Africa-Press – Eswatini. The government has successfully paid off its arrears owed to it suppliers as of the end of June.
This was announced by the minister of finance, Neal Rijkenberg during a press conference where he mentioned that government spent E2.8 billion to settle these arrears.
The minister stated that in the last three weeks, government had managed to settle debts to suppliers 100 per cent up until the end of June.
“This means that all of the requests for payments that came to treasury up to the end of June, as of yesterday, have now been settled in full,” he said.
Rijkenberg stated that government had been fortunate in the last three weeks they received provisional tax payments which contributed E800 million to taxes, the SACU receipts come through of which half of it was pushed towards the CBE advancement which was used every quarter for government salaries and E15 billion of the SACU receipts had been used to pay the suppliers and as well as the E445 million profit from CBE was used to pay suppliers.
The minister mentioned that the government had been battling with growing arrears for a long time and that his current cabinet found E6 billion arrears in government.
“Within about a year from the time which is towards the end of 2019, we managed to get on top of majority of these debts outstanding to suppliers and for about two and a half years, we managed to more or less pay suppliers on time,” he said.
He stated that unfortunately around this time in 2022 in the budget, they had planned to raise a portion of the budget in the Johannesburg stock exchange listing.
“However, the legislation took a while to get through parliament as well as the time delays in getting the listing done. Even as we speak we haven’t received any money from them yet. We are hoping that in a month or two we should be floating government bonds on the JSC,” he said.
persisted
Rijkenberg mentioned that due to such delays, they then went back to paying suppliers late as of august 2022 and it had persisted until now.
He however, explained that this however meant that they could be invoices in draws, which meant that any suppliers that might not been paid would need to work with the ministry’s involved and see what could lead to this blockage. He added that they would now continue to do their best to ensure that every supplier was paid on time.
“It is a better time of the year because normally in the budget cycle the first and last quarters are normally the times when every payment is made because when a budget opens or closes they is always pressure to spend the budget,” he said.
He further explained that they foresaw that for the next medium term they would be able to remain on top of paying suppliers on time.
“We felt the need to announce to the nation, because this has caused disruptions in supplies, over pricing in supply to government, government trying to make MOUs between treasury and ERS and many other unnecessary arrangements,” he said.
The minister further thanked the treasury office for working so hard to achieve this.
“This should really give huge relief to the nation as it means that taxation is better and that there is health in the country’s economy. We believe that our economy is ready for growth and paying suppliers on time would really improve the growth prospects that we fore see in the economy, “he said
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