Africa-Press – Tanzania. EARLY yesterday before the East African Community members individually read their budgets, routinely unveiled on the same day, the Minister for Finance and Planning Mwigulu Nchemba submitted two documents, namely-the Economic Survey Report for 2020 and the National Development Plan for 2021/22 to the Parliament, whose details were professionally to the point.
Making such details open and public show how the government has been struggling to develop the country, despite challenges like the global Covid-19 challenge among others.
For instance, the virus effects have slowed down global including Tanzania’s economic activities mostly in manufacturing, commerce, arts and entertainment, tourism and transportation and logistics, forcing the government to strategise again to implement a number of measures, including continuous assessment of economic and business trends in order to utilise opportunities for greater advantage of the nation and to continue raising awareness on preventive measures against Covid-19 spread.
It is good news that the preparations for the Economic Survey 2020 Report and the National Development Plan 2021/22 were highly participatory involving wide stakeholders’ engagement at all stages of preparation and government approval process for the sake of developing Tanzania.
For instance, the survey for 2020 was prepared based on the trend of economic indicators of various sectors in the respective year as compared to 2019.
In addition, the preparation of the National Development Plan for 2021/22 has taken into account the government’s priorities identified in Third National Five-Year Development Plan 2021/22 – 2025/26.
Closely analyzing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook report of April 2021, whereby 2020, the global economy had a negative growth rate of 3.3 percent compared to a positive growth rate of 2.8 percent in 2019, it is wise that the government took the initiative of outlying strategies for the economy to recover amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
That is after realization that many economies which depended highly on tourism including Cape Verde and Mauritius and those depending on oil (Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Republic of Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria and South Sudan) were severely affected by Covid-19 contributing to a negative economic growth on sub-Saharan Africa.
Equally, we need to commend the government through the Bank of Tanzania that has continued to implement accommodative monetary policies, which help to reduce interest rates in financial markets, and in particular the lending and deposit rates, all with the aim of making the economy to recover.
