Fears of the national budgetary constraint resulting from the suspension of budgetatry support to Rwanda by two European nations have been despelled by a top government official. Sweden and Netherlands last year called-off a combined financial budget support of about $22m (Rwf12.3 b) following a United Nations (UN) Group of Experts’ report. John Rwangombwa, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning said in an interview with the Business Times that government and these development partners are in talks and he said they (donors) sound positive. “We’ve started dialoguing with them, so we hope what was suspended last year will be disbursed this year,” Rwangobwa said. Also Secretary to the Treasury, Rwangombwa said that there was no impact experienced from this action. “This was withheld towards the end of last year. It was supposed to finance the 2008 budget. The good thing is that we had a tremendous performance on the revenue side during the course of 2008, exceeding targets way above what we had targeted,” he explained. According to Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA), total revenue collections last year amounted to Rwf338.8b, which is 20.4 percent higher than the Rwf281.4b target. “So that covered for the loss of the disbursement we were expecting from the donors,” Rwangombwa said. He also revealed that because of inflationary pressures, government cut expenditure by Rwf10b towards the end of last year, meant to reduce government injections into the economy. Ends
