Simultaneous budget readings give us the broader regional picture

My interest for and consumption of news and information got me at an early stage. I remember smuggling a small radio to school in primary six and hiding under the desk to listen to the budget speech one day. To be honest I don’t think I understood much of what was being said by the finance minister of that time but I felt quite sophisticated and fulfilled. The pomp that comes with the event was hard for me to ignore. There is that ritual of the finance minister walking into parliament with that polished briefcase emblazoned with the country’s court of arms and then going ahead to reel off huge figures and percentages punctuated with complicated technical terms always got my attention. I am now much older and a lot of that romanticism has faded away. Now that I am in a better position to understand what budget readings are really about, I instead prefer to ignore the real event and only look out for the analysis that follows. I narrow my focus to just a few sectors that I believe deserve my attention the most. I am more likely to ignore the figures allocated to security but will dig into the ones set aside for education and agriculture. I may also take note of the new taxes or tax alterations as they tend to signify where the money is or the government’s social welfare approaches. A few years back, the East African member states agreed to harmonise their budget reading process and for the last couple of years, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have been doing this on the same day. For some reason Burundi is yet to adjust its financial year to rhyme with the rest. Right now their budget year begins in January and the reading takes place in December. However despite Burundi’s exclusivity on the matter, the simultaneous budget reading to me is a significant event that in a way gets us as East Africans looking at the broader regional picture. As the ministers dug into the pages of the budgets for each country, some East Africans on social media were already comparing the budgets of the four countries. Such comparisons are a sign that East Africans no longer just think of themselves as citizens of a given country but also as members of the East African Community. This is a good trend because ultimately the economies of East Africa are interlinked. A problem at Mombasa port or Dar port can quickly paralyse the region. Similarly, improvements at any of the two ports results in faster movement of goods across the region. The region’s ambitious infrastructure projects have also been key features in the recently read budgets and all are aimed at improving trade and transport within the region. Some of these projects are also aimed at drawing in South Sudan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and thus boost the EAC economy as a whole. Already, Kenya Uganda and Tanzania are benefiting a lot from exporting to their neighbours. Besides infrastructure, the region also needs to boost its energy supplies to meet the huge industrial and domestic demands. This too can be seen in the budget allocations for power dams and thermal energy plants among others. It is not a secret that the region is eyeing the big power projects in DR Congo and Ethiopia to address its power deficits. That, coupled with the recent oil and gas discoveries ,are proof that the region has enough potential to make a big developmental leap if we do not make the mistakes others have made with such resources. In a related move, Rwanda has decided to move the famed annual baby gorilla naming ceremony, Kwita Izina, to September from June as in previous years. This has been done to accommodate a joint tourism promotion initiative between Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. The initiative will see Kenya utilising October to host its Magical Kenya Expo and Uganda milking the month of June for Martyrs Day that falls on June 3. We need to remember that with the single tourist visa and other initiatives, East Africa is often marketed as a single tourist destination and mutual support by the member states is not surprising. The travel advisories that often come with the terror threats or attacks in Kenya have proved to be a problem not just to Kenya but to the region as a whole. Countries in East Africa can no longer pretend to function as isolated units but rather must work as integrated units of a larger bloc.

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Simultaneous budget readings give us the broader regional picture