At the important event, the Finance Minister's brown leather briefcase —— containing sheaves of foolscap paper filled with all sorts of figures, and big words like expenditure, absorption, disbursements, households, framework, and peppered with black and white graphs—— would be held up for all to see.
Photo journalists jostled for the best angles, cameras
click-click-clicked away, the Minister flashed a wide smile and hold the
pose for a few minutes just to be sure they had enough choice to pick
from.
Then s/he would ascend the steps to the room where the long-awaited speech would be delivered.
And then the next day, it was a sure deal that all newspapers would paste the photograph of a beaming Minister of Finance and the notable briefcase to share space with the lead story and the headline.
And people crowded round the news vendors’ stands to read for themselves, and to ponder what the next year really held for them.
Today, we are privy to the proposals in Parliament, proposals served with threats of levies on this and that, because we are gossips, we are tax dodgers, we need to contribute to the construction of the roads we use!
The minister’s budget speech is public property even before he starts presenting it.
We know that the VIPs will stride into the Conference Center feeling very important, the army of TV journalists will interview them, they will sit in an air-conditioned room, pull out bottles of mineral water and PK chewing gum to keep them awake, and then sit and clap and nod their heads through hour-long speeches.
MPs will shift uncomfortably in their chairs wishing themselves in any other place.
For some, their eyelids will struggle against gravity, being weighed down with sleep.
Others will have planned beforehand to sit near their friends to make the session more bearable with conversation.
And even before the event is over, the newspaper editors will have already copied and pasted the speech and allocated it pages and pages to the next day’s edition.
Because you see, tomorrow nothing will be so new owing to this digital era where the televisions and radios will have shredded every detail, economic experts on talk-shows will have explained and expounded on the gains and losses, and woe betide any TV station that doesn’t have the Budget reading as top story.
And then there's the biggest competitor of them all, the new kid on the block --- social media!
Who looks forward to the budget reading?
Then s/he would ascend the steps to the room where the long-awaited speech would be delivered.
And then the next day, it was a sure deal that all newspapers would paste the photograph of a beaming Minister of Finance and the notable briefcase to share space with the lead story and the headline.
And people crowded round the news vendors’ stands to read for themselves, and to ponder what the next year really held for them.
Today, we are privy to the proposals in Parliament, proposals served with threats of levies on this and that, because we are gossips, we are tax dodgers, we need to contribute to the construction of the roads we use!
The minister’s budget speech is public property even before he starts presenting it.
We know that the VIPs will stride into the Conference Center feeling very important, the army of TV journalists will interview them, they will sit in an air-conditioned room, pull out bottles of mineral water and PK chewing gum to keep them awake, and then sit and clap and nod their heads through hour-long speeches.
MPs will shift uncomfortably in their chairs wishing themselves in any other place.
For some, their eyelids will struggle against gravity, being weighed down with sleep.
Others will have planned beforehand to sit near their friends to make the session more bearable with conversation.
And even before the event is over, the newspaper editors will have already copied and pasted the speech and allocated it pages and pages to the next day’s edition.
Because you see, tomorrow nothing will be so new owing to this digital era where the televisions and radios will have shredded every detail, economic experts on talk-shows will have explained and expounded on the gains and losses, and woe betide any TV station that doesn’t have the Budget reading as top story.
And then there's the biggest competitor of them all, the new kid on the block --- social media!
Who looks forward to the budget reading?
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