Ideas & Debate

Why the road to achieving Big Four isn’t smooth

road

There are numerous challenges that ought to be sorted out first to realise development goals. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Our national state of constant diversion from, and obfuscation about, the real issues continues unabated. “Referendum” is the new media storyline.

Corruption and murder cases are in court, but all we are hearing is “remand” and “taking plea”. Fascinating TV, the people are ogling, and everyone’s now Detective Chief Inspector Clouseau.

In the meanwhile, Kenya is in a fiscal crisis. No numbers today, just think about your county, your governor, your county assembly, and wonder what they are doing on a daily basis if they are at the back of the line in our tenderpreneur-led payment system.

Oh! as a colleague informed me, many county pending bills are actually owed to county officers! Talk about eating your own county, sorry, country!

It is clear that counties are unable to work our three-year Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF). Annual planning and budgeting is probably the only way to stop the copying and pasting of theft already established in our bloated national government.

But these are just pre-referendum observations. The logical path for any credible national leader should be to squeeze expenditure back into taxes. I would imagine that a 10-15-80-5 ratio between policy-planning/growth-service-fiscus (management) would deliver a balanced budget for Kenya that accords with the excellent demands of our liberal constitution.

Now that I have diverted you from the headline, here are the real questions. First, the basics. Why are we rushing into referendum talk when we haven’t even identified Kenyans? Why are we doing a census and boundary review at the same time as a biometric identification project?

Tenderpreneurs galore? An integrated national identification project eliminates the need for greedy parliamentarians to hold forth on IEBC tenders, because a single ID does everything.

By doing this, we cut the IEBC budget a gazillion times (my personal preference is to scrap the IEBC altogether and create a temporary framework of independent commissioners supported by an ad-hoc secretariat drawn from our population registration agencies).

Let’s recall our leadership’s ICT agenda in 2014; an integrated national register that identified every person in Kenya, linked these persons with establishments (companies, cooperatives, societies and the like) and then traced these persons and establishments to land and assets.

Linked to a credible public finance management system (which we don’t have), this is the proper way to fix corruption, by reverse engineering, not bible bashing and educational evangelism.

Yes, I got you with my second diversion. So let’s get to the point. Is the Big 4 agenda real or fake? It’s definitely not new, or innovative, since Article 43 of our constitution already demanded the rights that it covers.

It’s clearly unknown, since government is too scared to publish the Third Medium Term Plan (2018-2022) under Vision 2030, which presumably is premised on Big 4. It’s notably uncosted, given our medium-term macro-fiscal forecasts.

Let’s ask the questions. On food, does the Big 4 answer our four key agro-questions – (a) production and productivity (including processing) (b) markets and money (c) demand-supply information (d) institutions as rules of the game?

Answers on the blind side of my ugali sosa please! Twenty years ago, low-income Kenya depended on “rain and aid”. Today, middle-income Kenya suffers “drought and debt”

On health, beyond tendered toys and tools, is there any thinking going into our two health fundamentals - lifestyles and living conditions?

Is anyone thinking about partnering around the sort of data genius that US-based Benelovent AI (check out that company – disruption at its best) is doing with its “data to drugs” strategy?

Why, as I observed from Monday’s brilliant Town Hall session on TV, are Kenyans still asking about fake drugs, funny chemists et al when we have a donor-supported supply chain known as Kemsa?

Then there’s our “Robin Hood”- financed housing. If government is Robin, who, surely, is the Sheriff of Nottingham? State capture anyone?

Which brings us to the end – jobs. Now that the state-led NYS experiment has gone incognito, where will jobs emerge from in a climate of bank-obsessed lending to government, rapidly cut (and anti-people) savings interest rates, humongous debt obligations and every other economic expletive known to man.

Diversion number three, right there. Welcome to Kenya, and the calls for a referendum.