President William Ruto and First Lady Rachel Ruto are received at the Great Hall of the People during a State banquet hosted by President Xi Jinping for visiting Heads of State and government in Beijing, China, on October 17, 2023.
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10 millionaires, 10 million beggars
President William Ruto has flown back from the Far East, like Aladdin, on a magic carpet of bogus election promises and Chinese dollars stuffed in his back pocket.
Quoting the Chinese press, Robert Alai claimed on X that the President wafted back with $64 billion worth of loans in his back pocket.
While these days I’m quite fond of Robert and I’m his biggest political fan, I must issue the disclaimer that I have no idea how fluent he is in Chinese and he may well be wrong. Other outlets had reported that he was seeking a $1 billion loan to complete road projects.
“After bashing China loans, Kenya’s president signals reverse course,” The South China Morning Post headlined a story which made the point that, after blaming Chinese loans for Kenya’s debt crisis, Mr Ruto was going to ask for some too.
Human beings do not remember what they ate the day before yesterday; their eye is always fixed firmly on the next meal. As times get tougher, many of the government’s supporters will forget the good times and will be among its toughest critics—just like some of former President Uhuru Kenyatta’s friends are now his biggest enemies and closest friends of Ruto’s.
You would never guess, listening to him, that Mr Ruto and Mr Kenyatta were the best of friends, were tried at the ICC together and took those loans together. But the President’s dexterity of diplomatic footwork is dizzying, even by Kenyan standards. Kenyans are worried sick about the state of the economy. Allow me to give voice to their fears about the country and the future of our children.
First, we don’t understand what the government is doing and why it is doing it. There was shock when, this week Central Bank Governor Kamau Thugge said the shilling is over-valued by 20 per cent and attributed that finding to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. How did they arrive at that conclusion, by what means, supported by what evidence?
As one analyst has pointed out, the IMF thought the value of the shilling was between Sh115 and Sh120 to the dollar; it is now at Sh150. What say they? Shouldn’t there be a market correction? Besides, why couldn’t the governor arrive at his own determination? Why was he taking the lead from those two? Does he know what he is doing? Do any of the others?
Collect debts
We agree that our country is better off without the IMF and World Bank. They are not here to help; they are here to collect debts. We were rid of them when the economy was being managed by solid people. It is Jubilee which dragged Kenya back to that hole. Why can’t the government seem to find the voice to explain to the public the economic decisions it is taking?
The task was left to the eager-beaver MP for Kiharu, Ndindi Nyoro, to thread the various bits and pieces of the government’s economic policy into a bigger plan. Econ 101, for sure (yellow notes and all, Kilimo Hall, lecture theatres, circa 1990) during an interview by James Smart on NTV. He was facing the member for Suba South, Mr John Ng’ongo Mbadi.
Mr Nyoro explained that, rather than play Mwai Kibaki’s demand side game, the plan is to stimulate the economy through production: At the primary layer, pump in cheap fertiliser to jump-start agriculture; at the secondary level, improve production through aggregation; and at the tertiary level, some interventions to help service industries. It made some sense. Why aren’t we hearing more of this?
Secondly, we are worried because almost three-quarters of us have no job. This is the land of the unemployed. Where is the jobs masterplan? And please, don’t say anything about the “digital ICT hubs”. We have no money; a whole two-thirds of us earn less than $3.2 a day. So you can understand why higher taxes and the increase in the cost of living has been so hard on Kenyans and 70 per cent are vulnerable to food insecurity.
Equatorial Guinea is a dot of an oil-rich country in West Africa with a GDP of $11.66 billion—which, when divided amongst its 1.634 million population, produces the seventh-highest GDP per capita in Africa, some $7,506. Ours is 2,099.
The thing is, in Equatorial Guinea, the president and his son take the whole lot and give the rest of the population $1,000 to share amongst themselves. It is reported that there is only one lit street, leading to the presidential palace, and children from ordinary households come out at night to do homework under the streetlights!
Our problem might not be so dramatic but we have grave economic injustices. Theft of public resources is mainstreamed, public officials are not required to account for wealth, corruption is an accepted, respectable exercise. Kenyans think there must be something wrong—not “industrious”—with anybody who is honest. We are living JM Kariuki’s nightmare—a land of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars—writ large.
