Rich, fat and stupid

What little I remember of the economics I learnt during the BA part of my university education is reduced to this: we have needs and we have wants. Quite often, the quality of the needs we get influences our ability to acquire the wants we desire. Nine times out of ten, we are responsible for solving our needs. While the State will provide us with institutions of learning, for instance, and the teachers who teach there, it is our personal initiative that will ensure whether the education we get stands us in good stead or not. I won't go into the quality of the institutions and teachers the State provides. Suffice to say, if you are provided with the best of both, and you sleep through all your lessons, your education is likely to be "half-baked" at best.

The same is true of health services. The state can build the health facilities and train the healthcare workers, but we are responsible for maintaining high standards hygiene at home so that we are not plagued by vector-borne diseases.

But when the state fails to do its duty, after collecting taxes through laws and menaces, and instead imposes the obligation of doing for ourselves what the state should have done for us, and at our own expense to boot, then the men and women who contributed to this state of affairs cannot possibly be trusted to offer us advice on how to live our lives or chastise us for how we leave our lives.

Anyone who has lived in Nairobi over the past thirty years will have noticed that even as the taxes imposed on them have gone up, the services that should have been provided by the state have reduced. It is true when it comes to access to affordable real assets. In the last decade of Daniel Moi's kleptocracy, public land was allocated to men and women connected to his thieving government at a rate that was staggering. So long as you and the Commissioner of Lands were on the same page, you would end up with a title deed in your name. Much of this land was acquired for purely speculative reasons; few of it was developed during the last decade of the Moi presidency. When Mwai Kibaki assumed office, still more public land, especially land held by state corporations, was transferred into private hands without so much as a by your leave.

We sowed the wind and now we reap the whirlwind. The acreage available for lease to small scale vendors at affordable rates is nonexistent in Nairobi. Much of that land is occupied by sixteen-story blocks of flats (or offices) that are, at best, half-occupied. The armies of Nairobi's itinerant traders have nowhere to go except to the last "open" space available: road reserves and pedestrian walkways. Nairobi is now neatly divided into two: land speculators and vibandanskis.

The same scarcity of affordable land hamstringing the middle class dream of owning an affordable house has also locked out millions of small-scale businessmen. The challenge is the same, whether you want an affordable three-bedroom-two-bath semi-detached maisonette in Buru Buru or you want to open a café to serve the on-a-budget crowd of office gremlins: land prices are unrealistically high. The solution is the same: seize all irregularly acquired land and give access to the millions who need them to build homes or businesses at an affordable price. The reality is predictable: the state will tax Kenyans to the bone first before it troubles the land thieves of the 1990s and 2000s.

So it is a bit rich to read the screeds by lawyers about how Nairobi is being turned into a slum of vibanda where dodgy food of doubtful safety is being served by shady vendors who don't even appear to have the necessary public health paperwork to be allowed to sell food to the public. These lawyers who only concentrated on "human rights" when it meant change-the-government, but were silent as their new boon friends carried on with the same corruption as the government they overthrew are hypocrites of a particularly nasty type. They pretend to be virtuous only until they get a chance to sup at the big table with the devil himself.

My take is simple: vibanda, in and of themselves, are not bad. The people who operate the vibanda are not bad. The people who take their custom to vibanda are not bad. They are making do, with meagre resources, in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It is not their fault. No matter how many SANYs are deployed to demolish the vibanda, they will never be erased so long as land prices continue to soar in Nairobi. But this is too much to expect of the senior members of my profession. They are too rich and too fat-headed to think in these terms anymore. Listen to them only if you wish to be as rich, fat and stupid as they.