Ideas & Debate

Why Musalia and Kersti are differently right about Huduma Namba

huduma namba

Adults applying for documents such as IDs will be required to provide new personal details. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Putative 2022 Presidential candidate Musalia Mudavadi is right. If our ID cards will lapse on Jamhuri Day 2021, to be replaced by Huduma Namba, how will we vote in August 2022?

Here’s where we are. 20 to 30 million or so “over-18” ID cards. 37 million plus Huduma Namba registrations (I still have no clue where to get my card). 47 million in our actual, duplicative 2019 census (we’re really about 53-55 million people today). As many as 23 to 25 million of whom will vote in 2022.

Of whom six to eight million are registered for KRA taxes, but less than a third actually pay tax, with a good proportion on nil returns.

This looks like a scenario where the only way to grow our tax take is to grow government (more people, more pay-as-you-earn (PAYE)), a mathematical MS-Excel circular reference. But there’s a sustainability limit. Hence, the new mindspeak about growing ourselves out of debt. Hello, it’s the economy, stupid!

It should concern our thinkers that recent economic, or output rather than living standards, growth is all about non-tradable stuff like education, health, local M-Pesa trade and public and private (“wash wash”?) construction, rather than tradables (agro, manufacturing/industry, movable services). Look at Kiambu county where I grew up.

An agro-space that is now “Hong Kong/Singapore with a compound”.

A non-tradable economy is exactly where North Korea is.

Everything gets costly if it isn’t already rationed, but the people learn to live with it. Until we don’t.

May we continue with numbers? We can now confirm that the long-delayed KNBS 2021 Economic Survey chimed our negative 0.3 per cent output growth with June 2021 World Bank estimates.

The press reported that KNBS had these numbers in March, but took another six months to release them. I am reminded of a personal experience in an unnamed Southern African country where input data was politically fixed, and it was impossible to later reconcile it with macro-reality under successor regimes.

Let’s take more numbers from the survey. Our baseline is 55 million Kenyans. Yet the survey tells us that we lost about 200,000 jobs in the formal sector, and more than half a million in jua kali.

If we’re talking 40 per cent of formal job losses from financial services, then our non-tradable economic problem is evident. It is a problem not about output per worker, but actual jobs. That’s the long-run perspective.

In its June 2021 Kenya Economic Update, the World Bank did the Kenyan numbers I always wanted to. Using our 47 million census, four out of ten Kenyans are not of working age. Within our working age, three out of ten are inactive, with roughly half of us still in (advanced) school.

Ten million of us work for ourselves and six million live on payroll. Half a million, including mums, work unpaid. It sounds to me that we have the M-Pesa-led 60-70 per cent “hustler” economy before we elect any “hustlers”.

But this is a story about identification, and why Mr Mudavadi is correct. I was incredibly cheered when, last week, visiting Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid launched an e-governance centre at Strathmore University. I was further impressed with her call to private sector to support Huduma Namba.

All the numbers you’ve just read above are simply educated and sophisticated guesswork. A proper national identification system fixes that, and advises policy in a country where we are loudly debating the transactional, not problem-solving, aspects of our recently launched Competency-Based Curriculum.

Without good data, fundamental problems are never solved, and solutions are always half-baked. The literature and reported observation confirms that Estonia’s astonishing e-governance, e-citizen (dear techies, please look at “X-road” and think Kenya!) is a case study on what real “leapfrogging” means.

Kenya in 2014 had an even better idea. “Umoja Kenya”, not the derived Huduma Namba that is neither dead nor alive. I will repeat this great digital idea again for the umpteenth time. Identify people. Identify establishments, including companies. Identify land. Identify assets.

Then link people and establishments to land and assets. For the techies, the underpinning would be innovative thinking around the enterprise service bus (“X-road”, anyone?), connectivity and data information and security.

I am as happy as anyone to believe this is happening and we know nothing. Initial financial modelling of this enterprise (people and companies, not establishments) promised a trillion shillings in positive cash flow in near-zero time before land and assets. KRA would be seamless, if not painless. A bit like M-Pesa.

It strikes me that government is unable and unwilling to process good ideas. Data is good idea, but Huduma Namba is a floundering policy result. Fortunately, Kenya is opportunistic. Despite the political leadership we select, we adjust and realign to reality, fully imbibed in top-level deal making and taking.

In the meanwhile, our brave digital, not analogue, leadership might deign to respond to Huduma Namba questions. Or we might be left with the ashes of what, to my mind, could have been Jubilee’s legacy. Writing apolitically, maybe Mr Mudavadi’s question is, indirectly, the right forward one for Kenyans. And, back to the beginning, we may begin to answer our tradable and non-tradable economic questions.