By HELEN ZULU –
THE Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (ZIPAR) has predicted that the 2018 national budget will be tough after a reduction in funding from cooperating partners .
ZIPAR senior research fellow, Caesar Cheelo said current trends starting from 2013 indicated that donor support towards the national budget had been reducing hence putting pressure on Government to find alternative sources of funding.
Mr Cheelo was speaking in an interview on the sidelines of the on-going media master class for business journalists in Lusaka yesterday.
The training is being organised by ZIPAR and Financial Sector Deepening Zambia (FSDZ).
“The 2018 national budget will be very difficult in the sense that the trends, the signal from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has not come, even from cooperating partners have not yet come, providing very little support. So if you check from 2013 and 2014, the donor component has been going down.
This means that everything you have on the budget is domestically financed so it puts much more pressure on the Zambian system to provide additional revenue to finance the budget,” he said.
Mr Cheelo said reduced funding towards the national budget had forced Government to fund the plan by borrowing either domestically or externally.
He warned that external borrowing was dangerous because the debt was pegged in a foreign currency.
“There is a chance that taxes will either stay still or rise and you will see a lot of domestic borrowing still being accommodated in the 2018 national budget,” Mr Cheelo said.
The Masterclass for business journalists officially opened on Monday and ends tomorrow.
ZIPAR executive director Pamela Kabaso urged the business journalists to ensure that they reported effectively on the issues of the budget.
The 2018 National budget will be presented to Parliament on Friday this week by Finance Minister Felix Mutati.