(Special for CAFS) News Analysis: More cuts expected in Namibia's budget review

Namibia's finance minister is expected to announce more cuts when he presents the 2016/17 budget review Thursday.

The country that is implementing two developmental projects -- the Harambee Prosperity Plan and the National Development Plan (NDP) 5, is walking a tight economic rope with desires to improve people's lives on one hand and reduce spending as much as possible on the other.

Under the Harambee plan, Namibia should provide housing, potable water, create jobs and alleviate poverty in the next four years, while the NDP is used to gauge progress towards the country's Vision 2030.

The nation's fifth NDP is currently being put together to run concurrently with the Harambee plan. The NDPs are under the economic planning ministry whose minister Tom Alweendo is on record saying that the budget cuts will impact negatively on both the Harambee plan and development plans.

Namibia has an 8 billion Namibian dollars (584 million U.S. dollars) budget deficit and had its economic outlook revised from stable to negative by Fitch Rating in early September this year.

Finance minister Calle Schlettwein has already appropriated more than 63 million Namibian dollars from all the ministries early this year.

This time, Schlettwein is targeting close to 5 billion Namibian dollars from the three-year rolling 66 billion Namibian dollars budget.

Schlettwein has said to afford the salary increases, the government needs to look into where the budget will be cut.

However, these cuts are coming when the government is running the Harambee Prosperity Plan, launched in March this year by President Hage Geingob, whose success depends on adequate funding.

Economic planning minister Alweendo said the government needs to be careful when deciding the cuts so as not to bring the economy to a stand still.

The minister admits that the cuts will indeed impact negatively on the Harambee plan.

"If you kill expenditure completely, the economy is going to be standing still, and this would put us in an even deeper hole, and for you to come out of that hole it will be much more difficult," he has said.

The budget cuts done earlier this year have already had a negative impact on several departments, among them the safety and security ministry under which the police falls.

Inspector General of the Namibian police Lieutenant-General Sebastian Ndeitunga said the budget cuts will ground the force.

"If we don't buy vehicles, there will be problems. Some police services will be paralyzed for three consecutive years," Ndeitunga said.

The other hard hit is the youth and sports ministry that was forced to allocate 38.6 million Namibian dollars among 50 sports codes.

This has left the Namibia Football Premier League groping for sponsorship and it is not clear when the season will start for lack of funding.

Apart from sports being hard hit, the budget cut to the ministry also affected training. Already, the youth minister Jerry Ekandjo, said four youth skills training centers saw 117 less youth graduating. Endit