This experiment in democracy is a very interesting one. It has left us with a legacy of an electorate who have been slowly brainwashed into thinking that free handovers are a definition of greatness. It meshes well into the concept of “socialism” or a post-coup era, post-cold war era “socialism” where the bragging rights of a regime are how many free “jobs” they gave people, how much free food children ate, how many free clothes they got, etc.
Very interesting, if you decide to compare the amount of profligate expense and attention that is dedicated to the discourse around these freebies, to what the intent has been, or the attempts have been to actually elevate the lifestyle of the same people who are loved and cherished by these neo-socialists.
This is unscientific, but I can bet you that for every dollar spent on free food, there is a value chain of untraceable corruption and losses to the state that is immense. This is because all these interventions require procurement activity, to which goals are quite subjective, and the evidence superficial.
So a shiny new road is built and applauded, a shiny new schoolhouse, free shoes and slippers, free uniforms, etc. Keep the people begging for more free stuff. There is no benchmark of the qualitative gain that the people that are so cherished get.
At the expense of these freebies are a neglect of the most important resource that is actually needed to make real change happen, that’s capital. Be it human or resource or financial, the focus shifts to what free things can be gotten to how creatively we can enhance our capital.
It isn’t sexy anymore for governments to rigorously pursue agenda for educational transformation, promote more science and technology training, promote more accountability through stronger institutions, policies that allow more businesses to reinvest capital and all that, because these require too much hard thinking.
Get a loan and build a few things and point to them as your gift for the nation. Reduce expectations of the people to only the low hanging fruits, do not elevate the debate and create deep thoughts, do not encourage analytical thought processes and behavior. Its too complex. Feed into the lazy mentality of the people and tap its immense potential to confuse the laziness as being downtrodden.
Brilliant, but true. So the best will not thrive here but leave to where merit is earned through genuine pursuit of excellence, where excellence is nurtured as a gift and not as an unnecessary accessory that will be a barrier to graft, greed and political power.
