Wouldn’t it be great if every time we fell sick wherever we
are in the country, we could walk into a health facility not have to endure
long tortuous queues and still get quality services at the end of the brief
wait?
Wouldn’t it be great if when we gave birth to our kids we
were assured of a first class education all the way to university – and beyond?
Wouldn’t it be great if in addition to expansive highways we
had high speed rail networks and affordable air connections within the country
and to foreign destinations?
There is a place like that on this earth.
My friend who visited Helsinki the capital of Finland a few
years ago has the best anecdote of the safe country we would love to see. The
family they were visiting with ordered a flat screen TV online. On the day they
were not home their TV was delivered and since the delivery man did not have
access to the home he left the TV on the porch, we call it a veranda. Hours
later the family returned home to the pleasant surprise that their TV had been delivered,
took it in and installed it.
My friend eight years later, has not yet recovered from the
shock that that was possible.
"Of course it was not always like this. The high living standards in Finland and Scandinavia have come after generations of interaction between the ruling elite and the citizenry...
So for example while the average annual government
expenditure per citizen is about €10,000 (sh40m) the revenue to GDP collections
in Finland stood at about 44.1 percent.
The comparable figures for Uganda are sh800,000 and 14
percent.
It is not rocket science if we want the good life we have to
pay for it.
Of course the common refrain is that this government is too
corrupt and it is affecting service delivery. The anecdotal evidence flies
right in your face and it is hard to refute, so I will be the last to vouch for
the integrity of our government.
"But truth too is that government has very little to work with. In effect in every sector of the economy even roads and electricity the resources available to them are hardly enough to do anything effectively.
And to make it worse they are trying to do everything, spreading themselves very thin and doing nothing particularly well...
For instance this year’s health budget comes in at
sh1.9trillion or about sh47,500 per person. This is even more pitiful when you
consider that of this money the cash spent on health worker salaries and
medicine is sh810b or sh20,250 per person per year.
Even allowing for the proverbial corruption government is
working with too little money to get anything done.
It therefore beats my understanding how our Members of
Parliament can oppose new taxes on mobile money and social media – an effort to
rope more people into the tax base and yet complain that government is failing
to deliver services and even worse are watering at the mouth to increase their
salaries yet again.
The way I see it government has two options neither of which
are easy.
Either using the existing resources they decide in five year
periods to focus on particular sectors and totally disregard others. So for
example they decide that for the next five years we are going to push power and
roads, bump their budgets like two to three times and the rest of the
departments make do with whatever crumbs are left over. After the period an
assessment is made on progress and decision is taken either to continue or
choose other sectors.
The obvious political fallout cannot be underestimated.
Or government goes all out, hammer and tongs to collect all
the taxes due to it from everybody who is liable. As it is now there about a
million people who pay taxes on their income against a total workforce of 11
million.
Understandably there will be gritting of teeth all over the
country at this, with opportunistic politicians leveraging it to increase the
government’s unpopularity, but somebody is going to have to do it sooner than
later.
"Given the miserable numbers the government is spending on every citizen the time of reckoning has long past. To stem poverty and all its ills – population growth, insecurity and disease, the government budget has to grow exponentially. For that to happen we all have to pay taxes....
And as for fighting corruption, how can government guard
against corruption when its law enforcement and accountability agencies are not
funded?
If we want to go to heaven (live a first world lifestyle),
we need to prepare for death (paying taxes).
