THE SUNKEN BOAT AS AN ANALOGY FOR OUR ECONOMY

Last weekend a boat capsized in Lake Victoria. At last count 32 people were confirmed dead of the more than 100 revellers who were on the boat.

According to survivor accounts the boat had slowed to a crawl, was taking in water, when its engine failed, the lights went out, the music stopped and it went under.

Fingers have been pointed at the boat owner, the marine authorities and the partygoers. It is clear that all parties shoulder part of the blame for the tragic disaster. I hesitate to call it an accident.

"I couldn’t help feeling that the whole event had an ominous resemblance to our economy...

To begin with we are overloaded not for the size of the country --- England about half the size has a population of 55 million and no one is complaining, except the Brexiters who don’t want any more people coming in.

 It’s the size of our economy which is the problem as the engine was for the MV Templar. It was stuttering and stalling, grinding and groaning under the weight of the merry makers on deck. Our economy of $25b is barely keeping us afloat at $600 per capita.

A combination of historical accident, the total collapse of the economy in the 1970s and 1980s, while the population continued to grow, set us up very badly for today. The boat it is said was dragged out of the “garage” for the weekend event with the mechanics still below deck tinkering with the engine, whose model we would not be surprised had long past its sell by date.

Our economy too seems to be stuck in a time warp, our planners still stuck in their “Economic for Eastern Africa” by Livingstone & Ord, text books. The fundamentals remain the same its true, but we seem unable to build on those fundamentals to keep up with the information age in which we are living.

"But like the ill-fated weekend revellers living a fiction up on deck while the people below are engaged in a futile effort to shovel water out, we continue with our lives refusing to make the sacrifices (pay taxes) to not only keep the economy going but get stronger and stronger...

Our tax revenue collections to GDP are at about 14 percent, which is why we cannot finance our own budget and need to go out to borrow to bridge the deficit.

The insufficient life jackets are a useful parallel for how the economy cannot finance adequate services for all. The people who enjoy the services are those who are connected or those who know how to access the services, through their connections or being in the right place at the right time.

The boat management instead of charging everyone a fair rate so they can provide each with a life jacket, opted to charge a minimal fee that will attract numbers and forget about the safety precautions.

The loud music and copious amounts of alcohol are enough to keep  many oblivious to the  impending doom just like in our economy because we are relatively secure, healthy and getting along we do not pay attention to deficiencies in the institutions supposed to deliver public goods – the police, the health and education sectors. Until it is too late.

A constant theme that run through many survivor accounts is that they sat up and took notice when a speaker fell into the water, when the ship begun to keel over.

But there was no more ambiguity about the situation when the engine died, the lights went out and the music stopped.

We need to shift the economy into production and away from donor dependency. To do this we need to raise our revenues, emphasise quality education for all, improve the business environment and accelerate our infrastructure development.

To do all this will take hard decisions, many decisions which seem unpalatable as long as the music keeps playing. It will also take sacrifice by all, especially the urban elite who have had it so good for the last three decades.

"The signs are there, we don’t have to wait for the speaker to fall into the lake for us to start doing something....