool that should be grounded in some major policy framework. The existing fiscal planning tool that this regime is nominally bound by is the National Economic Development Priority Programme (NEDPP) launched by minister Rugare Gumbo in March 2006.
“The budget therefore should have been a complementary tool for the objectives and roadmap designed in the NEDPP. Sadly, the supplementary budget is not anchored on this. Instead, it is a hotchpotch of contradictory and self-defeating policy tools.   Stripped to its bare bones, the supplementary budget betrays the contradiction in the Zanu (PF) state between, on one hand, the need to be loyal to basic economic fundamentals and, on the other, the power-retention agenda in which State resources will be spent without reason, logic or limit purely for the purposes of maintaining and reproducing power.  
“Thus, whilst the Minister implicitly acknowledges the cataclysmic effect that a huge budget deficit has on inflation and fiscal discipline, he nevertheless succumbs to the power retention agenda by producing a supplementary budget that is loyal to this cause and this cause only.  
One finds that the amounts allocated to the President’s Office (which houses the notorious Central Intelligence Organisation), the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Home Affairs, is a staggering $12,662 trillion, which is 33 percent of the supplementary budget. If one adds the traditional government slush fund , the unallocated reserve under the Ministry of Finance vote, of $2,4 trillion, then in fact the amount being allocated to the securocrats, who are at the helm of this Vampire State, is 43 percent of the supplementary budget.  
“The net effect of the expansionary fiscal delinquency is that there will be a major increase in the stockpile of domestic debt from $8,1 trillion to at least $16 trillion, in our view.”