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....
