This year’s budget speech, consensus seems to be emerging, has clearly not been among Botswana’s finest hours.
Not only was the speech dull and harried, it also came across as a mandatory ritual forced on a minister who only embraced it because he had no option but to honour it.
This past week, an acquaintance of mine, a man well grounded in economic theory forwarded to me a budget speech by a finance minister in Mauritius.
“Compare this with ours and you will realize why we are still stuck in another age,” said my acquaintance. It was the beginning of a discovery I have long suspected.
I may be wrong about this but I think our persistent efforts to compare ourselves with Mauritius are misplaced pretentions that, if not stopped, will soon lead outsiders to brand us a nation of delusionals.
All of the things we say about ourselves no longer seem to appeal to evidence.
While our government still tells us that things are not as bad, the truth of the matter is that views from our government have long ceased to be based on practical and testable facts.
We still think of ourselves as an economic miracle, yet we are unable to provide empirical evidence, by way of a national budget speech just what our claim to that success is.
Take a look at these two quotes from two finance ministers, each one delivering a national budget of their country: “Mauritius has gone up 5 ranks and entered the top twenty in the latest World Bank Doing Business report, after witnessing a decline for two consecutive years. On economic freedom, we are also for the first time ranked among the Top Ten economies in both the Wall Street Journal Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute indices. Various African institutions of repute have recognized our leadership position in Africa. In the midst of an intensifying Euro crisis, we created enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate virtually unchanged at 8 percent.”
And then this: “Mr Speaker, the domestic economy has undoubtedly experienced some depressing developments during 2012 ranging from declining output of the diamond sector to country-wide drought, there were some delays in completing some mega projects such as Morupule B and the connection of additional power supply to the national grid. Given these challenges, prospects of the domestic economy therefore remain fragile as it faces global economic volatilities particularly diamond exports which are destined for developed world.”
One does not need to be a professor of economics or languages to decipher a tone mismatch between the two ministers.
The Mauritian minister is emphatic in tone, certain in delivery and more crucially absolute in his decision to share information with his audience, deliberate and upfront in his plans.
On the other hand, our Botswana minister is exactly the opposite; hesitant, defiantly vague on the economic prospects, deliberately muddled and half-hearted in his information sharing duties, and in the process keeping away from the public key information that should otherwise be put to the public. Even more unpardonable is that the Botswana minister is not only non-committal and fluid in his deliberations he goes out of his way to underplay and gloss over serious omissions, failures, mistakes and oversight on the part of his government. The reason is simple; the Botswana minister of finance is adopting the narrative that he does because he sees it as his religious duty to shield his government away from blameworthiness. By disallowing thoroughness in his speech, he also makes a conscious decision not to associate his government with failure and degradation, notwithstanding all evidence to the same.
In here we have a minister who is creating an impression in the public mind that things are not as bad while also leaving himself an escape route, a safety valve if you want, that he could later use to say “but I mentioned it in my budget speech” vague as it had been.
Given what the Botswana minister knew about Morupule B at the time he delivered his budget speech, there is no reason he can refer to problems therein as “some delays” unless he wants to become a master of fiction, not least because of the economic implications of the disastrous delay.
For a minister as image conscious such as Ken Matambo to allow himself to become a willing player in this myth-making makes the whole setting all the more tragic.
In this instance, we have a senior minister of state deliberately using an important national event to not only conceal data but also avoid coming up with checkable facts that could stand up the test of independent verification.
But this is just one example of contrasting attitudes and techniques that run literally across the two budget speeches.
And given that for over ten years now, authorities in Botswana have often actively sought to copy-cat the Mauritian economic path how can it be that we miss out on such a crucial component of the Mauritian success – namely a willingness to be honest, including by way of delivering the bad news and accepting mistakes?
Unless something is done about it, the temptation to design the truth according to their own designs is one constant that will in the coming years be looked at as a single constant sin that ran across the whole of President Khama’s presidency.
Under the current government deliberate efforts are made to create a mythical landscape that only suits the master so that the truth ultimately becomes what the master and his ministers in government say.
Because their myth is suddenly taken up and aped by their lackeys it all of a sudden becomes a gospel truth that is somehow cast in stone.
