How to be self-reliant in 5 years
Honourable. Folks, hats off to government for regaining the confidence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which has announced the resumption of the Extended Credit Facility (ECF).
Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe rightly sees less cause for celebration since the nod no longer has as much “green card” effect as it used to on other donors who used to take it as a cue for their own aid packages with Malawi, especially budgetary support.
But Lilongwe still has a reason to smile. Short of Nepad’s Peer Review Mechanism, a tool African Union created for measuring economic and political governance of its member countries which never really left the manufacturer’s workshop, IMF’s nod remains a proof of good economic governance.
It gives the tax-payer—the source of government’s zero-aid budget—confidence that Capital Hill is on the right track and its revenue is generally being put to good use. Loss of tax-payer’s confidence can be a political nightmare to folks in government.
Take for example, the late Bingu wa Mutharika. He was massively voted for in the 2009 presidential polls only to see that support crumble within 24 months. On 20, 2011 his government could not quell a highly-charged massive demonstration even after 20 people had been gunned down by the Police!
Bingu also went through the heart-rending experience of being booed by zigubu-wielding motorists whenever his motorcade went past long, snaking lines of vehicles parked for days waiting for fuel at filling stations.
Loss of confidence in government’s fiscal prudence also made captains of the industry caution the Bingu administration they were seriously thinking of making their tax revenue hard-to-get. On its part, the civil society, under the umbrella of Public Affairs Committee (PAC,) gave Bingu 60 days to leave office or face massive protests.
Then came Bingu’s successor, Joyce Banda. Her administration easily implemented economic reforms—devaluing the kwacha by 49 percent and floating it at the same time, among other things—but when it dozed off on Cashgate , JB was shown the door in 2014, making her the first president to lose the vote even after serving for two years only.
The donors, who were unquestionably impressed by JB’s courage to implement massive reforms, were equally flabbergasted by the level of mediocrity in her government which allowed the Public Finance Management system lose over K20 billion to Cashgate within six month.
They froze their budgetary support, dismantled CABS (Common Approach to Budgetary Support) and resolved to disburse whatever remained of their funding towards the poverty reduction cause through non-governmental channels.
Prudence should therefore tell government that time to take the tax-payer for granted, just because paying tax is a statutory obligation, is over. If they know what’s good for them, governments would better handle the tax-payer as an egg.
Which brings to mind the problem of executive arrogance: imagine, all along we’ve looked to donors for aid that hovered around 30 percent of our national budget in total.
Yet, when the media amplified Director of Public Prosecution’s estimates that government was losing about the same 30 percent of its revenue to corruption, the Executive simply dismissed looked the other way.
Had the Executive been humble enough to address the problem instead of being in denial, we wouldn’t have suffered the humiliation that Cashgate has brought to us as a nation and the self-reliance which APM told US-based Foreign Affairs magazine would be achieved in five-year could probably have been a reality already and without inflicting much suffering on innocent Malawians.
Government ought to use a single measure for all the corrupt—be they the President’s close allies in the Cabinet or the revenue collectors at Lilongwe City Council who have been stealing 40 tambala from every kwacha the council has been collecting from market fees or folks in the private sector, including those who try to buy their way by bankrolling the party in power. n
