A minister reads out a written speech full of numbers, for more than 2 hours. A couple of hundred people, mostly elderly males, gather round him. Most are in varying degrees of somnolence. From time to time they wake up and clap - with their feet. And all of this is presided over by a black man in a white wig, wearing red robes reminiscent of Santa Claus…
May I be forgiven for not wanting to listen to the Finance Minister’s annual Budget Speech in parliament last week? I find the whole thing farcical on many counts.
Let’s start with the setting. If a ritual requires that you read a speech to people who are not interested enough to stay awake, get rid of the ritual! What is the point of doing something so boring that it acts as a sleeping pill? Secondly, is reading out lists and lists of numbers not one of the more pointless things you can do in this day and age? What on earth were bar graphs and pie charts and slide presentation programs and projectors invented for, if not to convey an easy understanding of what numbers mean?The whole two-and-a-hour thing could be done in 45 minutes by a tech-savvy presenter. The audience would also become more willing to be subjected to the torture!
Why do we persist with these archaic forms of communication? Because that’s what the British taught us, half a century ago? There comes a time when a country must grow up and do things that are right for its people in their time - not what was right for dead people from another world. The speaker’s attire, the feet-clapping - please, let’s move on and find our own means of expression.
The event aside, I also take issue with the annual circus that surrounds the Budget Speech. In June, everyone becomes an expert on the economy, and seems to know exactly where the money should go. This is the time of year, for example, that all the accountants in Kenya emerge as chat-show guests, opinion writers and analysts. What do they do the rest of the year? Auditing, mostly.
We can’t blame this on the accountants - they merely fill a gaping whole in our national discourse. Because they understand numbers, it is assumed that they know how the macro-economy works. And true to their training, they add up, down, and sideways and pronounce on the big issues of the economy. But where are the people who should be engaged with understanding where our resources go - the economists, chief executives, engineers, sociologists, even artists? Since when did a country become a balance sheet?
The media join in happily to provide PR opportunities to all and sundry, and to betray their own ignorance on what makes the economy go round. And so we will get wall-to-wall coverage on the budget for a week in June, followed by a return to the politics of the day. At the end of it all, there is usually an inane chart in every newspaper and TV news report: “Winners and Losers”. That is what it boils down to, in the popular discourse.
The economy is a rich and interesting thing, and understanding it cannot be confined to accountants and journalists. It is also an ongoing conversation that cannot be summarised in sound bites. What motivates people to work hard, save more, innovate, invest and trade is a fascinating subject. These behavioural issues are the things that drive the economy forward, or hold it back. We need to be having a far more rewarding conversation as a country about what makes us rich or poor, and the annual budget is not the place to have it.
What is a budget, after all? Merely an allocation of resources to competing ends. It is the way of making sure that money moves to places where it will have the most impact. Government can indeed make meaningful investments, and does, but its more important role is as a manager of incentives and penalties to regulate behaviour in the economy. We have got this back to front: we confuse ‘the budget’ for ‘the plan’, and ‘the plan’ for ‘the strategy’.
Kenya’s ’strategy’ and ‘plan’ is these days called Vision 2030. That is where the thinking has happened, and true to form, it was done by a handful of people from a particular class. That is where we are not asking the hard questions. How inclusive is Vision 2030? How mindful is it of the fact that in the long run, education is the only known driver of development? And how willing is it to face down the demon of corruption that holds this economy by the throat?
Those are the hard questions, and they are the ones we don’t ask every year as we settle down to watch the budget circus. If it’s entertainment we want, give me a good football match instead, every time.
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3 Responses:
June 30th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
The leather briefcase that the Hon Minister puts up for all of us to see is another joke. If I was the Minister I would be showing my laptop or perhaps just a flash disk?
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
That was a good analysis of our psyche as country. By the way, have you ever realised that in Kenya, when a word is “discovered” by our media, it becomes the buzzword in every discourse? We’ve heard words like ’stakeholders’, ‘amnesty’, IDPs, post-election violence and what-not being mentioned here and there.
Sometimes I wish our leaders found time to read your “sunny words”. The vision 2030 is today our catch word. However, it is only mentioned by the same people who had other visions for the country by 2000, 2020 etc. A peep into the history of our beloved President in Kenyan public life is as follows: In 1963 he made a debut in elective politics by contesting the Donholm Constituency (now Makadara) in Nairobi Province, which he won on a Kanu ticket.
He was made the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance from 1963 to 1965 and in 1965 he was appointed a minister at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry where he served until 1969. We had Sessional Paper No. 10 published in 1965 and co-authored by Kibaki. This was our first vision “2030″ at the time.
He was later moved to the strategic ministry of Finance and economic Planning where he served from1970 to 1978. Kibaki was appointed Vice-President in 1978 when Daniel Arap Moi took over the reins of power following the death of founding President, Jomo Kenyatta. He continued to serve in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning until 1983 when he moved to the Ministry of Home Affairs and National Heritage .Kibaki was also the Leader of Government Business and Chairman of the Sessional Committee from 1978 to 1988.He was the Kanu vice-President from 1978 to 1988.
It was around the 80s that we had vision 2020 mooted. Kibaki was still in the picture. Today, about 40 years after the first vision ‘2030′ we are still having the same people shouting from the rooftops about achieving the same dream in 25 years to come. Are they for real or it is the same gerrymandering that we are used to from our politrickians? From a personal perspective, I dont feel vision 2030. You mentioned that in the long run, it is education that will be the driver of development. But, here I am, an educated Kenyan youth ( I graduated from our public universities - UoN- with a degree in electrical $ electronics engineering) who have been left out as thousands of other educated youths from the circus called vision 2030. Is it those Wazees who are going to help achieve the dream of 2030? How young will Mzee Kibaki be in the year 2030?
I believe it is the Kenyan youth who will do the mortar and brick work that will see Kenya achieve that goal. The energy reserves that the youth have in this country seems useful only when attending political rallies, unleashing violence on fellow Kenyans and being told to wait for their time- tommorow- to build the nation. We are still waiting. I have had chance to travel around our country in the course of my duties. Kenya and Africa is not poor, it is the people!! We have arable lands which are lying idle just because the colonialist didnt develop them. The stretch from Athi River to Mombasa has very fecund soils which only require irrigation, yet the people of Ukambani have to wait for relief food. Tana and Athi Rivers pours thousands of litres of water into the Indian Ocean daily while we “cry” for food aid from donors. At the same time, we cite lack of employment for our idle youth in our idle land. Recently, I went to work in Kisumu accompanied by a colleague from North Eastern who had never seen the Lake. Here we were, on the shores of the largest fresh water lake in Africa which is mostly lying idle with no water sports or vessels doing transport business. The same commodity - water- is in abundance yet barely 300 miles away, there are people walking miles and miles daily with their livelyhood (livestock) and killing each other over ponds. What is so hard about making the water available in remote Lodwar district. In fact, the people living on the shores are ever thirsty due to lack of clean drinking water. It is just an irony that in the abundance of water, the fools are thirsty!!!
We can not claim to be a modern nation if simple things like plumbing (piping water from the many sources) seem like rocket science to our government.
All in all, we are still the ‘Africans’, known for not doing anything positive that the world can write about. The budgets will still be read and nothing much will change apart from hearing that Nyeri will get a big allocation for water and roads than Marsabit simply because the president doesnt come from that corner.
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:05 am
Am with you on this,i’d rather watch football anytime.
We have a colonised mindset where we believe that if the british do it that way then it’s got to be right.
The same is reflected even in the way we do our purchases. We buy italian suits because they are meant to be better than what oti in nairobi will make, or even buy a shoe made in paris rather than in limuru since ‘we all know’ paris is the fashion capital of the world.
I believe looking at the end product of our actions should be what that moivates us to do these things. The budget would be easier read in the papers rather than listening to it been read.