By Musa Sanneh
As the year 2020 draws its curtains, we are conditioned to return to The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, for the reminder that “what is past is prologue.” The year 2020, by that definition, is now a prologue. In the birth pangs is year 2021. At the threshold of 2021, it is apt to ask what lies in store for The Gambia going forward. Will The Gambia be better positioned into the distant future or will she continue to sail in rudderless sailboats and meaningless platitudes?
Regardless of the direction, I contend that The Gambia’s character and tenor must transcend those of Banquo in Macbeth. Doubtful of what the future holds, Banquo metaphorically asked the Witches of Endor to tell him about his own future by pleading “if you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me ….” Nay, we are not Banquo. As a people, we are way more sophisticated than a Shakespearean character. But as Banquo, I submit, even if the Witches of Endor were to offer us some witchy cryptic codes for a successful future we are likely to understand not because we are not witches. Thus, cruising in the alley of darkness, the fundamental question that must be posed is, to achieve the future promised to her at birth, what must The Gambia do differently?
In Much Ado About Nothing, Conrade advises that to achieve our desired goals we should “frame the season for our own harvest.” But framing the season for our own harvest in the case of The Gambia would require invoking yet another Shakespearean plot. First, we must examine the prologue, lean on its guardrails, and then go forth to map out the most realistic path ways both in policy and in politics. Let’s begin with the latter.
In The Gambia, as in other parts of Africa, the hot-button issue that occupied the polity for generations has always been that of leadership. The centrality of the argument has mostly been that if only the metaphorical lion — the greatest man, the indomitable, the glorious son, the honest and the most incorruptible man — is put at the helm of state affairs, all our economic problems will disappear; all societal wrongs will be righted; and that everything else under the sun will be fine and dandy. Under such impression, it is not uncommon for some people to even go further and postulate that institutions and institutional guardrails—the checks and balances and other constraints and safeguards — are merely extra burdens on the dear leader, and therefore every effort must be put in place to make them redundant notwithstanding their democratic utility. Leaders they posit are enthroned by God and must therefore be accountable only to the higher power. Those who seek accountability, they will argue, are nonconformist who must not only be ostracized but should be quickly taken to the gallows. Drugged with thunderous plaudits, the chosen few, those who are given the sacred privilege to lead, soon begin to graduate into competitive authoritarianism in which the rights of only the ideologically subservient allies are recognized and respected.
In antiquity, such propositions may appear to have some semblance of validity. For even in the most extreme and most primitive of situations, useful variants can sometimes be found in circumstances that in totality are unmitigated disasters. Dare I say, the people who often peddle such positions are people who are trapped in the limits of their own intellectually inelastic imaginations. If such people are not contained, by the natural scheme of their actions echoed by the distortive effect of their arguments, then society risks sinking into protracted conflicts once the height of their voices reached the crescendo.
The United States, undoubtedly, is one of the few democracies in the world that extravagantly appropriated power to the presidency. But it did so not without legal and other constraints on the chief executive.
In writing for The Atlantic, David Frum, one of the former speech writers for former President George W Bush observed that:
Americans have lavished enormous powers on the presidency. They have sought to bind those powers by law. Yet the founders of the republic understood that law alone could never eliminate the risks inherent in the power of the presidency. They worried ceaselessly about the prospect of a truly bad man in the office—a Caesar or a Cromwell, as Alexander Hamilton fretted in the Federalist No. 21. They built restraints: a complicated system for choosing the president, a congress to constrain him, impeachment to remove him. Their solutions worked for two and a half centuries. In the era of Donald Trump however, the system failed”— (Emphasis added).
Evidently, if the system could fail in the world’s most matured and vibrant democracy, it certainly could sink into abyss in a country just emerging from the ashes of dictatorship. Our compatriots must therefore measure their words and actions. Leaders are not saints. They are mortals made up of blood and flesh. Running for the highest office in the land is naturally never an exclusive function of a person’s benevolence, sympathy for the poor and the downtrodden, the economically deprived, the used and abused, and the rejected and dejected. On the contrary, it is also a function of a person’s innate desires, a crushing orgy that must be depressurized. Nay, Adam Smith was right. In 1776, in his seminal work of the Wealth of Nations, Smith posited that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” In pursuit for better Gambia therefore, indifference, silence, or ambiguity in the face of visceral intra-party imperialism or downright dictatorship at national level must not be rewarded with unmitigated plaudits.
In policy realms, I contend that The Gambia must jettison self-destructive and ideologically driven economic policies in favor of a holistic reorientation towards policies that gravitates on maximum restraint and pragmatism. For far too long, The Gambia has been exposed to twisted ideas that are neither rooted in evidence nor backed by algorithmically verifiably data. We are told, for example, that loans and grants by nature are anathema to economic development; that subsidies, microloans or credits for farmers are the keys to unleashing unimaginable economic bounties which we have never seen in our lifetimes; and that sovereign wealth fund is the holy grail of economic prosperity. While these ideas could undoubtedly make good talking points politically, and when evaluated charitably seem virtuous, but the contrast between the rhetoric and reality speaks volumes and opens valleys.
Admitting that less loans and grants preferred, I contend that in the short to medium term, loans and grants are not in themselves the problem. The problem is how we contract loans and grants in the first place and how we invest them once we secured them. Clearly, any butut spent or invested on a project that is based on a flawed project plan, if there exist one, is money not well spent. One of the most stunning economic development and social mobility witnessed in the 21stCentury was largely financed by loans and grants as we saw in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and in the Asian tiger states following their collapse in the 1990s. More on this later, but for now, the major challenge for The Gambia is how to wean off the various political actors from over indulgence in meaningless platitudes to the arts and science of crafting solutions to our economic woes based on data and evidence.
As with the loans and grants, the prognostics being offered about agriculture makes excellent sound bites but are not informed by realities. Gambian farmers, I acknowledge, have a lot of problems. But availability of credit to buy farm inputs and implements within the borrowing powers of individual farmers has historically not been one of the problems. The Gambia Cooperative Union (GCU) we must recall, used to disburse two kinds of credit to farmers back in the days—consumption loans, and production loans. Consumption loans were usually disbursed in the month of August—dubbed the hungry month. These loans were designed to help farmers bridge their consumption needs between the two harvest seasons. Production loans, on the other hand, were disbursed in the form of inputs and implements such as seeds, fertilizers, oxen for draft power, and other animal-drawn farm machines. Since most farmers could not provide their own collateral securities to secure direct loans from The Gambia Commercial and Development Bank (GCDB), the GCU served as the conduit between the farmers and the bank. A thorough research of the records shows that besides the brutal mismanagement, fraud and abuse by some officials of the GCU, the eventual collapse of GCDB and indeed, the GCU itself, has some of its origins from nonperforming loans that the cooperative union issued to the farmers. The financial performance of microlending institution at the village level, commonly referred to as the “seccos” provided instructive lessons of the ideologically destructive programs still being propagated discounting empirical evidence of their failures. For example, by the first half of 1988, the total amount of outstanding loans due to the GCU amounted to D76 million (Shipton, et al). And as of March 1989, both (Rural Development Programs) RDP I and RDP II suffered the same faith.
Furthermore, the records of The Gambia Cooperative Union (Demissie et al. p.56) show that a total amount of D1.4 million RDPI short-term loans were due as of March 1989. Of this amount, only D0.5 million was recovered representing 26 percent rate of recovery (74 percent unrecovered). A total of D3.9 million of medium-term loans as of the same date were due but only D0.9 million was recovered representing 19 percent rate of recovery (81 percent unrecovered). Similarly, as of March 1989, a total amount of D1.4 million RDP II short-term loans were due. Of this amount, only D0.07 million was recovered representing 5 percent rate of recovery (95 percent unrecovered). By the same date, D4.3 million of RDP II medium-term loans were outstanding. Only D2.0 million was recovered representing 32 percent rate of recovery (68 percent unrecovered).
Clearly, if all these mounting evidences did not change our collective psyche about agriculture in The Gambia and how it should be handled moving forward, then in my view, recycling tired and failed policies would be a colossal indictment of our collective intelligence
Equally, as we saw in Part 1 of this series of articles, we must restate here that beyond the expressive flamboyance of the words “Sovereign National Wealth” this author cannot comprehend the obsession with the buzzwords gaining currency of our time. The Gambia already has a sovereign wealth both in the traditional and in the nontraditional sense of the word. What it did not have is the derivatives that supposed to result from these investments. For starters, it should be refreshing to note that all the government holdings in the various State-owned Enterprises (SoEs) in their nontraditional sense are sovereign wealth of The Gambia. In the traditional sense, the receivables from IMF, investments in securities abroad, investments in the proposed West African Central Bank, investments in African Export-Import Bank, and African Reinsurance Corporation are all sovereign wealth of The Gambia in one form or another.
Alternatively, if the sense is to create a Sovereign National Wealth Fund, then what the citizens should know is that, a Sovereign National Wealth Fund is, for example, akin to your individual savings or investment account at the personal level. In that respect, we assume that every Gambian, particularly those that are working, would certainly like to have a savings account with a lot of money saved in it for future use. Truth, however, is not everyone who wants to have a savings account, including those who are working, will end up having a savings account. And the reason is simple. If you can rationalize it at your individual level then understanding it at national level is a slam dunk.
For example, at personal level, you probably are among those Gambians who wish to have savings account but would not get one anytime soon probably for several reasons. One of the reasons might be that you are not working and do not have other means to make money, and hence could not save money or make investments. No rocket science there. Right?
For the rest or for good number of Gambians the reason might be that they are working but their earnings are very small. And because they have very limited earnings, they have no discretionary income. That is to say, the amount that they earn are not enough to cater for their day-to-day expenses much less to have a leftover to save or invest. Is that you? Does it sound familiar? Bingo, you got it. For the reason you are unable to save or invest for a rainy day, it is precisely for the same reason that, as a country, The Gambia cannot afford a Sovereign National Wealth Fund as is being propagated. For many countries that do not have sovereign national wealth fund such as the United States of America, or have tried over many years to create one but could not such as South Africa, etc., this is one of the reasons. It’s not because their leaders are dummies and evil souls whose daily preoccupation is to make their citizens poor and crimpy. Given The Gambia’s dilapidating health and inadequate educational facilities, poor telecommunication and road networks, antiquated water and electricity infrastructure, soaring budget deficit among others, any talk of creating Sovereign National Wealth Fund now or even within the next ten years would be considered not only as an economic adventurism but also a profoundly misplaced priority. Development is about knowing your priorities. The Gambia has many pressing and critical priority areas. However, creating a Sovereign National Wealth Fund apparently is not one of them.
But even if The Gambia were to have a Sovereign National Wealth Fund today, the fund should be utilized as an economic stabilization mechanism or preserved to better the lives of the future generations. Sovereign National Wealth Funds by design are strategic resources for the future but not to finance recurrent expenditures. The reality of The Gambia is that the lot of the citizens needs to be improved and no idle resources are in abundance to save for future generations.
Thus, at the threshold of year 2021, it is apt to ask ourselves once more, what does the future hold for The Gambia?