The 2012- 2013 Budget

The 2012-2013 National Budget may have been passed but the big question remains, what is in it for the poor? Firstly, Malawi like most countries, identification of poor people will lead us to rural areas. It is a common perception that the outskirts of consumption centres are the hubs of poverty. It is important however that when looking at policy issues like national budgets, there is need to pay particular attention to those forgotten utra poor citizens living in towns and cities of our country. As compared to their rural counterparts, fellow citizens in the cities will be described as utra poor because often, they have no jobs, no land to farm and do not have capital to start businesses or property to use as collateral for bank loans. Thus they are hardest hit by poverty. The national budgets in the recent years have tended to support families with Farm Inputs Subsidies (FIS)which unfortunately mostly target the rural poor families. The imapct of this deliberate attempt to blow out poverty in rural masses through food security has be quite enomous, on the other hand, it has as well provided a premise for political contestation, with ruling elite controlling major part of implementation process. This strategy however, has often not paid attention to the landless poor city and town dwellers- it may have been assumed that the benefit of the programme would trickle down to this sector of the society, but does it happen? Some strategies like Public Works Programmes (PWP)work well to absorb the poor. Jobless citizens, especially women and the youth are involved in community development projects like building of roads and bridges and in turn are paid some stipend per the work done. The programme has tended to target rural communities. The two strategies have been touted in the budget as already the main focus to deal with some of the challenges of joblessness and poverty. However, the question is what is in the budget for the utra poor of this society? Do we need to start looking at long term startegies to bolster our industrial capacity as a nation to increase job creation? How about our infrastructure, do we not need to start reflecting on infrastractural development in our cities as a deliberate strategy to improve the employment sector that would greatly absorb the majority of utra poor citizenry? My view of our nation is that we have not yet mastered the art of strategic orientation,we need a systemic overhaul that will include dismatling of the human tragedy that is in our planners and as well as our infrastructure that are being outdated by time.Lest we get archived while still 'functional'.