By Linda Tsungirirai Masarira

29 November 2025

The 2026 national budget arrives at a time when Zimbabweans are suffocating under the weight of rising living costs, collapsing social services, structural unemployment, and a chronic erosion of real incomes.

What the country needed was a people-centred, rights-based, redistributive budget anchored in dignity, social justice, and inclusive development.

What the nation received, instead, is a technocratic stability budget, a budget designed to please markets, calm donors, and protect political power, while the majority continue to carry the heaviest burdens of austerity.

Let us be clear: stability in itself is not a crime. Stability is necessary, but stability without social justice is simply another word for controlled suffering.

VAT on the Poor, Relief for the Better-off
The decision to increase VAT to 15.5% in an environment where wages have collapsed and food inflation is biting is nothing short of a tax on poverty. VAT is the most regressive tax instrument: it punishes low-income households who spend the largest share of their income on basic goods.

Meanwhile, the reduction of IMTT from 2% to 1.5% mostly benefits the formally banked, corporate entities, and high-volume digital users. This is relief for those already buffered not relief, for the masses who transact in cash because the system has excluded them.

This is not a pro-poor revenue strategy. It is a polite, technocratic squeeze on the already overburdened citizen.

Minister Mthuli Ncube’s health budget can’t heal a nation. Allocating 10.5% of the budget to health may sound significant, but it is still far below the 15% Abuja Declaration and dramatically short of what is needed to make healthcare free, accessible, and lifesaving for all. Our hospitals remain under-equipped, understaffed, and heavily dependent on donor funding yet Official Development Assistance is declining.

Where, then, is the money for:
▪︎ oncology centres for cancer patients?
▪︎ drug rehabilitation facilities in all 10 provinces?
▪︎ mental health hospitals?
▪︎ free basic healthcare?
removal of user fees for accident and GBV survivors?
▪︎ dialysis and chronic disease support?

These are not luxuries. They are constitutional obligations and moral imperatives. The health vote remains a polite gesture, not a transformative investment.

Education got the largest vote but not the justice It deserves. LEAD welcomes the highest allocation, but without:
▪︎ free basic education as required by the Constitution,
▪︎ a plan to wipe out BEAM arrears,
▪︎ disability-friendly schools in every district,
▪︎ proper teacher remuneration,
▪︎ rural school infrastructure overhaul,
this remains a budget of inputs without rights.

Zimbabwean children can not eat percentages. They need a system that provides equal opportunity not inflated rhetoric.

Social Protection: A Thin Lifeline for a Nation in Hardship

Allocating 4.4% to social protection in a nation where millions hover on the poverty line is not social justice. It is survival politics.
Pensions remain meaningless. Grants for the elderly and persons with disabilities can not cover food, rent, or medication. Urban poverty continues to deepen while rural households face both climate and economic shocks.

A people’s budget does not treat social protection as a residual item. It sees it as infrastructure for human dignity.

The budget crushed labour justice under a wage cap. The civil service wage bill is capped at 50% of the budget while the security sector remains one of the most generously funded arms of the State. A recruitment freeze except for limited posts in education, health and security undermines service delivery, labour rights, and morale.

Teachers, nurses, social workers and frontline civil servants remain among the poorest-paid workers in the country.
If labour is the engine of development, why is it consistently sacrificed at the altar of “fiscal discipline,” while corruption remains untouched?

Energy & Industrialisation: High Ambitions, Low Commitment
The rhetoric of value addition, AfCFTA optimisation, and rural industrialisation is welcomed and aligns deeply with LEAD’s vision, but the rhetoric is not a budget line.

There is no large-scale, ring-fenced allocation for:
▪︎ new solar or wind plants,
▪︎ grid rehabilitation,
rural electrification,
industrial energy security,
▪︎ farmer-focused off-grid systems.

Without energy, industrialisation will remain a brochure, not a lived reality.

So, Is This Budget Pro-People or Anti-People?
It is a budget with progressive wording, but a regressive heart;
A budget that highlights social sectors but refuses to enable them;
A budget that protects numbers, not people.
Zimbabwe needs a bold shift towards equitable development, a comprehensive social welfare system, a living wage framework, disability inclusion, rural industrialisation, and free basic healthcare. Instead, we received a budget that speaks reform while practicing restraint, a budget that stabilises without transforming.

This is why the Labour Economists and Afrikan Democrats reaffirm our position: Zimbabwe deserves a human-centred economic order where national resources uplift citizens, not statistics.
The economy exists for the people, not the other way around.