BY TANU JALLOH
When I listened to the minister of finance and economic development, Dr Samura Kamara and his co-guest, Joe Kallon, on Radio Democracy’s flagship morning show one of these days, I realised there was a complete break in communication to the masses.
The minister was apparently representing the views of the government while, Kallon, was there at the behest of the opposition Sierra Leone’s People Party. The subject was the economy.
While I doubt that the panellists knew their audiences, I felt they squandered that opportunity to reach the people on such an important issue on the eve of elections. I will get to some of those moments when they were at their lowest ebb, later in this piece. That was their nadir of difficulty; unjust to the topic.
From feedbacks, in the form of text messages, it was obvious that most of the comments were direct responses to the intentions that informed what Dr Kamara and Kallon had said and not to the important economic issues they addressed. The encounter was more or less a defence-attack game. At some point tempers almost flared up and the message was killed by innuendoes, gibes and scoffs. Their mission, it would seem, was to land some political capitals, although the minister consciously ruled out any such inkling to his effort. The vision was blurred, too.
Let’s assume that the target public included policy makers, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, university professors and the general public of mainly not-too-literate people. Let’s even say the main target public was the yeoman, a peasant or the man on the streets. They could even be the proverbial ordinary man or average Sierra Leonean. The uneducated lot. They certainly never benefitted from the experience of the minister and Joe Kallon. In short, no communication took place.
Ideally, and for obvious reasons, the target public should have been the ordinary Sierra Leonean whose life is affected directly by decisions taken at macro and microeconomics levels. Therefore, while talking economics on a prime time Krio radio programme, both highly educated executives exercised too much elitist tendencies as to defeat the very purpose for which they were invited to a public court of a platform. Thus what they threw at the public would be used to judge the extent of how far they were actually removed from the reality on the ground.
Then there was Sandi, from the point of view of World Bank, playing around facts and statistics at his disposal with relative subtlety. So confined to the details that he too compounded whatever was being badly communicated by the two parties on the panel. Figures provided were interpreted with the highest sense of equivocation, leaving the intended publics further drenched in ignorance. With such level of idiosyncratic approach to dealing with people whose lives have come to be determined by the soundness in economic policy and ultimate decisions, an important purpose was defeated.
Missed opportunities
Both panellists missed an opportunity to get the various publics, especially the masses, to understand exactly what economic policies were being pursued and why, but also how pro-poor those policies could be at a given time. Most times governments’ approaches to economic and social service delivery priorities are both informed by their manifesto pledges and donor conditions. Where they are at liberty to take decisions independently, they look for the most politically pru dent.
Dr Samura Kamara
As minister of finance and economic development, he could not effectively use parallel authorities to legitimise his government’s claims. For example it was a fact that in a 2012 statement on the investment climate in Sierra Leone, the United States Embassy observed that after the war the country was “being forced to move beyond the moniker of a post-war nation to one of nascent self-sufficiency.” That there have been no “discrimination, limits or denial of treatment for foreign investors. There are no known economic or industrial policies or practices that have discriminatory effects on foreign investors.”
He could have referred the public to the country’s Investment Code of 2005 that effectively addressed the treatment of foreign investors, thereby creating the basis for an economic culture that would eventually launch Sierra Leone as one of the most favourable on the World Bank’s Doing Business 2012.
He failed to tell the public that in a development policy note extended to assure the African Development Bank, he, as minister, stated inter alia that there were good signs the country’s macroeconomic policies were tenable. For instance, he could have highlighted facts that monetary policies have been set to achieve the goal of single-digit inflation in the medium-term while the Bank of Sierra Leone (BSL) continues to pursue its open market operations through a repurchase agreement or repos and reverse repos to contain the growth in excess liquidity and hence inflationary pressures. He could just not communicate what was being done by his government to arrest inflation.
With the ordinary man on the streets in mind who might find these details very difficult to understand, he should have told us that to achieve the objective of single digit inflation in a country still trying to balance imports with exports power (dis)parity; reserve money would have to be justifiably programmed to slow down. And tell us that during this period a restraint is likely to engender what people consider as hardship or may constrain the flow of disposable cash. When all of that has been clearly stated, he would have attempted to break down those entire complex technical macroeconomic policy issues in a way that ordinary people would appreciate the extent of his government’s effort at mitigating most of the macroeconomic risks.
Why didn’t he explain that as a government they were aware that programme implementation was uneven in the second half of 2010? That domestic revenue overshot projections by 0.3 percent of GDP; spending on infrastructure projects, fuel subsidies, wages, and goods and services led to higher–than-envisaged domestic financing. That it was because of some of these capital intensive engagements that the ceiling for net domestic bank credit to government exceeded the standard rate. When the government spends too much, tell people what you did with the money, so that they are satisfied. As the minister for economic development, he can also use the opportunity to tell the public that all of those monies were generated locally and that they were inspired by the fact that real GDP growth reached 5 percent in 2010, compared to 3.2 percent in 2009, reflecting growth in mining, manufacturing, and construction.
As the minister in charge, there was nothing wrong if he admitted to some challenges the government faces. After all such challenges are not peculiar to Sierra Leone. Tell the public that as a government you faced several policy challenges coming into 2011.
If you can tell the IMF in a Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies you submitted in late 2011, that interest cost exceeded budget allocations, why not tell the public the same. That other unbudgeted expenditure demands emerged, including from an increase in fuel subsidies to cushion the impact of rising international oil prices, higher cost to complete the Bumbuna power station, plus additional compensation to teachers. That the monetary expansion in late 2010, combined with increasing food and fuel prices, made it increasingly difficult to bring inflation down to single digits in 2011, as envisaged under the Extended Credit Facility programme.
Joe Kallon
As opposition representative, Joe picked on the loopholes left behind in the minister’s explanations. However, he went too ballistic in his criticisms that some important chances were badly taken and handled. For example that the minister could not tell what was being done to cut down on inflation should have been raised as a serious point. Often the opposition criticised policies as if they were the harshest to people’s survival because they were not in power. Alternative approaches to dealing with extant government efforts, where they are said to have failed, were just not part of the argument. Some observers have referred to such attacks as selfish.
Finally, I hope subsequent panellists would learn from common mistakes politicians make whenever they deal with the economy.
