Last Sunday , this very publication carried a story in which councillors in the Tonota area were said to be exasperated that tax payers funds were being wasted on white elephants. The subject of their frustration was a moribund milk parlour at Tonota College of Education. These councillors deserve credit for raising such a pertinent subject which, when all has been said and done, is about the degree to which the government should be building things instead of allowing the private sector and other non-governmental entities to do so instead. By raising the red flag, the councillors unwittingly help us to reflect on the distance we are prepared to traverse to promote effective and efficient spending of tax payers’ money.
However these councillors or anyone of us should not be surprised that government spending leaves us with white elephants littered all over the place. In some cases it leaves us with over-engineered buildings which also run at excess capacity. Examples abound. We have the Dibete ostrich multiplication farm which was launched with a lot of fanfare about a decade or so ago. The last time we ever heard about it was when they were busy relocating the farm from the edge of the busy AI road to a relatively quieter site. Since then, there has been no word about its performance but deafening silence despite the millions that have gone into setting it up.
We also have the ostrich abattoir, which too, was built at considerable taxpayers’ expense but had to stay idle for a while until it was converted into a multispecies facility. In Lobatse, they have a horticultural market that is just but another white elephant.
Now history is bound to repeat itself with talk of plans to upgrade Lobu Farm to a stud goat project. Just at the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, we are bound to have another Dibete ostrich multiplication farm for goats!
It is very interesting how the govermemet seems to be always prepared to lavish money on a project, even if the prospects for success are dim. In their planet, the more a project fails commercially, the more money they think needs to be pumped into it. In the last state of the nation address for example, the President stated that the government would “renovate and upgrade existing milk pasteurizing centres in Tonota, Phitshane Molopo, Serowe and Sunnyside and outsource their management to farmers by March 2021”. He also added that: “Through the Economic Recovery Transformation Plan, Government will therefore develop fodder banks in strategic locations for the cattle industry”.
The trouble with these projects is that there is no insight on whether any due diligence was conducted to prove that farmers would run the centre profitably. In a similar vein, the business case for fodder banks run profitably by the Government is not made. It is as if something automatically becomes viable just because the govermemet decrees it.
And to be fair to the government, we ask too much of them. Why do we expect them to be bothered about conducting due diligence when they know that they are after all, not putting their own money at risk? It’s other people money.. It is an environment whereby whether the process succeeds or fails, has no bearing on neither their tenure nor earnings.
By listing a litany of failed government projects as I did above, should not be misconstrued as casting aspersions on the role of government. Of course the government has an important role to play in our lives. So the long and short of it, is that we need government. The role that the government should play is to regulate business and ensure that we are safe. It must also help the indigent without necessarily being directly involved in delivering food packages or paying old age pensions.
This is why the late US president Ronald Reagan once quipped that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m am from the government and I’m here to help”
