Luis Rubio
There is no better guide to determine whether leadership connects with the country’s circumstances than to gauge whether her vision of the past and future matches the budgetary reality. Nothing is more concrete than the content of the governmental budget, in that therein are shaped the priorities, interests, and perspectives that the governor imprints on her administration and on the future of the nation. All the rest, as a former Mexican president once said, is demagoguery.
“The past is prologue”, wrote Shakespeare, but in governmental matters, the past frequently becomes a burden because its components linger permanently embedded in the laws, rules, and, above all, in budgets. Decisions once made, perhaps justifiable within the context from which they arose, are, in the end, consummated deeds that become acquired rights and are thus untouchable. Many labor contracts, cash transfers, and innumerable budgetary items become political realities restraining the country from advancing. The English novelist L.P. Hartley fully summed up the problem: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. The key to the budget of a new government dwells on dealing with the burdens of the past, especially the fiscal deficit, but building the foundations of a different future.
‘Nothing is more important than investing for the future’ reads the rhetoric of political candidates, but very infrequently -in Mexico practically never- do these investments come about. Regarding the government, the crucial part is not doing things but rather creating the conditions for these to occur, which implies investments under at least three essential rubrics: education, health, and infrastructure. In addition, given Mexico’s circumstances, a fourth factor must be included: public security, without which all the rest would be irrelevant. Are these the priorities of the government?
Despite overwhelming evidence worldwide that education is the principal asset to be able to count on for any nation, Mexico remains firmly lodged in the past. Worse yet, the outgoing government did not break with that sorry tradition but also procured the politicization of education to an even greater degree. Countries without natural resources, such as Japan, Korea, and Singapore, converted education into their ticket out to development, and all of these transformed themselves, achieving very high growth rates and a consequent rapid diminution of poverty. The same can be said regarding health, the obverse side of the coin of education. These two crucial factors allow for not only the transformation of persons’ lives but also for the advancement of the country’s development. Are these vectors up for change in the budget?
Infrastructure is another crucial element in this equation but, in contrast with education and health, where the public presence typically predominates, it is perfectly feasible for infrastructure projects to develop with private financing, drastically reducing the need for scarce governmental resources. A view of infrastructure oriented toward the future would involve evident rubrics such as improving communications (and Internet) within the country, guaranteeing the supply of dependable water and energy, and raising the quality of highways, ports, and border interconnections. For example, it is evident that Mexico City requires a new first-world airport; the same can be said of the highways (like that of Mexico City—Monterrey and all intermediate entities, all these absolutely saturated). Pondering the future implies not only abandoning irrelevant projects of the past, even those built yesterday…, but developing and building those demanded by the future and a dissatisfied and increasingly frustrated population.
The urgency of facing the problem of security is blatant. How is it possible to aspire to development if the prevailing violence impedes daily life? How is it possible to argue for the future if children live in permanent uncertainty and their parents are still worse? The primary and most rudimentary reason for the existence of a government is security, but in Mexico that principle has been evaded systematically, blaming the neighbors or the past instead of assuming the fact that there are no conditions for the population to live safely and starting from there: from the bottom up. In contrast with the other priorities, this one is more complex to harness, but without this, the others diminish in viability. Paraphrasing Dag Hammarskjold, the former United Nations Secretary-General, “Security was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”
The previous government did not have one eye trained on the past, but both: as posted on a sign in London some years ago: “A nation that keeps one eye on the past is wise. A nation that keeps two eyes on the past is blind.” That is the key question: How can we free the country from this conundrum? That is the key question: no government can forget the past, but the government’s mission is to make the future possible. The budget must reflect that look: half toward the past and the other decidedly toward the future.
@lrubiof
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