The Conspiracy Against The Trickling Down Effect.... Part Two

| Monday August 6, 2007 00:00

The free market economy, coined around the naturalistic law of nature or the law of the jungles, popularly known as the 'survival of the fittest' whereby only those with strong financial muscle are having the benefits and the privilege of a national cake. Many are now seeing the salary commission as a new possibility that might herald a new dawn in this era of economic hardship. Although reality and expectations never cordially co-exists many are expecting the commission to serve as an anti-poverty measure across all our societal stratification.

Nevertheless, similarly I guess it's about time now that we should all now be concerned with the extent and speed at which our country's wealth is trickling down to reach the hands of the poor, even the poorest in our social strata. The 'trickling down process' is simply a diffusion process of economic gains and wealth of a country from the hands of the bourgeois class to the poorest people in our society.

Although there are different views about the development as a process, the issue here is not about how much wealth our country has accumulated in the past years, but rather the extent and speed at which benefits of the development should reach out to the social periphery.

My layman's view point about the concept of development is, although in principle we cannot claim to socially and economically develop every citizen of this country, development has to be planned in a way that it would be able to address most of the basic social needs of the majority of the citizen. Whilst some might be skeptical about this that in the history of development no one has actually come up with the best recipe that would address all the social and economic needs of the people, realistically many measures or economic indicators have been used to measure the level of the development in both developing and developed countries like ours, such as the GDP and GNP per capita but still the economic indicators fall short of conceptualising the real life situation of rural poverty and to a larger extent the middle income earners.

 
  While fearing the temptation of entering the sphere of a complete discussion of economic development, my layman's perspective is that, many economists and political scientists would agree with the view that Botswana's economic status has the potential to become an economic power house for Africa and in recent years the country has experienced an economic steady growth in the last quarter, coupled with a well manageable population of approximately less than two million, the assumption is that the country's economy is capable of equitably feeding its citizens, hence the popular expectation by the majority of the people that as the country gets richer, the quality of the people's lifestyle changes for the better.

The economy of the country for the last quarter has seen a steady economic boom and many seem to be ignoring acceleration of the trickling down effect mainly due to the free market economic conditions.

 
However, it takes a lot of courage for contemporary political leaders and lawmakers to strike a balance or rise above this capitalist economic theoretic base to adopt a more pragmatic approach. Again, it takes a bit of a unique breed of contemporary political leaders to appreciate that time and space is the determining factor when developing economic plans for the people.

 
Finally, it remains to be seen whether the legacy of the gap between the poor and rich would become top of agenda in the salary commission or as Billy Ocean puts it, 'when the going gets tough, the tough has to get going' so.
 
By Bruce W. Kojane
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