Political budget cycles that every voter should watch carefully

The president, his deputy and all other incumbent politicians have been spotted in the past several months bragging about the various development projects they have successfully initiated. The president and his deputy are notorious for this, and their several videos on this agenda are full on air in several local television stations not to forget the newspapers and radio stations. This is a term scholars refer to as political budget cycles.

Political budget cycles refers to a situation whereby electoral considerations drive the formulation of economic policies. The incumbent politicians will have incentives to manipulate macroeconomic policies to favour their reelections. No wonder even the local drunkards at corner bar are amused at the rate at which so many development projects have been completed and initiated during this election year. Politicians will intentionally choose and favour only those projects whose completion date will coincide with the election period and worse of all they will strategically delay and drag or speed up certain projects for their completion dates to coincide with the election period.

Scholars from France have nicknamed this scenario the red ribbon effect. This is because the incumbents will be trying to achieve the following two objectives; first and foremost they will be trying to signal competence through visible projects and finally politicians will be trying to sway swing voters through pork barrel projects. This is why a politician is induced to exert more pressure during the election years.

Politicians from France have been doing this ever since democracy was introduced into their country and it seems that our Kenyan counterparts have borrowed a leaf.
This is however a very worrying trend because most of these red ribbon projects do not benefit the long term interests of the electorate. A good study case is the recent collapse of the famous Sigiri bridge, which tragically collapsed barely a week after it was officially opened by the president in a highly publicised event whose main aim was to woo the local voters to vote for the current government.

The project cost the taxpayers a whopping 1.2 billion shillings and the contractor was under immense political pressure to finish the project on time for the President's vote hunting trip in the region.

This is how politics and ideology drive business cycles in Africa and other developing countries. Many African governments initiate several development projects that do not add value to the economy nor help the country alleviate poverty. Government policy makers come up with macroeconomic policies and economic variables that only serve the selfish short term interests of the incumbent politicians. Immediately after the general elections such projects die quickly despite the money and resources wasted in them.

The government recently waived tax on maize flour and allowed maize importers to do so tax free until the end of July 2017, barely a week to the general elections. Is this a long term strategy to tackle the food crisis problem in Kenya? Has the current Jubilee government done such a thing in the past five years? More so, will the government do the same come next year if the rains fail after they have secured a second term in office?