Sink or swim

The silver lining out of the current government liquidity crisis is the restoration of sanity on government expenditure. In the recently presented national budget, Minister of Finance Calle Schlettwein has introduced prescriptive measures to resuscitate the gasping government liquidity situation. After years of throwing billions of dollars of taxpayers' money down the drain into State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), the government's liquidity crisis has made government see clearly now. We welcome the end of bailouts for SOEs who all these years perpetually handed their begging bowls to the government with no remorse for their exploitative financial transgressions and whining in the wake of “financial constraints”. Only a handful of these SOEs are profitable and the majority have been sucking the Finance Ministry dry since birth and have metastasised over the years to become State Agony Organisations. Organisations riddled with inefficiency and glaring lack of business acumen, they have hired and fired executives willy-nilly and paid them hefty exit packages unfazed by their costly decisions and plunder of State funds. Praise Schlettwein for emulating the tactics of the eagle, which removes the cushions of its thorny nest to force the little ones taking too long to learn to fly out of the nest. This was long overdue, but it's better late than never. Political interference has also hampered the efficient operation of some SOEs and blocked the implementation of sustainable operational initiatives. President Hage Geingob's spirit of Harambee should be instilled in these SOEs to rid them of the fragmentation that has retarded progress and profitability. The national airline, Air Namibia and national rail carrier TransNamib will also do better without unnecessary meddling in the affairs of their operations. With the port of Walvis Bay growing by leaps and bounds, it is incongruous that TransNamib is not bagging the benefits, leaving the road carriers taking the opportunity, while the goods train leaves Walvis Bay at 9 o'clock in the evening with coaches carrying six passengers.