By Paul T. Shipale
Minister of Finance Saara Kuugongelwa Amadhila tabled the country’s budget before Parliament with an expenditure outlay totalling N$ 60.28 billion, which reflects a 29.1 percent increase in operational expenditure that now stands at N$ 48 billion.
Already the opposition and some unreformed neo-liberals imbibed in the market fundamentalism have started to criticise the budget. These are the same so-called intellectuals who keep quiet, ducking the debates and airing their views in private in fear of challenging the views of the dominant narrative that keep our people living in shanty towns packed like sardines in informal settlements serving as breeding grounds for crime, diseases, poverty while foreign land owners have large tracks of unutilised lands. These neo-liberal market fundamentalists never campaign for minimum wages, decent houses and salaries for domestic and farm workers, for security guards and petrol attendants, for taxi and bus drivers but want to lecture us on taxes, debts and spending while masquerading as those who care for the vulnerable.
Following the South African youthful and eloquent Minister of Public Enterprises, Malusi Gigaba’s intervention, on the occasion of the debate on the South African State of the Nation Address, on February 19, 2014, I wish to dispel some notions advanced by the chorus of the opposition and the unreformed neo-liberals with their market fundamentalism and their feudalistic spin doctors.
The inclusive growth theme chosen by the Minister of Finance recognises that our country needs to change apartheid’s development patterns skewed as they were towards a few but big towns and regions. In this regard, our inclusive growth budget recognises public sector spending as an important response to a shrinking global economy and sluggish domestic growth. Quite clearly, our budget is about outlining an inclusive growth strategy and shared wealth, based on the progress of the previous years of democracy and the new socio-economic challenges our country is facing in light of both the global economic recession which had constrained growth as well as the persistent and pestilent triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality which had continued stubbornly to dog the social transformation of our countries.
As our budget is about reporting on the progress made and also to discuss the programme of action for the new MTEF, it would have been total folly to present new visions and plans again on top of the visions presented already with their development plans. But, of course, the opposition always wants the ruling party to be stuck on endless visions so that they turn around and ask the question, “where is implementation?” When you implement the vision, they turn around again and ask, “Why is there no new vision?” Gigaba argued.
Like South Africa, Namibia too is investing heavily in infrastructural development, as a moral imperative for both countries given the multidimensional nature of our social and economic challenges. Therefore, as a messenger of hope and not a harbinger of doom and gloom; a consummate debater who never recoiled from rigorous intellectual debates; an ideologue who defends the concept of the African Nation and its Liberation Struggle, its policies and ideological outlook regardless of who this would offend or make uncomfortable. I fully concur with the analysis of Gigaba when he asserts that it is pivotal to shifting gear towards intensifying the struggle for social and economic freedom as we begin to usher in the second phase of the struggle for radical economic transformation or what our sister party of the ANC calls the second transition towards the National Democratic Society, characterised by high levels of equality, all-round development and a better life for all.
In this regard, our governments have chosen a policy approach predicated on three core developmental values: to increase the availability and widen the distribution of wealth; to raise the social living standards through employment and enhance the material well-being and to expand the range of economic and social choices available for our citizens.
It is against this background that expenditure priorities for the MTEF, encapsulated in three main priority areas of economic growth, employment creation and poverty reduction seek to, among others, fund drought relief incentives and expand rural water supply as well as the green scheme project. Yet, the challenges ahead are mammoth, not least among which is the need to secure the future funding of the infrastructure programmes both through the fiscus and the balance sheets of State-Owned Enterprises and SACU as well as through unlocking domestic and foreign investments.
Of paramount importance is that we need to find ways of strengthening the balance sheets of the State-Owned Enterprises, which in Namibia “keep extending the begging bowls to the Treasury for bailouts and thus ballooning public debts levels”, asserted Desie Heita of the New Era newspaper. Fundamentally, we must make significant strides in positioning our State-Owned Enterprises to drive a holistic economic growth and development process and build significant capability both to plan ambitiously and rigorously implement those plans.
Compared to the previous apartheid administration, when the infrastructure roll-out was taking place in inner-cities and towns only, we need infrastructure in rural areas, redistributing the wealth, income, jobs and spreading the better life to all. As we continue the roll-out, more youth are going to be absorbed into employment and skills-development programmes in order to address their very urgent plight.
Quite clearly, all over the world, people are realising the intricate link between the political and the economic system as well as the important fact that the political as well as economic systems need to be fair and just as Gigaba, the youthful South African Minister of Public Enterprises said on the occasion of the State of the Nation Debate in the National Assembly, on 19 February 2014.
The current global economic crisis has forced policy makers to rethink our macroeconomic management approaches. Indeed, our economies are facing the classic structural challenge of a middle-income economy and if they are to grow and develop, we need to invest aggressively in technologies and skills. For this reason, as a response to the structural constraints in our economies and global economic externalities, we identified infrastructure as both a driver and an enabler for economic development specifically designed both to expand our mineral exports and build our capacity and capability to design and manufacture intermediate and complex trade-able goods, for internal use and for exports, asserts Gigaba.
Accordingly, each day we witness the improvement of the quality of life of the citizens of our country when we connect households with electricity to the grid; when we build new houses; by improving integrated routes in our cities, towns and settlements; when we improve road and rail transport; when we open new plants and projects to support jobs. Much to the chagrin of the opposition, the exceptional strides made by our countries led by the SWAPO party and the ANC during the past twenty four years as we strove decisively to end the tragedy of apartheid-colonialism through programmes of social and economic transformation, they wished, that we did not acknowledge these achievements. They wished that this impeccable delivery records did not exist so that they would be able gleefully to substantiate their narrative of failure, which hopelessly disintegrates in the face of all the detailed record acknowledged even by independent monitors. They prefer to obfuscate the truth and being amnesiac about the past as well as offering soliloquies and throwing stones believing that what they say is true.
They are ignorant of the fact that we believe in an active role for the state in the economy, unlike our more neo-liberal opponents who are unreformed market fundamentalists even in light of the global economic crisis and its lessons for developing as well as developed countries. I therefore concur with Gigaba when he asserted that it is simplistic, opportunistic and misleading to claim there can be a single set of programmes that can create decent jobs at once, especially when you either have no vision or have one hatched quickly out of expediency in order to try deceiving a nation that keeps on asking the nagging question, what is your vision? Where is your plan?
Ownership patterns in our countries still reflect racial and gender patterns of colonialism, and the structure of our economies remain backward and inhibiting to job creation – this is what the opposition does not want to challenge and would rather defend. Radical economic transformation is the most critical question the next five years must answer, contrary to the views of our more neo-liberal opponents and feudalistic spin doctors who parrot whatever their masters are saying, even patently untrue stories.
I again agree with Gigaba that the choices before our people today have never been more sharp, stark and grave. As we usher in the second decade of our freedom, the fundamental question before our people is, what type of future do we want and how do we want to get to that future? There are difficult choices to be made and they must be made now! The message of doom and gloom articulated by the vestiges of the past firmly believes, twenty four years post-apartheid colonialism, that the best way into the future is by turning backward with one step forward and two steps backward, winning and dinning by day while backstabbing and devouring each other by night like a pack of hungry wild dogs and venom snakes each trying to take a bigger stake from an innocent lamb led astray to wonder in the wilderness and divided into bifurcated ethnicised identities.
We do not need retributions and revenges; accusations and counter-accusations of one faction outsmarting another. We need solutions and this is what this budget offers.
Contrary to those who think politics is an issue of personalities and a fight of Porsche versus Jaguar driving elites fighting to outsmart each other over the next lucrative tender or people living in affluent areas and playing hide and seek with our people’s lives, and not substantive issues, politics is about people’s lives.
• Disclaimer: These views do not necessarily represent the views of my employer nor am I paid to write them.