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{
    "id": 1134146,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1134146/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 126,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Farhiya",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13179,
        "legal_name": "Farhiya Ali Haji",
        "slug": "farhiya-ali-haji"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, for giving me this opportunity. I beg to support the Budget Policy Statement, but I have a couple of concerns and some recommendations as well. In terms of revenue targets, in this House, we have dealt with five budgets. In all the five budget cycles, we have never met the revenue targets. Why do we always get it wrong? Where I worked before, I did a lot of budgets. The history informs the future of budgets. You stretch a little so that you are not lazy in terms of achieving your targets. At the same time, you should not always get it wrong. When you are budgeting for the same revenue, you should have some conservatives that take care of the excesses that you always project. The problem I have with having excessive budget projection is that revenues are matched with expenditure. Therefore, when you have over-projected revenue, it means you will have over-projected expenditure. This is partly the reason debt increases. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, as we budget, we need to be sensitive about that. From this Statement, I see that agriculture and source of diaspora funds have continued funding our economy. When you realise that some of the sectors are the ones that increase your output, the revenue and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country, then we need more investment in those sectors. Some of the sectors got less money this time, while there has been a decrease. If you check the proposed ceiling for agriculture, rural and urban development sectors, have decreased by 15.6 per cent. My only hope is that the decrease from the national Government has gone to counties. If not, it means that the sector that generates more revenue gets less allocation in terms of the budget. We are likely to generate less and not meet our target for revenue generation. We need to be careful how we handle that."
}