Our budget needs to go on a diet

I mean your bladder balloons to the size of the budget and you don’t smile when emptying it? That is not possible. 

What is possible, however, is the budget being big enough to take care of itself. In fact, it can now vote and even settle down with a female called Budgette. 

After all, the budget is now Shs72 trillion and counting. If it gets any bigger, it might need a diet which, ironically, is what the Japanese parliament is called. 

Yes, you saw correctly: the Japanese parliament is called the diet.

To be sure, if your parliament is called the diet, then you must be into budgets whose body-mass index is not an index of your mass body. 

So maybe there is something in a name. And if we rename our parliament the diet, it may no longer feed itself on a diet of negatives.

As it develops a flat-stomached regard for budget making, it might spare us taxes arising out of a swollen prostate of a fiscal policy.

Sure, I am aware that when some people hear the word ‘fiscal’ they imagine that it is time to get physical. 

So, they raise a fistful of shillings to punch the economy in the solar plexus with new costs and no benefits. 

However, the minister of “fine Nancy” can stop this trend with some responsible budgeting. 
The first place that the minister should start when thinking about the budget is our income. 

This is simply how much money we, as a country, have coming in each month (not to be confused with savings, which is how much money we currently have and should not be dipping into if we can help it).

Accordingly, we must record all sources of income, including wages, social security and anything Baddie Black makes.

That lady is great at making “dough”, so we knead her. Plus, I hear that her brother is US actor Jack Black. His net worth is $50 million. 

Anyway, the minister could also look at our fixed expenses. 

These are expenses that are inflexible, won’t be changing, and that we cannot eliminate. 
For example, the amount we pay for the President and his Cabinets is a fixed expense, as are our utilities costs, etc. 

Deduct these fixed expenses from our national income so that we know how much we have left for other spending on roads to our favourite Kafundas. 

We need to be very serious on that last point so that we can be smiling from beer-to-beer when it comes to toasting a great budget making exercise. 

Speaking of exercise, we might also recommend the budget tries it in order to cut down on its own size. Currently, it is morbidly overweight.

Debt servicing also falls into our fixed expenses. For example, the government has to pay for the medical bills of all Ugandans after giving us a collective headache with all those policies that wind up in the toilet. 

We are stressed with the Parish Development Model, for instance. We heard it was a model but we have not seen it modelling in local fashions such as the Abryanz Collection. 

So we do not believe it is a model, well, unless it suddenly becomes a Kabareebe, Zuena or a Bettinah. 

The next category the minister must think about when creating a budget is related to flexible and unplanned/emergency expenses. 

Flexible expenses refer to things that you want, but don’t necessarily need, such as Balaam’s orange shirts. 

We can also do without any more zeroes in our expenses at the NRM secretariat, so Mr OO might have to go. 

Ordinarily, the minister should look at the savings we make as a country. But since the country was saved in 1986, this is unnecessary.