Sage wisdom treats leaders, especially top ones, as visitors even within their jurisdictions. Visitors inspect only what their hosts want them to see. The evidence of goofs may sometimes lie in the unseen.
The people suffer more when the visitor is also mired in the conspiracy. A former governor in western Kenya was prone to such goofs. The man had a tendency of launching ‘completed’ ghost projects.
One such project is the talk of the county long after the former governor’s legacy-less departure. It was a decade of squandered and missed opportunities.
The former governor’s aides fooled the people and the lame-duck governor about a supposedly completed water project. County government bowsers delivered water to a 60,000-litre tank overnight for the ‘completion’.
The former governor showed up days later, with his complacent entourage in toe, to officially open a fake project. The county had reportedly spent Sh100 million on the project.
Water taps generously flowed with water — as gullible villagers clapped to the successful launch of a project that did not exist. Ooh, development had finally arrived.
The former governor dished out bundles of notes to the cheering audience before he fled. There was Sh200 for everyone, on the occasion of confirming the official loss of millions of shillings of public money.
Leaders become more of visitors if they overly rely on their delegates. This allows dishonest subordinates to get away with deception. They don’t speak truth to the wielder of the pumpkin and the knife.
Sage wisdom advises good leaders to be cynical: take advice with a pinch of salt. ‘Visitors’ are expected to doubt everything and everyone until they verify recommendations with independent sources.
The National Government Constituency Development Fund projects fail in some constituencies because of the casual ways of some members of Parliament. The lousy ones rely solely on the recommendations of their lackeys.
Those lackeys want to amass for themselves every cent of public money they can pilfer. Such MPs consider contrary opinions and evidence of ghost and failed projects as lies and politics.
Absurd does not capture the scams that attend public projects. But miss-advice flies much higher.
The emerging backlash in the national economy, especially rising taxes in the face of falling aggregated national consumption, rising unemployment, plummeting savings and fleeing or relocating investments, may partly be blamed on advisers. They don’t want their ‘visitors’ to see and inspect everything that needs evidence-based information.
Revisionist economics is spawning a disenchanted electorate. That this comes early during the dawn of promise is reason to rethink the latter-day ‘progress’ model.
The spiralling effect of these complex forces – stagnant total incomes, rising taxation, falling consumption, diminishing savings and flight of investments – clears the road to depression.
The US paid people to dig holes. It paid more people to fill up the holes during the depression. The plan to spur consumption sounded illogical but it worked.
The architect of the Laffer Curve, Prof Arthur Laffer, President Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser in the 1980s, understood the disincentives that attend too much emphasis on increasing taxes, as the only way to fill revenue gaps to offset public expenditure or spur the economy.
Basic economics, taught to journalists in good schools of journalism, gives a different pathway to bridging public revenue gaps. Consider the algebraic model of the four traditional ways of spending in any civilised economy:
Let ‘Y’ represent total income; ‘C’ - consumption, ‘S’ - saving, and ‘I’ investment. Therefore, Y=T+C+S+I. Consumption falls when ‘T’ takes a huge chunk of a constant/stagnant ‘Y’.
Businesses flounder when ‘C’ falls. ‘T’ falls when employers downsize because they cannot sustain operational costs. ‘C’ plummets when prices of commodities soar. The Treasury knows drops in fuel and beer consumption may deny the State Sh133 billion in lost revenues.
Employers downsize when they are forced to increase ‘Y’. Retrenchment of staff takes ‘T’, ‘C’, ‘S’ and ‘I’ on a downward spiral, before hitting a point of no return.
When you find yourself in a hole, better stop digging.
