I was at Fairground Office Park a couple of days ago, sitting in my car and waiting for a friend who had gone into one of the swanky offices in that precinct. It was a pretty hot day but I switched off the engine -and by implication the air conditioner – to save fuel and opened the windows as an alternative means of ventilation. It didn’t work quite well but it was what it was. Before long, a government vehicle pulled up by my side, and out came a lady who also checked into one of the offices. Her driver remained in the car and instead of switching off the engine as regular people do, he did not, so that he could run the air conditioner. I also would not have been surprised that the officer that he was transporting was merely delivering letters or some such trivial errand. Even as fuel prices continue to spiral out of control, it is not uncommon to see government drivers drive around in gas guzzling 4 x 4s to drop letters. So the whole notion of belt-tightening remains foreign to them.
We sat there in our cars for a good thirty minutes waiting for our respective companions to finish whatever they were doing. Throughout that time, this other car in question had its engine running because it belongs to the government. That being the case, the driver does not have to worry about getting a bang for his buck as far as fuel usage is concerned. He fills up whenever he goes low and minutiae such as fuel usage are the least of his concerns. And by the way, I don’t begrudge him for having his air-conditioner in a stationary car while I could not afford that. I guess I would do the same if I had access to a car whose running costs I never had to worry about.
Many ordinary people do not do that when driving their cars and that goes for off–duty government drivers too. The fact that he had in his possession an asset that does not belong to him personally is what influences his behavior. After all, that car that on paper belonged to all of us but in reality no one in particular. He can waste as much fuel as he likes during his course of work and that doesn’t matter. That then is the problem with the government. The smaller the fleet that the government owns the better would all of us be because we won’t have to fund wasteful spending. I truly shudder to think about the billions that go into funding fuel costs by our outsized government fleet.
The amount of waste that goes on in other sectors of the public service is another area of concern. Let’s take roads. The government is simply not treating the task of maintaining roads even here in the nation’s capital, with the seriousness that it deserves. The city‘s roads are littered with potholes and one worries that we may be reaching a point of lowering the bar to the extent of accepting potholes as an inevitable fact of life. Yet despite this, everyone who should be patching roads gets paid at the end of the month. So why on earth would they worry about potholes when it does not really hurt to leave them unattended?
The same can be said about schools, clinics, and hospitals. Education outcomes in public schools are simply not proportionate to the huge financial resources that the taxpayer puts in. Yet heads do not roll because no one really gets rewarded or punished for results.
The public health system leaves a lot to be desired and only those without private health insurance use it because have no other option.
The common thread of all these government services is that they are inefficient and cannot be improved by peppering them with even more money. It is simply the nature of government to be inefficient and wasteful. This is why many governments in the developed world have outsourced many activities to the private sector. Botswana must simply follow suit for all of us to prosper.
