Interrogating the trajectory of Zimbabwe national budgeting

National budgets are the key pillars of economic and fiscal management, the central mechanisms through which the allocation, distribution and stabilization functions of governments are coordinated. Review of the trajectory of national budgeting in Zimbabwe over the past decades point to protracted efforts by the state to accommodate the diverse and often conflicting interests and values arising from the shifting local and global landscape. Zimbabwe’s first decade (1980-89), national budgeting was primarily shaped by the convergence between global interventionism and post-independence imperatives of national building and equitable socioeconomic development. Fiscal policy interventions had a distinct expansionary and welfare thrust, prioritizing subsidies, grants and social sector spending. Second decade national budgeting was conditioned by the crisis contexts of the state plus the dominance of liberalism which advocated minimal state and fiscal austerity. Fiscal policy measures had a very visible cost saving thrust, emphasis being placed on subsidy withdrawal and cuts in grants and social sector spending, privatization, deregulation and exchange liberalization. The pre-packaged nature of second decade liberal measures weakened state leverage over the budgetary processes. In the third decade (post 2000 era), national budgeting was shaped by three forces, namely, the emerging disenchantment with liberalism, the socioeconomic meltdown and state estranged relations with the western world and the donor community. The adoption of the “we eat what we kill” cash-based budgeting in the post 2009 era was a realistic response to the fiscal space challenges which the inclusive Government continued to face despite a relatively stable socioeconomic environment.