An uninitiated’s take on the budget speech

In a quotation that I have not found in my admittedly limited reading of Vladimir Lenin, he is said to have once suggested that all Economists—the people to who, because of their training we assign duties to manage public wealth—should be shot. I doubt Lenin ever said any such thing. Certainly, the person who purported to quote Lenin had grown tired of economists’ penchant for caveats and equivocation. For example, saying, when asked for advice, ‘On the one hand…, on the other hand…’—and saying this more than two times, when most human beings have two hands only. These prevarications often lead to what seem like contradictions to us, laypeople. For example, in the current Budget Speech, we are told, in consecutive paragraphs, both that SACU revenues ‘are expected to decline’ (para. 14) and that the country’s foreign currency reserves will improve as a result of ‘robust SACU revenues’ (para. 15). Further, some Budget Speeches seem, to some of us, like rituals that have to be gone through to legitimise good and bad use of public money. Typically, texts of such budget speeches (a) blithely describe and analyse economic reality in very unsocial ways; and, accordingly, (b) make propositions that appear to have no, or very little, relation with daily lived experiences of the majority of society. As often happens, it may be the message gets lost in translation. Writing budget speeches also in Sesotho, henceforth, might go some way to solve this problem. The impression I gained from reading the recently-presented budget speech was one of economic gloom—most things are declining, or are on a declining trend, most indicators are down, etc. For his part, the Minister has bravely countered only with hope and optimism that based on developments and changes most of which we don’t exercise control over, things will look up in the year ahead. There is a lot that can be taken issue with regarding intentions of the government for the year 2021/2022 as reflected in the text of the budget speech. They include both what has been said as well as what is missing from the text of the speech. Unable to taken-on core issues raised in budget speeches, many of us usually content ourselves with protests about what is not in the document. My list of omissions, below, consists of issues that may be unfit for inclusion in a budget speech. First, the word denoting one of Basotho’s biggest problem, ‘unemployment’, appears three times in the text of the speech. Even in those instances where this huge socio-economic problem appears, it is not discussed in its depth. For example, not once does the Minister say how many employable Basotho are not currently gainfully employed and, therefore, living in hardship with their families. True, appearance of this and other words and phrases in the text of the speech would not necessarily reflect the government’s commitment to address them. Instead, at the very least, seeing the words and phrases in the text would be a little assuring, suggesting sufficient government’s concern. Second, the word and phrase denoting the equally intractable socio-economic problems facing Basotho, ‘poverty’ and socio-economic ‘inequality’, appear once, each. Again, it might be that even if the words do not appear in the document the whole budget is designed in ways to attend to these problems. But we need these phenomena referred to by their name, and in ways that show the government and officials have an adequate appreciation of the nature of the phenomena and their toll on society. Third, one of the most glaring omissions in the text of the budget speech is the need to establish and adequately fund robust disaster management systems to enhance government’s ability to respond to natural and other calamities. The omission stands in contrast to the Minister’s acknowledgement that the pandemic is going to be with us for some time. Indeed, experts tell us that because of globalisation we should expect more world-wide disasters. Our existing disaster management systems have shown themselves to be weak, rickety, and unable to meet challenges such as the current one perhaps because of underfunding. The costs to society are huge — deaths, lack of information for authorities, public ignorance of what is going on and what is being done, leading to public fear, leading to mental distress and illness, etc. It is not difficult to see that a number of social disasters are developing within the current pandemic and will require a well-oiled system to attend to them, probably even before the worst of Covid-19 is over. For example, government and officials have stood by as retailers hike prices of basic food to levels beyond what many people can afford. This is wreaking hunger and infant malnutrition in society. This and other coming disasters must find us in possession of adequately-funded and efficient disaster management systems and frameworks capable of saving lives. Fourth, the government shows no commitment in the budget speech to change course on distribution of public wealth. The pandemic has further forcefully shown that this is necessary. As has been seen before and during the current pandemic, not only do victims of the maldistribution of public wealth suffer indignities of having to accept handouts from individual politicians—TV Lesotho’s cameras unfailingly in tow—but socio-economic inequality also has the effect of further entrenching Lesotho’s disastrous transactional politics. I need to read the speech again, or wait for implementation, in order not to see this document as the usual budget speech and instead to see it as a meaningful attempt to adapt to “a New Norm’ of current and future disasters and a step ‘towards transformation’ of ways in which wealth is distributed. Prof Motlatsi Thabane