My best analogy of leadership is one where two men standing atop a hill see a crowd of people walking as if in a procession and one of the men turns to his friend, “There go my people,” he says. “Let me find out where they are going so that I can lead them there.”
Notice that he does not say “let me find out what my people want and give it to them.”
Last week one, Members of Parliament shot down a government proposal to have their salaries determined by an independent body, two related to that issue MPs forced through an amendment for them to earn a pension and finally they look set to endorse the creation of another 15 districts.
As an example of the hemorrhage that is public administration each of the more than 300 MPs is entitled to a basic salary of about sh1.5m but with the addition of mileage, subsistence and responsibility allowances this can climb to as much as sh8.0m. This makes for annual bill of sh5.4b on basic salaries alone never mind other administrative costs.
An additional 15 districts means an automatic expansion of the house by that much, never mind the new monies needed to run the new district administrations.
The net effect of this is to increase the already high cost of public expenditure in this country to the detriment of the productive sectors of the economy.
This country’s number one priority is to create wealth that will be distributed – barring corruption, to alleviate poverty and every decision taken by government should reflect this.
A higher public expenditure bill is counter productive because to balance the budget government will be forced to cut expenditure from the productive sectors to feed the black hole of public administration.
Public expenditure may be a necessary evil but we need to cut our suit to fit the cloth.
In fact this increasing public expenditure is more sinister than the numbers suggest.
What in effect increased public expenditure means is a shift of resources to the mostly urban paper pushers who add little value to our society but on the contrary preserve a status quo that is increasingly unsustainable.
“The 30.3% of the budget spent on roads and education constitutes expenditure on long term investments, whereas the 12.5% of the budget spent on public administration is purely consumption expenditure,’ according to the finance ministry in its “Guide to macroeconomic management in Uganda”.
“At the same time, sectors which could make a significant contribution to growth such as agriculture, energy and trade and tourism cumulatively receive less than 7% of the budget.”
The sad truth is that this trend just feeds off it self – if you make a short term concession here you will have to make another elsewhere if only to avert the perception of favoritism, tribalism, sectarianism, whatever.
By continuing to increase public expenditure our political class is succumbing to parochial pressures and greed while abdicating their roles as leaders meant to shepherd us to the Promised Land.
If you extrapolate the current trends five, ten, fifteen years down the line you cannot help but conclude that because of the sheer inappropriateness of its size the public sector will become increasingly inefficient and irrelevant as the private sector finds novel ways to work around it.
This will be a disaster because it will increase unpredictability and as a result the cost of doing business in this country. By logical extension this will discourage the investments supposed to create the wealth to lift us out of poverty.