Maybe we shouldn't privatise.

But should we?

Hardcore free-marketeers will urge on us the "logic" of the market. How it will match needs with resources and that it is the best possible argument for the delivery of bot public and private goods and services. Letting the "market" decide seems like a very good idea, at first blush.

It is good. Over There! Not here. The infirmities in this market are too serious to simply elide them. One of the bedrocks of free-market theories is information. In Kenya, the asymmetry in information - knowledge - is profound. More Kenyans know less about their "free" market than do. Those who do know combine their knowledge with a particularly colonial mindset: restrict access to market knowledge; share that knowledge with select insiders; combine that knowledge with conflicts of interest and, Hey presto! a free market superstar is born.

This is not hyperbole. Take the rise of John Njoroge Michuki from the darkest recesses of the colonial askari army to the Bard of Directors of the Kenya Commercial Bank. His fabulous wealth was acquired with insider knowledge shared with a select few. Few Kenyans of his generation had access to information or credit like he did. His biographers will, Kenyan-style, extol his work ethic. They will most definitely elide the whiff of cronyism that assured him his material comforts.

That system that benefitted the few at the expense of the many has not been dismantled. In fact, it seems to have metastasized. The metronome of insider knowledge and conflicts of interest at the expense of the vast majority of Kenyans keeps repeating itself: Goldenberg, Anglo-Leasing, Triton, and now, SGR.

That is the surest argument against privatising the public sector, only leaving it to deal with public safety, national security, diplomacy and oversight. The first three will provide opportunities for procurement fraud; that has somewhat become a public sector specialty. But it is in oversight that rent-seeking will doom the project of private sector provision of public goods and services. The signs have been there for twenty years. Only the pigeon-like will forget when parliamentarians accepted as little as two thousand shillings to ask questions in Parliament.

If we privatise, it will be up to the national Executive to enforce rules and regulations made by Parliament for the purpose of ensuring quality goods and services to the people who pay the taxes that keep the army or regulators and legislators employed. And Parliament would oversee the enforcement of the national Executive. If a private-sector supplier of a public service - say education - failed to meet the standard, the national Executive would penalise him, or deny him the opportunity to participate in that market. If the national Executive failed to do that, Parliament would step in and sanction the national Executive. That is the theory.

The reality is that for forty five years Kenya has built a culture that empowers those in the national Executive ad Parliament to use their offices not for the good of the people but to line their pockets. When you see a Parliamentarian wailing in front of the President about railways tenders, he is not saying that he would like to see the tender cancelled; he is saying that the shadowy figures who sponsored him to Parliament want their cut. There is no way privatisation - even with a zero-tax regime for the PAYE-army - will work when the rule-makers and rule-enforcers are in bed with the ones who are supposed to play by the rules.

We could privatise. I don't think we should. We should keep the hybrid demonseed we have now, work on improving it, and try to crack the challenge of keeping public servants honest enough to crack down on the hyenas in the private sector.