We have just come out of a recession that hit hard on government expenditure in the last two or three years and we now hear there is another recession looming in the not so distant future. In the midst of all these financial concerns and constraints on government spending we still see a sizeable percentage of funds going into what some have refered to as programs or projects of political expediency.
In brief with or without recessions we have always seen governments around the world, including ours, continue to allocate substantial finances to social welfare programs. What I want to discuss briefly this week is the implicaction of these social welfare expenditures on public service spending and the rationalization of the impacts of these on other pronounced priorities with respect to responses to the recession and government “commitment” to reducing government expenditure.
Let me first mention that while the rationale for social welfare programs has been rooted within the logic of command economies, we have neverthless seen even the leading market economies engage in some sort of welfarism of one type or the other. The United States of America spends millions on welfare programs such medicare, food stamps for the minorities and under priviledged, and others; Britain and other leading European nations also have sizeable percentages of their budgets going into social welfare. In the developing countries social welfare programs are a norm and an intergral part of government spending and these are justified as, in part, the basis for dealing with challenges such as poverty alleviation and/or eradication, creating employment or cushioning against both unemployment and poverty impacts as well as sometimes providing citizens with opportunities to venture into private investment of some limited scales.
It is therefore clear that irrespective of the type or system of governance and even the dictates of any economic system, at a practical level all countries from command to market economies still find it an anomaly to ignore welfare programs. A common feature of welfare programs is that they are mostly undertaken purely for the public good without considerations of aspects of cost recovery, cost effectiveness or even market based economic efficiency. This on its own provides a major challenge for political leaders and public services. Firstly, political leaders have to be seen to be committed to the qualitative growth of their constituents and therefore must, at most times, be channeling resources to these welfare programs, even when these provides a challenge in balancing national or local budgets.
Secondly, public servants are required to advise and intiate balanced budgets for recommendations to their political masters and they are to be guided by rationality and commitment to ensuring that government budgets don’t accumulate unmanageable deficits especially in the medium and longterm. In brief, public servants are to ensure that the national revenues can sustain the government expenditure and maintain prudent levels of managing expenditures. However, these are very challenging roles at a practical level and often divergent views may emerge from both sides, with the technocrats being usually more committed to prudent and careful spending guided by strict economic dictates as opposed to political expediency that often guides political leaders. It is this difficult act of balancing the two perspectives on government spending that has often seen governments choose to run economies on deficits.
In this world of recessions and other economic challenges, countries always find it very difficult to drastically reduce government spending and find it even more difficult to cut on social welfare programs. This is a major problem particularly for developing countries, such as ours, because unlike their big brothers in the developed world, they often have very limited and unstable revenue sources to rely on and consequently any prolonged high governement spending invariably leads to, not just unmanageable deficits but also, extended debts as foreign aid becomes a necessary evil in this equation. It is a given that most developing countries see social welfare programs as unavoidable and for some it is even a critical pre-occupation of governement expenditure considerations. But what should we be looking at in social welfare program and project management?
The difficulty in most developing countries is our preoccupation with too much political expediency that results in programs that are not sustainable in the longrun but more importantly, the longterm impact of these on the citizens is itself a problem. This is so because huge amounts of funds are spent but it does not create citizens who can eventually stand on their own and engage in productive activities in any viable sector imperatives. Instead our social welfare programs create a pool of very dependent citizens who ultimately start to believe that government handouts are a right for them and they simply degenerate into lazy, unproductive dependents whose livelihood is the responsibility of government. In our case we did this through the old drought relief program of the 1980s, the defunct Financial Assistance Policy (FAP), Accelerated Land Development Program I & II and now we have followed those with a new version of the Labour Intensive Programme and few others.
One may and should appreciate the intention to assist citizens as they struggle with the effects of unemployment, poverty and related social and economic challenges but cleared if in the longrun we are only creating a nation of beggars and dependents, then we need to think otherwise. This simply means it is forever going to be very difficult to manage the effects of recessions and even dream of cutting government expenditure by percentages as currently contained in our National Development Plan 10. Under these circumstances political expediency based programs will be on the increase and the necessary public service commitment to balanced budget spending will only be a corridor chat not a practicality. The challenge is for us to seriously explore realistic welfare programs that speak to the empowerment of beneficiaries such that they don’t relapse into the vicious circle of perpetual receivers of government handouts. We must prepare them to graduate to self contained productive skills and life sustainance. If we cannot do this we shall not prudently manage our economy and neither will we ever be able to avoid running deficit budgets.
*Molaodi teaches Public Administration at the University of Botswana
