The Floods, Force of Nature or simply Political Ineffectiveness?

Published in El Pais, 14 Feb 2018

The past weeks Bolivia has been exposed to heavy rains. Although, we could need some extra water after a long drought, it has been coming down too fast, too much. The resulting floods made people lose their houses, destroyed crops, collapsed bridges and even killed people. I heard people talk that it is just a force of nature and man cannot do anything. I tend to disagree!
To judge a government the The World Bank uses the so called Worldwide Government Indicators. One of them is called Government Effectiveness. Among other is reflects the perceived quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies. The scale goes from -2.5 to +2.5 and the higher the better.
In 2016 Bolivia scored -0.57, Argentina 0.18, Spain 1.12, USA 1.48 and the Netherlands 1.84. Needless to says that the perception the effectiveness is not very high, and it shows that the government is not putting its priority straight or that he is doing things that are needed to be done.

By the way, there is also a corruption indicator and Bolivia doesn’t look good on that one neither.
So back to the flooding problem. Houses destroyed, people killed and injured, and likely more rain to come so the total damage is yet unknown. I fear that I have to say that part of this is the government to blame. If you let people cut and burn the trees, if you let people build houses in areas that is known to get flooded, if you do not maintain the storm water channels and other structures that are needed in times of heavy rainfall, what do you expect?

I think some people who are affected did know the risk, but others didn’t, and it is a governments task to warn those people as a good father and if needed enforce it. It is a governments task to make sure heavy rain is managed good, but as always priorities go for less important but more visible things, such as parks, fountains, fireworks etc. Besides people always underestimate things occur only once every 5 years.

Now lets hope everybody learned a lesson and do not forget it when it stops raining and the government makes a strong and effective plan that prevents this from happening again.