Budget should focus on wealth creation

When you look at the Budget Thursday, you will be surprised to discover just how much our spending priorities have not changed in the last 30 years. A disproportionate share of our budget still goes to sectors that only consume instead of activities that generate new wealth.

The capital budget is still way below the recurrent budget, which means that we are spending more on existing assets and wealth than supporting the creation of new wealth.

When you analyse the Budget that Treasury Secretary Ukur Yatani presented to Parliament Thursday, the picture is that of a government that persists on spending too much money on feeding bureaucracy, servicing debt and on wages and salaries of civil servants, MPs and governors.

The evidence is in the fact that the capital budget is still way below the recurrent budget. If you are in doubt, grab a calculator and work out the amount of money that Mr Yatani’s budget has allocated to the recurrent budgets of bureaucracies and net consumers of taxpayer resources such as Parliament, the Presidency, the Judiciary, the Department of Defence, Ministry of Interior and the National intelligence Service.

Compare the money allocated to consumption by bureaucracy to what is allocated to agriculture, tourism, trade, infrastructure and industrialisation and the inescapable conclusion after doing the math is that a disproportionate share of the budget is spent on conspicuous consumption by these forever expanding bureaucracies.

Yet another big consumer of taxpayers’ money is the category known as Consolidated Fund Services—money spent on servicing debt, pensions and statutory obligations. On top of all this, we spend hundreds of billions on funding the ostentatious consumption of the huge bureaucracies running autonomous government agencies such as public universities, publicly-funded research institutes and regional authorities.

Which begs the question: When will we – as a country- arrive at a national consensus that wasteful expenditure is hanging on the neck of the taxpayer?

Today, the parking lot at Parliament is a theatre of obscene opulence- a monument to the depths our leaders have sunk in terms of conspicuous consumption.

Displayed there are expensive four-wheel vehicles and limousines that have been purchased at the expense of the taxpayer.

On top of this, the government has to devote billions of shillings every year to pay customs duty on these fuel guzzlers on behalf of MPs and senators.

How do we justify these levels of ostentation? We are told that the legislators have to drive upcountry on bad roads to visit their constituencies.

Doesn’t this just amount to putting logic on its head? The MPs who want the big cars to travel upcountry are the very same people with powers to allocate money to fix the bad roads.

In terms of priorities, we are a country of contradictions. We will not allocate enough money for roads yet invoke bad roads as justification for buying expensive vehicles for MPs and governors.

We pay hefty salaries to MPs yet fully-trained nurses from medical training colleges take years to be absorbed in rural dispensaries.

Graduates from State-owned teacher training colleges have to wait for years to be employed even in the current unsustainable teacher-pupil ratios, and despite the fact that the government has been running the Free Primary Education programme for several years. University graduates in specialised disciplines tarmac for many years before they get a job.

The public sector is growing rapidly. However, this growth is only happening at the very top – Cabinet secretaries and principal secretaries retained on terms and fat salaries they were earning while working in the private sector, chief administrative officers with neither job descriptions or work and highly paid personal assistants working for governors and ministers.

The logic is simple: those who are out must remain out forever to make it possible for the government to retain and pay those who are already well-paid.

What this country needs are bold moves to rationalise the public sector around a limited number of core public functions and to make every expenditure consistent with the resources we have.

We will need something as disruptive as a revolution before we can see a reorientation of government expenditure away from spending too much money on wages and debt service to budgeting with an emphasis on creation of new wealth.