Ibusa gave an emphatic headshake. “Until I saw what this computer Shalmaneser can tell us, I was afraid of that too. But I do now believe we can cope with all those problems, provided we can continue to rely on General Technics’ assistance in processing the information. What it comes down to is that we have here the first-ever chance in history to control a country’s economy directly. There will not be any taxes in the traditional sense!”
He leafed through his own set of Shalmaneser printouts.
“There will first be the loan in which the American government will take its fifty-one per cent share. From it we will make a series of loans of our own, some of which will be into investment funds the interest on which will pay for the following: a subsistence ration of food, an issue of clothing to all working people and children of school age, and medical care of an improved standard. There will also be a building allowance to heads of families which will by law have to be spent on domestic improvements such as house-repairs.
“But the cost of the project will at once be of the order of three times our present GNP. Simply by controlling what the computer says we shall be controlling directly a higher proportion of the money circulating in the country than is possible anywhere in the world.
“At the worst possible reading of the factors concerned, the gain to Beninia will consist in the removal of starvation and the improvement of personal and public health. That is, if returns from the markets we intend going into do no more than pay for the guaranteed interest on the original loan.
“Much more likely, we shall also enjoy a very high standard of literacy and technical skill, the fruits of better housing, transport, harbour facilities, housing, school buildings, everything. Especially we shall have power in every house for the first time ever.”
His voice dropped away to a whisper and his eyes went out of focus as though he were staring at a dream.
“When you say there will be no taxes, Ram!” Obomi said sharply. “You mean there will be fixed prices and deductions of income at source? There will have to be a great deal of enforcement, and I have always hated enforcing regulations on my people!”
“Ah—it should not be necessary,” Ibusa muttered.
“Why not?”
“Suppose inflation actually runs at the probable level of five per cent in the first year,” Ibusa said. “We shall withhold the amount of purchasing power corresponding to what would cause a ten per cent increase. There will be a real rise in the standard of living anyway because of the free issues and the loans; the pinch will not be felt. We shall then have surplus purchasing power to release in the year following, when people are growing accustomed to their new prosperity. But in the meantime we shall have loaned out the money we withheld and it will have grown, giving us the power to withhold a further portion, and so on. At the end of twenty years, when the groundwork of the project is complete and everything is in operation, that fund of reserved purchasing power will be used to buy back for the country whatever item still mortgaged is judged most essential to our independent development. It might be the new harbour facilities, it might be the power-system, it might be anything, but there will be enough to let us make the right choice.”
He suddenly gave a broad grin.
“Kitty?” Obomi said.
The plump minister of education hesitated. She said after the pause, “I made the best guess I could of what we might need to turn our people into the sort of skilled labour force our American friends are talking about and asked them to have their computer look at it. The machine says we can have everything I asked for three times over, and I can’t quite see how!”
“As I recall,” Norman said, “you suggested trebling the number of teachers, increasing school accommodation to the best modern standards, and expanding the business college here into a national university with a student body of ten thousand, the rest of the training to be left to trade instructors on an on-the-job basis. Well, according to what I gather from Shalmaneser’s report, you don’t know yourself what you have to play with. You have a feedback element you left out completely. If the average runs no higher than one in ten, then in any class of forty children you have four who are capable of additional training so that they can relieve part of the teacher’s duty in respect of the class next below but one. Your thirteen-year-olds can spare an hour a day to supplement the instruction the ten- or eleven-year-olds are getting. The other day I met a boy called Simon Bethakazi at a hamlet on the Lalendi road. I met him at random—remember him, Gideon?”
“The one who gave me that nasty question about the Chinese in California,” Gideon nodded.
“Right. If he gets the chance, that boy will be teaching his own class of forty sub-teenagers in three years’ time and because he’s not teaching them anything he hasn’t already learned backwards he’s going to be able to study—perhaps more slowly than in Europe or America, but it’ll only add one year to a standard three-year course—he’ll be able to study a subject at college level.
“Additionally, we envisage bringing in foreign advisors and teachers at generous rates of pay who will cost your taxpayers nothing—they’ll be GT staffers—who will combine a job for the project with a compulsory course-leadership assignment. Some of them won’t like the idea, and we’ll weed them out fast. Others will take to it because their skills are the kind which are being automated away from them at home and they’ll react favourably to the chance of handing on their knowledge to human successors. Shalmaneser’s been fed the results of surveys we’ve done in Europe and estimates we can hope for a minimum of twenty-five hundred of suitable calibre.
“And there’s one other thing you left out of your own calculations, Kitty.” Norman hesitated. “I guess it was owing to modesty, but there are times when modesty has drawbacks. Mr. President, may I address you a compliment which will probably sound fulsome but I assure you is quite sincere?”
“Elihu will tell you I’m as vain as the next man,” Obomi said, and chuckled.
“Well, it made me very sceptical when he told me about this country for the first time,” Norman said. “I didn’t see how a broken-down hole-in-corner place like Beninia could be as good as he claimed. I still don’t see how! All I know is this—here’s a place where there aren’t any murders, there aren’t any muckers, there aren’t any tempers lost, there aren’t any tribal squabbles, there aren’t any riots, there’s nothing of what people in supposedly more fortunate countries have come to take for granted. Yet your people are poor, sometimes hungry, pretty often sick, living in leaky huts and scratching up the ground with wooden ploughs hauled by scrawny oxen … Prophet’s beard, I can’t even hear myself say it without thinking it’s ridiculous! But what I wind up thinking is—is that I half-wish the slave-traders hadn’t steered clear of Beninia. Because I’d be rather proud to think my own African ancestors came from Shinka stock.”
There: it was out. Breathing heavily, Norman sought for a response among the people gathered at the table. Elihu was nodding like a benign Buddha, as though this was precisely what he’d expected, and the cabinet ministers were exchanging embarrassed grins. Of his own team, the only one he could see without twisting his head and staring was Derek Quimby, at the end of the line, and the little tubby linguist was apparently nodding violent agreement, not a reaction one would look for from a Caucasian in Beninia.
Obomi said finally, “Thank you, Norman. I appreciate that. It’s the way I’ve always felt about my compatriots, and it’s good to hear visitors agree with what I might otherwise mistake for parochialism. Well, are we decided, then?”