Funny how “blow-out” gets so readily applied to cost escalation in the provision of public services (hospital rebuilds, the Cook Strait ferries) but when politicians get the figures wrong for their pet projects, its just a matter of opinion. Case in point : the original cost estimates for the Regulatory Standards Bill came to $18 million a year – but this week, MBIE calculations released under the Official Information Act indicate that the annual cost could be $50-60 million, or roughly three times the original figure.
Sounds like a cost blow-out to me. The sort of incompetence the Bill was created to prevent. MBIE has also calculated that between 95 and 285 full time equivalent staff would be needed to carry out the legislative vetting work envisaged. And already we know that staff at Seymour’s Regulations Ministry get paid considerably more than other public servants, on average.
In response, Seymour has queried the figures, and suggested that AI would help to reduce those costs. (Hmm. What could possibly go wrong if we asked Chat GTP to rewrite the Resource Management Act in the style of Ayn Rand?) At best, AI might conceivably cut the time spent on several basic administrative tasks, but that would hardly bridge the gap between $18 million and $50-60 million.
As the Greens regulation spokesperson Francisco Hernandez told RNZ, one UK study showed that AI would reduce public service labour costs by only about 5%. With the Bill, Hernandez says, money is being diverted from frontline public services into“one person’s ideological vanity project”:
“But the level of nuanced work of interpreting secondary legislation and how it applies to a principles framework…its not the sort of thing that could easily be automated.”
Nor will the Regulatory Standards Bill do much to restore business confidence, which MBIE expects will be negatively affected by the introduction of an extensive vetting process and related compliance worries that are unlikely to survive a change of government.
Offal in, offal out
This week, the news has been almost as bad about another ACT Party fiasco – the school lunches programme. In recent weeks, a venerable political gambit has been used to repair the programme as a success. First, government enacts a terrible idea, and lots of people complain. No matter how many of them complain – or how loudly – the government totallky ignores them and, over time, people just give up. The government then declares the decline in the number of complaints to be a sign of success!
That’s exactly what has happened with school lunches. People have been forced to accept a shoddier product as the new norm. This week though, Business Desk revealed just how shoddy that product has become. Reportedly, an offal mince blend is now being used in school lunches instead of pure beef mince, in order to cut costs.
The School Lunch Collective has started using a cheaper offal mince blend, a move that has raised compliance questions. The supplier, headed by the Compass Group, quietly updated its website to disclose the use of “beef trim/heart“ only after BusinessDesk and regulators made inquiries late last week. Business Desk understands the value blend, which is 50% beef trim and 50% beef heart, is about 25% cheaper than pure beef mince.
Feeding offal to children to make a buck….Truly, anyone who voted for the ACT Party at the last election should now be hanging their head in shame.
Out of Africa
Unless a natural disaster, coup or rugby team is involved, Africa rarely makes it onto our news bulletins. Even back when it was called Upper Volta, Burkina Faso barely rated a mention. Yet weirdly, Burkina Faso’s young leader Ibrahim Traore recently became a point of contention between the leaders of two of our major political parties.
Traore was praised by Te Pāti Māori leader Rawiri Waititi, and damned by ACT Party leader David Seymour with equal fervour. As is usually the case with any country not in the Anglophile sphere of interest, local media coverage didn’t go much beyond the initial “he said/he said” exchange.
That’s a pity, given that in the non-Anglo media, Traore is arguably the most popular political figure on the African continent right now. To Waititi, Traore is a “hero” – the view that Seymour has described as “insane.” Insane? This seemed rich coming from someone who – as recently as 2023 – was still expressing his admiration for Margaret Thatcher.
Why does Waititi rate Traore so highly? After seizing power in a coup in 2022, Traore’s regime cut ties with France, its former colonial ruler, and set up a state-owned mining company. He also required foreign mining firms to (a) give the citizens of Burkina Faso a 15% stake in their local operations and (b) transfer skills to the local people. To further ensure that Burkina Faso receives a fairer share of the benefits from its mineral wealth, Traore is also said to be building a gold refinery and establishing national gold reserves for the first time in the nation’s history.
The leaders of Mali and Niger are doing much the same. As the UK Financial Times has reported :
Their more interventionist stance….stems from a desire to assert national sovereignty after decades under the thumb of western miners and subject to contracts the new rulers view as tilted in favour of the companies. They have been rewriting mining laws, demanding higher tax payments and larger ownership stakes in the industry, but have also resorted to restricting operations, issuing arrest warrants and detaining employees.
The effects of France’s grim colonial record of exploitation and oppression are still evident. Just before Traore’s coup, the literacy rate for those aged 15+ was below 35%, which is almost half the average level of literacy found across the Sahel, the region located between the Sahara desert and the savannahs of Central Africa.
Burkina Faso and two other Sahel countries (Mali, Niger) have cut ties with Western colonial powers and forged defence links with Russia, and its Wagner Group of mercenaries. Unfortunately though…right across the Sahel region, the banking system remains in France’s colonial grip. How come this is still possible? As the US Foreign Policy magazine recently conceded in an article otherwise hostile to Traore:
…[There] is a growing frustration with France’s continued economic role in Africa, a result of the enduring Central and West African franc currency systems that continue to exist in twelve former French colonies in the region. This currency regime, which during de-colonization aimed to provide a smooth landing for African economies by pegging their currencies to the stability of the French franc, has endured through the transition to the euro until today. Yet, perhaps the most humiliating aspect of this system is that 50 percent of each member state’s foreign assets are held in Paris, plus an additional 20 percent for “sight liabilities.”
All up, one can readily see why Traore’s fightback against Western economic dominance and minerals extraction has struck a sympathetic chord with Waititi. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Burkina Faso regime, some of its brutal suppression of dissent has been a survival tactic in the face of the advances by jihadi military forces. For that reason alone, Traore’s survival is in the West’s self-interest.
The jihadis appear to be winning, across much of the Sahel region. To combat them, the Sahel governments that have kicked out France and the United States have not only turned to the Wagner Group for military assistance, but have offered mining rights to Moscow in compensation. Russian assistance has also boosted Traore’s sophisticated social media presence. As a result, deepfake AI videos of Beyonce, Justin Bieber and R Kelly have appeared online in which they appear to wish God’s blessing on Ibrahim Traore for a long life, and for many more years of enlightened rule.
In reality, Traore’s rule barely extends beyond the country’s two main cities, with jihadi militia controlling much of the countryside. Elections have to be deferred, Traore claims, until these Salafi fundamentalist forces are defeated – otherwise, people would be killed by the rebels for daring to cast a ballot. Given the extent of the jihadi threat, Burkina Faso is now rated by some as being the world’s number one centre of Salafi terrorism.
Footnote: Unfortunately, politics readily lends itself to this lionising vs demonising process, focussed on individual heroes and villains. The Congolese politician Laurent Kabila once called this process ‘dancing in the glory of the monster.’ Meaning : it’s not about the man, it should be about the system. We need to better understand why the political system rewards the sort of leaders we get.
Anthem for a nation
The Ivory Coast has always had a strong influence on the music of Burkina Faso. Born in Ivory Coast, the artist now known as Floby has been a fixture on the Burkinabe music scene for over 15 years. From last year, here’s a single in which he celebrates his country, and its people: