PM A MISALLOCATION RESOURCE

Allow me to focus my attention today on political appointments and the implications on resource allocation.

This comes in light of the prime minister’s (PM) intention to focus on the economy and not pay much attention to political stability. In my honest professional opinion, this is a gross miscalculation on the side of the PM; political stability is intricately linked to economic success at the present moment more than it ever was before.

Fixing the economy

Political stability is a critical component of a very important variable in fixing the economy, it speaks to investor confidence and consumer confidence. Good luck in fixing the economy with poor investor sentiments; I really struggle to see how you will be able to fix the economy when business does not have confidence in the political stability in the country and the safety of their businesses. How do you reassure investors that you will not wake up and find your business has been put up in flames? I also struggle to make sense of how we grow the economy when consumer confidence is also at an all-time low. The uncertainty really does not bode well for consumer confidence; consumers are not likely to spend much of their money in this economy. What this situation breeds is a scenario of thrift, the better to save money in readiness for when we start running yet again. All these variables are largely dependent on political stability.

Major downside risk

Truth be told, political risk has always been a salient, yet dormant risk factor in the kingdom, and events of the past two months have since turned it into a salient and active risk factor. This drastically changes the way in which business regards political risk in Eswatini. It now carries a huge weight in the eyes of the international community whom you would hope would come and setup plant in Eswatini and also it plays a major role in the eyes of the consumers whom you would hope would spend their money on commodities. This also exerts huge pressure on State coffers since a lot more has to be spent on security than necessary. You cannot fool the world to believe that there is stability and supply chains have been restored when all that is being done at the barrel of the gun. The fact that you have police with armed automatic rifles in front of every major shopping centre does not bode well for market sentiments on its own. It is an indicator that the authorities know that something is amiss, and they are choosing a military option to quell discern rather than finding a lasting political solution, the militarised response communicates magnitude on its own, it is an acknowledgement of the problem on the part of government, and what is left wanting is the adequacy of the response. This is, however, not surprising given the way the country is run. It’s worrying that the country is being run like an enterprise.

Political appointments

Appointing an economist or rather a technocrat into political office is a gross misallocation of resources. I believe the rationale given is that you need an economist because we need a person who can lead us out of the current economic quagmire that the country is facing. It is quite worrying because the role of the PM, like the role of the CEO in a company, should mostly be to give guidance and strategic leadership and rally popular support to get the country to rally behind certain policies. The fact that the PM does not care much for popular support indicates that the problem is much bigger than we thought. Also, it proves exactly what the proponents for change have been saying, loyalties of the appointed PM lie with the appointing authority and not with the population. This just shows that there is a mismatch between the job description and the actual outputs for the job; a PM that does not even seek to satisfy the people who pay his salary and choses to satisfy in full the person who appointed him. This defies all logic, the PM is paid through public coffers and it is the public that pays the tax from which he draws a salary and I believe popular support is critical otherwise the PM is just stealing our taxes. However, the responses are not worrying since he is a technocrat who is now mal-employed, meaning that the skill set does not meet the requirements for the job, and he attests to that himself, he only has two years in politics. As a PS he would make more sense.

Resource misallocation

The tendency of appointing technocrats into political positions is a huge resource misallocation. It results in mal-employment. Mal-employment occurs when college graduates are working in occupations in which they do not use the knowledge, skills, and abilities that typically are developed through college education. Taking an economist and placing them in the post of a politician results in mal-employment. There is need for a system that will train and nature politicians as they grow in their political lives to ensure they have the requisite experience and are rightly qualified for the job.

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