Wishful thinking
Correspondent | Friday January 29, 2021 16:46
I would like to use both classical music and a technique within it as a metaphor for what I propose we could do to imagine the kind of ordered and egalitarian society that should be the aim of any responsive government.
Popularised in the Baroque era (1600-1750) by Johann Sebastian Bach – widely regarded as the greatest composer of all time – counterpoint is the writing of a piece of music using rhythms and melodies that eventually coalesce harmonically. (A good example as any is here – Bach: Complete Concertos).
If popular music helps us find ourselves, I would like to say that classical music leads us to find something greater than ourselves.
And so should our annual budget speech, I reckon.
Our national budget speech re-allocates financial resources across our country, contributes to economic growth, paves the way for economic stability, and seeks to reduce inequalities in private earnings and wealth. These are objects greater than one ministry, greater than one set of elites, and where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As in a concerto, our Minister of Finance will deliver his budget speech as a soloist in a type of dialogue between him and his Cabinet colleagues, and Parliamentarians – in effect – instrumentalists in an orchestra.
Let us start where it should begin, with our youth, who like the first movement of a concerto, grow fast. Our youth are sufficiently young to be impressionable, but old enough to understand the essential meanings of the broad experiences they have now or are witnessing around them.
We, that is, the parents to these youth, had an experience of a poor nation, intent in its inexorable march to some level of development, of modernity, and personal success.
In this steady march, public schools were our citadels of learning and the nurturing of raw ambitions, our parents and other villagers were the reliable, trustworthy and authoritarian figures of our lives, and our teachers were strict potentates of our classrooms.
This eclectic mix promised one certainty – success in life, later! I request that the 2021 national budget restores our faith in this national mobility and that we put our nation’s money where our priorities ought to be – with the public education of our youth while we demand better spending of it, better grades, and reduced spending on the frills of this nation’s economy: we know where those frills are!
As a moral and philosophical imperative, reasonable people ordinarily agree that the wealthiest people everywhere should pay higher taxes than others.
There is a logic to this, and it is here. The average person pays a direct tax because of employment or business operations – income tax – or because of a product or service bought – VAT. Both these taxes and a capital gains tax are applicable in Botswana.
A wealth tax is different from them as it is imposed on any asset that can have a monetary value, such as cash, property, shares, jewellery, paintings and other artefacts, and is levied even without the sale, exchange or disposal of that asset.
It could be imposed annually or periodically or even once-off: for us, an easy starting point would be a land tax.
As long as a nation (like others) we have income and wealth inequalities, this imperative and logic for a wealth tax might continue to gain prominence in some circles.
Nonetheless, just like in a concerto, we will be slow in criticising those who are wealthy, and lyrical in acknowledging their wealth as a microcosm of the dark heart of our nation’s level of inequality. By the end of NDP11 in 2024, it is reckoned that Botswana’s borrowings for ERTP projects and other expenses will push the country’s debt level to about 35% of its GDP. This is a debt that has to be repaid, sooner or later.
The government has ruled out any increases in income tax to pay that debt. With such limited options and with the unprecedented spending to counteract the effects of the pandemic, in my view, now during the 2021 national budget speech is as good a time as any, to impose a wealth tax in Botswana.
Much as a counterpoint in classical music, where several music lines are mediated into a single harmonious whole, I would like to propose two interventions in our 2021 national budget speech, to spur us across the bar lines of equal opportunity and fairness as a nation.
These are a freeze in our public service (that is the government and parastatal) wages. I reckon that as the largest employer in Botswana, the public service will lead the small private sector by example, which the latter will probably follow. The other innovation would be the introduction of governmental baby bonds at the birth of every citizen child, payable to them on their attaining maturity in a reverse sliding scale – to those who have more, less is given, and to those who have less, more is given. If they are accepted, these proposals would constitute the art of making one societal step lead by necessity to the next admirable one – indeed, the budgetary equivalent of the contrapuntal composition of Baroque music.
Just like in a concerto, the 2021 national budget speech will end as it began, fast. In short order, we will be exhorted to be frugal, to adopt austerity measures where appropriate, and to make do with far less.
And then shall come to the standing ovation, ostensibly for the soloist, the finance minister, but really for the figurative conductor of the orchestra – seen in Parliament but not heard – the President of Botswana.
He alone must convey a unified vision of the music of his government, in fact, his transformation agenda, to the audience, the nation of Botswana.
BONGI DDM RADIPATI*
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor