Etcetera II

SANDY GRANT | Monday April 19, 2010 00:00

And this year, despite all the promises, has proved to be no different. In fact, the situation is presumably a great deal worse because the amounts of money available to government Ministries and Departments and parastatals to lose or misappropriate, increases year-by-year.

In other words, the rot is endemic in government and, self-discipline or no, has proved to be incapable of cure. But how can this possibly be so? If those 5Ds are to have real meaning, they have to be applied from the top downwards.

By report, the various departments in the Office of the President are amongst the worst offenders, not least the three security agencies, the BDF, the police and the Department of Intelligence and Security. But even they come nowhere near approaching the shambles that apparently exist at Botswana Railways whose gross financial mismanagement explains precisely why it was unable to run a single line passenger service. Self-discipline is an all embracing concept, which includes a disposition to live within one's means, either as an individual or as a government.

A sloppy use of funds, and an unwillingness to recognise that expenditure needs to be related to income should eventually lead to bankruptcy. In the government's case, this doesn't happen because a compliant Parliament will always vote in additional funds and overlook the failings that made such increases necessary.

The current debate in the imminent UK election is invariably of much interest - because so much is relevant to this country. But can anyone here believe that one day there might be a face-to-face debate by leaders of the different parties? It's hard to believe that such an innovation will ever be possible! In respect of the recession there, the electoral theme line of the Conservatives is, 'we are all in it together' and together we must see it through.

Here, there appears to be no such sentiment because we are so obviously not in it together and the taxpayer, hardest hit by VAT, and by electricity, water and food costs can only react with resentment, disillusionment or sullen anger. No action appears ever to be taken about successive Auditor General's denunciations, or about the huge amounts of money, which are lost, mislaid, unrecorded, mis-claimed - and no one seemingly cares. So much so that the government has yet to get around to appointing a new Auditor General two years after the previous incumbent retired - which is not so dissimilar as being reluctant to appoint a new Chief Justice. What can possibly be the explanation? Responsibility and accountability are inseparably related.

But it is not being viewed that way because it is the general public, which is understood as being the problem which the government is committed to address - its supposed loss of values, its self-indulgence not least with sex, drugs and alcohol, its immorality, its materialism, and its loss of respect for custom, culture and leadership.

But having the whip hand, the government's privileged civil servants are left free to mis-use, without severe consequent action, substantial amounts of the country's wealth - as per the Auditor General's Report. But are they or are their Ministers more to blame. Exactly where does the buck stop?

The difficulty about understanding today's Botswana is that the right and left hand are no longer in sinc, that we seem to be simultaneously moving both forwards and backwards, and that values, endorsed from the top, are being unevenly applied. Is this country, after 44 years, incapable of working out its own values without them being imposed, Pharaoh-like, from the top? Values need to be understood and practiced up there before they are enforced down here.