The 2018 budget yet to impress me!
Wednesday, November 15, two days ago, was budget 2018 day as we all sat glued to either our radios, mobile phones or television sets, to listen carefully to our Finance Minister, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, deliver the President’s proposed financial statement for the next financial year beginning January 1, 2018.
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Expectations were high because we still seem to be in the campaign mood, over 10 months after the inauguration of a new President and 11 after the election which won him the office, giving him the power to form our current government. I dare say that those expectations were in my case not met.
Of course, a big part of the reason is because I am familiar with important parliamentary statements such as the budget, presidential, prime ministerial and ministerial addresses on a host of national issues from the time of Prime Minister Nkrumah in the 1950s to the present.
History
The parliamentary delivery of budgets from the days of Komla Gbedemah, F.K.D. Goka, J.H. Mensah, our own current Senior Minister, Nana Yaw Osafo-Maafo, and Dr Kwabena Duffuor, all possessed unique characteristics of their own which lived up to the hype, in terms of the satisfaction of public perceptions.
I am by no means implying that these fine men solved our economic problems with their style of delivery. If that were so, there would be no need to have Finance ministers after January 2013.
This is also not an argument that our problems have worsened and changed dramatically from that time. The truth of the matter is that the previous election campaign, the lurid and doomsday predictions about our economic direction as described by the eventual victors, indicated that victory for the now ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, will usher in not only dramatic policies, but that their positive effects would be incontestably plain to all of us.
That promise is yet to manifest.
Four
I believe honestly that this budget did not touch in any way on the four or so items that our people look up to the government for, for the amelioration of their living conditions in the coming year. This is the template I am using to grade this budget. I am still sincerely hopeful that as the debate starts and the appropriation and tax bills are laid, all of us can see our way to appreciating the bland, discouraging words of our current Finance minister.
The four items that have come to define the living conditions of the vast majority of our people are the prices of petroleum, liquefied LPG, residential accommodation rent and electricity tariffs. They are not inflation, budget deficits and business friendliness which seem to be the overriding emphasis of the NPP government as far as I can tell from official and unofficial sources. The related matter specific to the latter is the false belief that performance per se, or to be charitable, better performance, as far as the economic indices above are concerned, can guarantee continued stay in office after electoral cycles. This is demonstrably a false belief.
The electoral fate of the much-vaunted health insurance scheme is a case in point.
Of the four household budgetary items I have enumerated, and which determine everything else micro or macro, because they are the direct psychological impulses for the basic comfort our people need to participate meaningfully in national economic efforts, only one was touched on, and that indirectly by the minister.
The promised 25 per cent reduction in power bills across the board announced only last week by the President was reduced inexplicably to a range from the low of 12 per cent to a high of 20 per cent. We all know that it is a statutory body, the Public Utilities and Regulatory Commission, which actually fixes tariffs in the energy and water sectors, and so why promise in the first place, and disappoint the expectant masses? Our current government must quickly abandon the campaign mode before it outpromises itself out of existence.
Satisfied?
Vice-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia came to our attention as the then Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana in 2007 and led in the redenomination of our cedi by the removal of three zeroes. Is he comfortable with the prices of services and commodities when rendered in the old cedi he led in eliminating?
That a 14 kg cylinder of LPG is actually GH¢74 today, that is nearly three quarters of one million old cedis? Or that we buy petrol at GH¢21? These current prices are the result of several increases since our new government came into office in January this year, and not a carryover from the previous government.
These astronomical prices determine the way we live our daily lives and move about to work, travel or to go to town, and not the abstruse navel-gazing debt-to-deficit ratios, debts and the all-purpose inflation indices government communicators trot out daily like a funeral mass.
Mystified
I am even more mystified by the unnecessary self-generated confusion preached in government circles that free education will have immediate economic benefits. It is only after qualifying to be employed, and the availability of employment which makes educated human capital a useful resource to have.
But since we live in a now more interconnected and integrated global economy, our only hope of a breakout from current stagnation of being restricted to raw commodity production and export, now with raw oil added onto it, is to at the very least create mass employment through massive public works such as infrastructure, or for the state to lead in establishing serious factories and industries, not the cottage industries popularised by the defunct 31st December Women’s Movement of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, and now being described as one-district, one-factory by the current government.
This, of course, calls for looking for serious credit outside, what our government describes as debt, as if that is a swear word.
Unless and until we come around to accept that our problems and the security implications that come with them, cannot await this stately, sedate and staid pace of development, our conditions will only worsen and postpone needlessly the comprehensive and courageous apprehension and resolution of our catch-22 situation. This budget is a disappointment.