How Government spends public money generates controversy year after year. While ministers came out of Parliament on Monday applauding themselves after Finance Minister Ashni Singh’s Budget speech, most of the nation yawned in knowing boredom.
The $161 billion national budget promises a lot. But would it deliver tangible results for the average person in this land?
Last year’s budget saw a whopping $143 billion spent in 12 months, not to mention the billions of dollars in additional supplemental funding.
In fact, Stabroek News’ Business Analyst Christopher Ram said in his Budget Analysis in this newspaper last year that “the government has spent more than $1.29 trillion, excluding Value Added tax money, and other sums not properly accounted for, over 18 years.”
Over 18 years, we as a nation spent over one trillion dollars of public money. Where did we spend one trillion dollars?
After one trillion dollars and 18 years, we still have blackouts; we still have rusty water flowing through city taps; we still have gross incompetence in the health care system; we still have a justice system caught in the traps of a corrupt public service; we still have inadequate roadways; we still have hordes of indigent people roaming our streets; we still have garbage piling up all over the city; we still have poor drainage and heavy flooding; we still have close to 40 percent chronic poverty.
Government spent one trillion dollars. Where?
I am not saying that we have seen no improvement. This government solved some crushing problems. After the Desmond Hoyte government had solved the public transportation problems of the 1980’s with the flawed minibus system, this government solved the housing crisis of the 1990’s.
We now have a country with a functioning public transport system, an overflow of housing, easier travel to Berbice, easy access to food and goods of all sorts, and much less blackouts. We have seen marginal improvement in the health care system, though still too primitive for us to applaud, and we have seen some progress with pure water supply.
Business has become easier to conduct, with the private sector fuelling much of the Gross National Product.
We have seen progress, after 18 years and one trillion dollars.
Here’s the question: did it really cost one trillion dollars to generate this rather marginal progress?
The big projects, such as the Berbice Bridge, the East Coast Demerara development and the East Bank Demerara rejuvenation all came at the hands of private or overseas funding, including heavy donor aid.
As Ram observes, we cannot look to the Auditor General’s Report to track where we spent this one trillion dollars. Year after year, the Report becomes a white elephant, laid in parliament to gather dust. We ignore problems concerning the management of public funds that show up in this Report.
Government supporters would point to spanking new school buildings, the East Bank road and new health care buildings as tangible proof that one trillion dollars fuelled “development”.
Here’s the thing: development means the advance and progress of people, not physical infrastructure.
It seems as if we became paranoid about the state of public buildings after those previous 28 years of brutal mismanagement of State cash that allowed buildings to fall apart. So this government chose to clean up the outside of the society with nice looking buildings, including the international airport at Timehri.
However, in the process of fuelling nice looking hospitals and airports and schools, we neglect the human resource capital of the land. We over-develop buildings, and under-develop people.
One symptom symbolizes this gross neglect of people: the ongoing drive to migrate out of this country.
From the national budget this year, we see that government continues to pour money at the devastated social order, and expect that economic activity alone would solve the crushing problems, almost miraculously.
This approach, we witness after 18 years, fails to bring about a new, working social order.
The economic blinkers come from a government managed under the hand of a President trained in collective Economics, a la Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Thus, we as a nation fail, after 18 years and one trillion dollars, to develop our people. The human resource base of the country, the human capital and the intellectual assets of our nation, remain mired and bogged down in under-development.
Our development could be such an easy task. The road to a modern, developed society has been paved in the developed world. All we really have to do is duplicate the methods that the developed world uses. We could learn method from the history of humanity.
The foundation of developing sound societies and a modern, functioning social order rests on the development of people, of investing in the human resource capital of a nation.
That kind of thinking we hardly see in the national budget. Of course we budgeted for the education of the nation. But what aspect of education are we aiming at? We have seen that just throwing money at the erection of new buildings fatten the bank accounts of contractors, while our kids suffer from poor reading skills.
When we look to the developed world, we see that investment in people resources fuels development. Society is people, not buildings.
This truth hits home vividly in Harold Bloom’s book called ‘Genius’, where America’s premiere literary critic wrote a big book about the 100 greatest literary works of Western societies. Bloom found that originality of thought and creative thinking generate transformation in a society.
In other words, Britain became great because of minds like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wilde and Dickens. The US became great because of creative minds like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Russia, with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And so on.
Bloom’s work stands out as the defining investigation of the singular method that paves the way for development across the Western world, encompassing Europe, including Russia, North America and the Commonwealth.
His book not only lays out the literary road that great minds journey to develop ideas that generate society’s advance. His work is important because in reading over 100 great literary works, and studying their long term impact and influence across society, he found that this “mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds” actually created a vision for a flourishing society. This literary vision became a mosaic of what society could look like, and it was generated out of the creative works of original thinkers, encouraged and nurtured by the State power of the time.
This is where we as a nation fail. We fail to budget for the creative potential of this nation. We fail to develop a social order that generates great ideas, creative solutions and transformative thinking. We do not fund writers, artists, visionaries and innovators. We fail to create geniuses among us. And Bloom found that a society becomes a place of beauty in proportion to how that society cultivates, nurtures and hones its creative minds.
We have a national budget that ignores creative writers, shuns literature, and does nothing for innovative thinking.
So after 18 years of a society governed under free and fair national elections, after more than one trillion dollars poured at the devastated social order, and after building spanking new houses, schools, hospitals and roads, we still have close to 40 percent chronic poverty and a people migrating in droves every day.
The $161 billion 2011 national budget fails to contribute to and generate an inspired creative energy in the population.
For us to create a society of genius, greatness and class, we must first develop beautiful genius minds who transform our society with originality of thought and creation. It starts with a government that recognizes this essential truth of human society, as Bloom does.
This writer can be contacted by email at [email protected]
