Tuesday, September 02, 2014

There'll be opposition.

It is not the worst thing in the world for someone to vomit all over your shoes. Indeed it is not the worst thing in the world for someone to vomit all over you, unless they have been infected by the Ebola virus. But when someone decides to take a massive dump on you, all bets are off. Even passing gas in the general vicinity of your person is an invitation to extreme violence. What the Eleventh Parliament and the First County Government have done over the past eighteen months amounts to taking the greatest shit on the people of Kenya for a decade.

Uhuru Kenyatta's Cabinet Secretaries and their beancounters continue to promise us that the rising tide of the economy will lift all boats. The Gross Domestic Product is showing a steady rise. Per capita income is also steadily increasing. Agricultural output has taken a beating due to the vagaries of the weather but the overall agricultural picture is optimistic over the long term. The successful listing of the government bond on the Irish Securities Exchange demonstrates that foreign investors have faith in Kenya's economy. This is the rosy picture that the Cabinet members have painted for one and all. It is full of shit.

Take housing, for instance. Wallace Kantai, writing in the Business Daily on Tuesday, 2 September 2014, sees a bubble in the housing market. There are few young middle class professionals who can afford the premiums being charged by mortgage companies and therefore, cannot afford but to rent in very downmarket areas. Interest rates remain stubbornly high even with the advent of credit referencing. Housing remains a privilege of the monied, well-heeled and, if you happen to be the Housing Cabinet secretary's boon friend, well connected.

So too when it comes to healthcare. Looking at the much ballyhooed insurance scheme for the National Police Service, you get the sense that the Government of Kenya has taken lessons in cosmetology. It is the only explanation for the "cover" rank and file police officers enjoy while the top brass enjoy what has been dubbed the Gold Plated Cover which includes everything but a second wife and a guaranteed entry ticket to heaven.

We have taken much of the shenanigans of our leaders without too much rancour, never mind the anti-MPigs brigade led by the likes of Boniface Mwangi. But our patience is wearing thin. The National Assembly, in a rare show of consensus across houses, and the Senate have hatched a brilliant plan to aggrandise themselves even more. In the name of "equality", men and women who work for twelve days in a month have decided to raise their "paltry" eight hundred and fifty one shillings salary to one million two hundred thousand shillings. Only. Because their allowances were skewed in favour of a few colleagues.

If they truly deserved the collective billions of shillings they squander on quangos and junkets, Kenyans would mutter unhappily under their breath but let it be. But these men and women have consistently failed to advance the interests of the people. When it comes to the management of the public funds, Kenyans long passed the point of diminishing returns and are now firmly in the land of loss-making. All of it can be laid at the feet of the elected classes and the state officers they have under their overmighty thumbs. They vomited on our shoes, and we let it go. They vomited on us, and we let it go. They passed wind at us, and we shrugged. But now that they have dropped their pants and are squatting on top of us ready to take an almighty shit, I think it is safe to say that there will be opposition.

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