Finance scholar VOK loses fight to brain tumour

The last one month has witnessed devastating but related incidents in the field of finance in three different continents.

Finance ministers of the Eurozone and the International Monetary Fund have intermittently converged on Brussels to review progress of Greece with respect to her commitment to austerity prescriptions, and to re-assess the country’s suitability for further financial bailout.

Greece is literally hanging on a financial cliff, unable to meet her debt obligations to bilateral and multilateral lenders.

Here in Kenya, a chilly breeze was blowing through the valleys of Nairobi’s Lower Kabete as the University of Nairobi’s School of Business announced the untimely demise of Vincent Otuoma Kamasara, a scholar and lecturer in accounting and finance.

Dr Kamasara’s death followed that of John Nash, the professor of mathematics who won a Nobel Prize for his work in economics. Dr Kamasara, like Prof Nash who died in a car crash in New York together with his wife Alicia, had made tremendous contribution to human development.

VOK, Kams or Carey – as he was fondly referred to by his friends – had travelled across the Indian Ocean to seek specialised medical attention for a brain tumour.

Dr Kamasara was a consummate accountant but unlike most of his professional colleagues who rarely engage in intellectual discourse, he had transcended the straitjacket approach and comfortably engaged in public scholarship. He broke the intellectual glass ceiling and demonstrated that being an accountant was not synonymous with intellectual aloofness and inertia.

Dr Kamasara was razor-sharp, intellectually incisive and outgoing, always bearing the last card that determined the emerging trajectory of the discipline of accountancy. There is hardly any accounting policy milestone in Kenya that does not bear his signature.

Dr Kamasara started his academic journey in the early 1960s in Dar es Salaam where his parents then worked. He later moved to Gwassi where he completed his primary education before proceeding to Tonga Secondary School for his O-Levels.

Among his contemporaries at Tonga was the late Homa Bay Senator Otieno Kajwang’.

He took his A-Level studies at Kabarnet High School in Baringo and was admitted to the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Nairobi, from where he graduated in 1979 with a First Class Honours in Bachelor of Commerce, Accounting. He was immediately re-admitted to his alma mater for a master’s degree in business administration (accounting and finance), which he completed in 1982.

He began his teaching career in the same faculty, now known as the School of Business. The quest for more knowledge saw Dr Kamasara move to pursue doctoral studies in the UK in the early 1990s.

Despite his superior intellectual endowment, Dr Kamasara never raised his voice during an intellectual discourse. He was confident, re-assuring and clinical, and only took an intellectual position after thorough reflection.

For this, he was revered. Those of us who were privileged to drink from his prolific intellectual well were always amazed at his depth of knowledge and flamboyance in the English language.

His students fondly recall that he always strode into the classroom like a colossus, without reference material or notes, and engaged the class for three or even six hours, with only 10 to 15 minute breaks in between lectures.

He was a stickler for time and never missed a class, unless the odds against him were insurmountable. He was enthusiastic about accountancy and finance, and always sought to explore new frontiers of knowledge in the discipline.

His classes were serious and value-adding. But the most memorable quote that his graduate students will cling on to for long is: “Marks are not given; they are awarded.”

This statement was always received with mixed reactions, depending on each student’s objectives for joining the graduate school. Hard working and serious students who heeded his advice scored high marks and good grades.

Dr Kamasara had an amazing attention to detail and a huge capacity to decipher abstract ideas and concepts, qualities that enabled him to go through students’ scripts with a toothcomb.

Those who had not read well and internalised concepts could not escape his admonition, while hardworking ones earned well-deserved recognition.

I still vividly recall an incident in the 1990s when more than three-quarters of the MBA class trooped out of an examination room, complaining that the management accounting examination was “undoable”.

When a meeting was later convened by the dean of the Faculty of Commerce, John Kenduiwo, to try and iron out the issue, Dr Kamasara stunned the students when he stated that the exam was the easiest he had ever set for an MBA class in his entire teaching career, then spanning more than two decades.

Dr Kamasara was committed to his noble belief that students had a responsibility to pursue knowledge and not be fixated with marks, grades and certificates, which were not even worth the papers on which they were printed.

In the past couple of decades, Kenya has witnessed exponential increase in the number of university graduates in all disciplines. But it is debatable whether such huge numbers of “educated” people have had commensurate impact on the country’s socio-political and economic development.

Above all, Dr Kamasara was clear in his mind that accountancy and finance, though closely related and sometimes interdependent, are separate subjects.

Accountancy, he explained, deals with book keeping, systematic documentation of financial transactions and their interpretation based on universally agreed conventions and principles.

Finance, on the other hand, is much more complex, using theories of economics and mathematical models to analyse the intricacies of sourcing and application of funds.

Accountancy, therefore, belongs largely to the micro level, while finance looks at the macro, he explained. Unless this distinction is clearly appreciated, the development of accountancy and finance as distinct disciplines, with separate objectives in an economy, might be in jeopardy, he quipped.

Dr Kamasara deeply understood the impact of globalisation and its discontents in the context of a developing country, being a leading scholar in the highly dynamic area of international finance.

In the past two decades, he dedicated his intellectual energy to investigating the impact of transfer pricing and other forms of illicit financial transfers on host economies, particularly in developing countries.

Developments in financial technology and adoption of major world currencies such as the US dollar and the euro for global financial transactions have made it a lot easier for multinational corporations to deepen their purveyance of illicit financial flows across the globe.

Developing countries have particularly been victims of targeted transfer pricing practices of multinational corporations.

Dr Kamasara’s premature departure from the academic scene leaves behind many orphans who were particularly keen to unravel the devastating effect of transfer pricing on the tax revenue base of developing countries.

Those in public finance and corporate governance will especially miss his incisive analyses and intellectual depth.
Fare thee well, VOK.

Dr Ongore is a senior officer with Kenya Revenue Authority and a specialist in public finance and corporate governance. [email protected]