AfricaPress-Tanzania: ALL eyes and ears will be tuned to the country’s capital—Dodoma, today, as Finance and Planning Minister, Dr Philip Mpango tables the last budget of the first five years of President John Magufuli’s administration.
The ambitious 34.88tri/-budget, is expected to mainly focus on the implementation of key strategic development projects as well as propelling the industrial economy and poverty reduction agendas.
Dr Mpango, with the traditional briefcase, is expected to appear before the National Assembly this afternoon to present his last budget as Finance Minister, before the House is dissolved by the Head of State on June 19.
With expectations riding high, the Tanzanian budget will be tabled concurrently with other East African member states, as it has always been in the previous years.
On March 11, 2020, when he presented in the National Assembly the government’s development plan and budget framework for the forthcoming financial year totaling 34.88tri/-, Dr Mpango said the 2020/21 government budget translates into a five-percent increase from the 33.1tri/-, which was approved for the current financial year that ends on June 30, 2020.
According to the Finance minister, a goodly 37 per cent (12.9tri-) of the total budget of the coming financial year will be development expenditure, in priority areas, basically involving infrastructure development and industrialisation, as well as improvement of social services delivery.
Key development projects here include the standard gauge railway (SGR) in the country’s central transport corridor, and the Nyerere hydropower project at the Stiegler’s Gorge along Rufiji River.
This is not forgetting development projects in education, health and water, among others, which were pledged by the ruling party—CCM in its 2015 election manifesto.
The other 63 per cent of the budget-21.98 tri/-will be directed to recurrent expenditure ranging from public salaries to national debt repayments.
In this year’s budget, 78.8 percent of the development budget will be sourced domestically and the remaining 21.2 percent will be sourced from development partners and international financial institutions.
“Part of the budget will be spent on running the 2020 general elections,” said Dr Mpango without revealing the amount of budget planned for the polls to be conducted in October.
It is also expected that in the next fiscal year, the government will have no other options than employing various techniques, including fostering supervision of the use of Electronic Tax Stamps (ETS), to raise revenue collections and speed up the process of creating an enabling environment for Tanzania’s industrialisation journey.
Recently, the parliamentary Budget Committee, led by its chairman—Mashimba Ndaki hailed the ongoing implementation of the ETS, after receiving a progress report that was presented before Members of Parliament (MPs) in Dodoma.
When Presenting the National Development Plan and the budget ceiling for 2020/2021, Dr Mpango noted that the country had witnessed a considerable rise in revenues during the first seven months of the 2019/20 financial year, noting however, that there was a need to sustain the achievements.
It is equally on record that Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) has had a good time during the first seven months of the 2019/20 financial year, with tax collections rising to higher levels.
Despite the rise, the taxman was also working hard to contain some unscrupulous people who fabricate electronic tax documents purporting that they have been issued by TRA.
