Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Perils of Economic Salvation

Our economic salvation is at hand if one goes by the millions of inches of newsprint published over the past eighteen months. If it is not gushing stories on the Thika 'Super-highway', it is equally saccharine disquisitions on the Konza 'Techno-City' or the LAPSSET. When President Kibaki's government unveiled the economic blue-print for our future, the Kenya Vision 2030, we all stood to a man and cheered for the vision that promises to make Kenya a 'middle-income country' by the year 2030. Its flagship projects have been hailed as the panacea for the economic mismanagement of the past four decades, a cure-all that will not only bring us into the twenty-first century but will empower the nation to catch up with the Asian Tigers, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. The promulgation of a new constitution is seen in the same context, especially the provisions on devolution which promise to decentralise economic decision-making from the feckless, corrupt mandarins in Nairobi to the enlightened and highly motivated homeward-bound boffins who have made their mark in the world.

What a short memory Kenyans have of grand schemes and national targets. President Kenyatta promised to end poverty, illiteracy and disease. He failed. President Moi promised to foster peace, love and harmony. He failed. President Kibaki Mark 1 promised to end impunity and corruption. He failed and continues to fail. Policy papers have been prepared, some of them very good, to address our myriad challenges, from piped water for all by the year 2000 to comprehensive healthcare for all by the year 2015. Even our government admits that we are missing all our targets by a country mile. Now we have new targets and new objectives to achieve, old-challenges-dressed-as-new to overcome. The Constitution and Vision 2030 are the tools that we will use to attain nirvana. The record so far is as encouraging as can be expected, if our expectations were that they would be vehicles for rent-seeking, cronyism and corruption.

A look at constitutional implementation betrays that the ills that have plagued this nation for nigh on forty years are yet to be cured. The political class that has been at the helm of all policy-making and implementation has demonstrated that it is incapable of placing the nation ahead of its selfish needs. Even in the relatively simple area of appointments to national offices, whether constitutional or not, they have demonstrated that merit or the national good have no place in political discourse. All that matters is that the imperative of booth-capturing to ensure that Their Men occupy sensitive positions with the overall objective of keeping everyone else out.

Vision 2030 went off the rails a while back and it is only a matter of time that Kenyans wake up to the reality. Take the LAPSSET as an example: the plans for a port in Lamu have been on the cards since at least 1972. In that period, not only has our government failed to tackle the Land Question at the Coast, it has ensured that the matter never sees the light of day. The landless at the Coast are not just un-propertied, they are unlettered and disenfranchised on a colossal scale, their grievances given short shrift by all and sundry, relegated to the fringes of national debate. When the Presidents of Kenya and South Sudan and the Prime Minister of Ethiopia witnessed the groundbreaking ceremony for the project, President Kibaki capped it off by issuing title deeds to the peoples of the district, promising more in the months to come. Prime Minister Odinga had done the same some months ago when a nascent opposition movement against the project started gaining traction. Amos Kimunya did the same when he was Lands Minister when the project was first mooted. This has not prevented the well-heeled and well-connected from making a killing from the project.

Perhaps the LAPSSET will be completed; whether it will be a success depends on which side of the breadline one will be standing. Some will make a killing, literally, and laugh all the way to the bank. Most will find themselves not only landless, but also jobless for it is inevitable that if a majority of the jobs that will be generated by the project require technical or professional skills, these will be in short supply in Lamu or indeed, at the Coast. It will be the same case with the Konza Techno-city. 

Ukambani is not known for ICT start-ups but for eye-watering poverty, drought, famine and staggering levels of illiteracy and semi-literacy. The hordes of investors that will descend on Konza will bring more than their cheque-books; they will also bring a buccaneering spirit that is alien to the Kambas. I foresee decades of land-wrangles as the better-heeled, better-educated occupants take the locals for a ride as experienced by the millions of people in Coastal Kenya. Our economic salvation is at hand. Let it not blind us that economic salvation will benefit the few over the many.

2 comments:

bemihblogger said...

Social and Economic rights versus Right to development...[still a very thorny issue that ought not be whimsically dismissed]

maundu7300 said...

bemihblogger, please do not dismiss my concerns as whimsy. Social and economic rights are nothing without a coherent development programme, one that admits that mistakes have been made in the past and that they will not be rectified by political carpet-bagging but by placing the ordinary man and woman at its centre. Anything else ...

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