My two key Christmas wishes for Parliament

It’s that time of the year again. The season for prayer, reflection, merriment or debauchery depending on one’s bents and cents. Nairobi’s streets have emptied but aren’t quite as empty as they were in the “golden” past.

It’s the economy, stupid! The travellers have gotten rid of “Nairobi” masks and distancing; confident that home cooking and brew beats Covid’s Delta and Omicron variants. Some are anti-vaxxers busy giving their own meaning to the phrase “better safe than sorry”. It’s a binary world!

The government isn’t asleep, however. A massive police deployment, including prisons officers, is in place to ensure our safe travel, among other personal wealth creation objectives. Governors are probably busy putting up official Christmas Trees (if you’re snoozing, dear Governor, you’re losing).

Hopefully, these trees have the pro-poor purpose that was the intent we inherited from colonialism. In this yuletide season, politicians will offer us “sights and sounds” on their focus on the vulnerable and disadvantaged, before returning days later to their “survival for the fittest and nastiest” default settings.

I will return to this next week, but let’s just say that the last two years didn’t actually happen. Yet, in our lovely “Build Back Better” sloganeering, isn’t the “Back” what we should escape from, not return to?

We could go economic and reflect on growth in our opposing red and green economies, the adjustments our black and grey economies have had to make, or the disaster that has cut through our creative orange economy. Or progress we have forcibly made in our white, purple and silver economies.

Or we may reflect on the government’s most cantankerous part; Parliament. I will resist our late great wordsmith Philip Ochieng’s unforgettable depiction of the single house as it was then as a collective of “thieves, layabouts and ne’er do wells”.

But I cannot step past two items of debate that they have busied themselves with this week. One has caught the daily headlines, the other is cruising under the radar. Both are important for business, because, put simply, all politics is important for business.

Let’s begin with the noise that’s still in a debate at the time of writing. Having liberalised politics a few years after liberalising the economy, it seems like someone somewhere thinks that was a mistake twice over. The Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) was a first attempt to fix this.

The Political Parties Amendment Bill reads like the second. In the search for a national unity that could create an angry, closet opposition, the bill concocts the idea of a coalition party of parties and individuals that requires a pre, not post, election accord which invites Kenyans who already own Kenya to our own national cake.

Yes, it’s 2022 Uhuru Kenyatta succession time. This looks like a “back to the future” stroll to “baba na mama” KANU monolith. Does our Competition Authority do political competition? It is easy to see the political rationale, which this business page does not deserve.

What should worry us more is that, in our 58th post-independence Christmas, we’re still sharing, not baking, the cake. Hence my first Christmas wish – a Parliament that gets that bad, uncompetitive politics equals bad, uncompetitive economics.

Let’s turn to the stealth weapon otherwise known as the Huduma Bill. To be clear, as I have said umpteen times before, Kenya needs and deserves a world-class digital identification infrastructure.

Preferably integrated between people, establishments (including our companies), land and assets (including our cattle, chicken, goats and sheep). Integration is a keyword; it kills entropy and thievery.

The Huduma Namba registration exercise (the people part of a likely deliberately weak integrated identification effort) which many of us complied with was slapped back severally by our intrepid courts with 37 out of 47-50 million registered. Data integrity, privacy and protection were the key concerns.

In the meanwhile, delivery of the idea has been a comedy of omission and commission errors in real-time; we probably have more people vaccinated against Covid-19 than holders of Huduma Namba cards.

Now we have the bill. It’s finally set out in fairly logical English. Huduma is both foundational (your bios) and functional (services to you). To be clear, the national ID you hold is only foundational. Let’s await Christmas pudding as proof. In the meanwhile, you get a Namba at birth (yeah, on your birth certificate).

You get the “Minors” card at six; then an “Adults” card at 18, at which point KRA and IEBC get to know you (there are also Foreign Nationals and Refugees cards). It’s your lifetime watermark.

On the KRA bit, the words tell us you shall “by default be registered as a taxpayer upon attaining the age of eighteen years”. You need Huduma to get a passport. Ditto other government services, including marriage registration. Here’s a thought in these Covid times.

Must one be vaccinated to get “Huduma-d”? This sounds “Big Brother” frightening, and it is. But I am biased towards gain from this pain.

With a second Christmas wish. That the ultimate end is, as Singapore’s objective with this exact experience tells us, to make government (and our taxes to sustain it) “invisible”. Think M-Pesa after a lifetime of banking hall queues.

That’s the people-focused imagination Parliament needs right now.