Mass test for covid19, bring back Carnival

Kiran Mathur Mohammed

kmmpub@gmail.com

The budget needs to do two things which are immense but totally achievable.

It needs to immediately fund mass testing to reopen the economy and simultaneously act on the Road Map committee’s recommendations to deeply transform the State’s role in the economy.

First: the immediate. It is crazy that no one is talking about the single biggest most important thing the Government can do right now to restore the economy: buy ten million new US$5, 15-minute Abbot covid19 tests, give them out to the public and lift the lockdowns. This is pennies – chump change compared with all our other spending.

If we test everyone non-stop, then it will be safe to go back to business and go back to our lives. I’d spend $5 to go to a friend’s wedding or a family member’s funeral. People spend far more than that going to restaurants and bars. We crave social interaction and need to go back to work.

Carnival brings in hundreds of millions. The Government is understandably cautious about having it. It is indeed far too risky without mass testing, but completely possible and safe with the new tests. We can reopen the economy in a week with mass testing and bring back Carnival.

The returns on investment in testing are absurdly high. Reopening the economy will restore thousands of jobs and incomes for a trivial cost, by allowing businesses to resume supply and more importantly calming people enough that they feel confident to go out in the economy to spend money.

Then: structural reform. If you read the Road Map to Recovery Phase II document you’ll find recommendations in spades (I was on the transformation sub-committee and needless to say, the meetings required no small amount of stamina). It is of course by no means perfect, but that’s the nature of the process. There’s a saying: a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

The State must cease its role of providing employment without enabling people to be productive or achieving their potential. But at the same time the State actually needs to get more involved than it is. We need government everywhere from infrastructure to industry. Our water system needs $13 billion, our electricity system billions more. The poorest need a leg up to get into the digital world.

These types of investments will create thousands more meaningful jobs that will more than make up for the soul-destroying jobs they replace. There is no shortage of projects from shipyards to software development from which the State cannot earn a tremendous return.

The report goes some way towards that – if not all the way towards recommending the infrastructure spending we need. It recommends that everything from hotels to rum distilleries to chemical plants to ports that are currently run should be sold off, monetised or given to private managers to unlock the value in them.

It recommends a vast review of all the regulations in the country to free our people from the fetters of red tape and free our civil servants to do the jobs they signed up to do. It recommends procurement reform and performance for civil service.

It holds up digital transformation as the key to unlocking growth.

I’ve been banging that drum for two years now in these pages and elsewhere.

Our leaders have more room to borrow and spend than they think. Capital always finds projects with real returns on investment. The beauty of this of deep reform is that it pays for itself and has done so everywhere from Ethiopia (booming before covid19) to Uruguay to South Korea. I’ve spoken to Wall Street bankers and folks at the IMF and World Bank. There is no one who will not lend or even give money to a government making this kind of deep reform.

This government has a tremendous mandate and has signalled its willingness to make serious changes. The problems we have are deep but not insoluble. From far off they look like a vast morass. It is easy to despair. But spend enough time breaking them down into smaller pieces and you will realise that we can actually make a difference very quickly.

The budget must therefore invest firstly in the mass testing we need to reopen now and secondly follow through on the report, tremendously reducing “non-discretionary” spending while increasing “discretionary” spending.

I am confident that the people working until 3 am on the eighth floor of the finance building can and will do this in time for next week.