Cost of indiscipline: Why neighbours are eating our lunch

I have a few distasteful things to say about Tanzania, including how it has become a nasty neighbour, but we have to applaud its economic progress in the last one decade. Throw in Rwanda and Ethiopia, and you have a full picture of success in economic growth and development buoyed by national discipline. For many years the world considered Kenya the island of peace, but with increasing levels of national indiscipline, this title has slowly slipped away, with our neighbours eagerly gobbling it up.

Kenyans should focus on national discipline, else this will slowly eat into our economic and social development. Small things like littering the streets with abandon, jumping red lights and dignitaries overlapping in traffic-jammed streets speaks volumes of our levels of national indiscipline. Our social media venom is at a world high and we have no respect for laws. Political indiscipline has reached a crescendo. While we have a progressive Constitution, it has often been abused by politicians.

Misuse of freedoms

The provisions on freedom of speech, right of assembly, peaceful demonstrations, picketing and the like, have been abused with full blessings from the political class. We have all seen what this has done to our lives. Shops don’t open for fear of vandalism and stray bullets from the police. Public transport is paralysed and roads can’t be used. Businesses are burnt. This has progressively increased our country risk profile, as indicated by both foreign direct investment and diaspora remittances. As a result, our GDP growth has slowly been overtaken by Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s GDP growth closed 2016 at 7.2 per cent, Tanzania at 7.0 percent and Rwanda at 6.5 percent, while Kenya closed at 5.8 per cent.

These countries have high levels of national political and governance discipline as also examples of China and Singapore show. Both have had a history of high levels of political discipline. China is now the second largest economy in the world by nominal GDP. In one of his witty addresses, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni once quipped: “If you don’t think politics, peace and stability have anything to do with agricultural development, try planting coffee in Mogadishu.”

What he meant was that economic growth and development cannot be sustained in an environment of high voltage politics whose active ingredient is national indiscipline. History is there for us to learn the past good, and to avoid past wrongs.

Comparisons

The Communist Party under Tito came to power in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II, and during this time, it was the most prosperous socialist country with one of the highest GDP per capita. I have argued before that whether rightist or leftist politics doesn’t matter, as long there is discipline. The leadership of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk between 1923 and 1938 offers great lesson to Kenya on how national discipline nourishes economic development. It is worth noting the downward spiral of both Yugoslavia and Turkey as a result of political indiscipline after Tito and Mustafa respectively.

The same can be said of African countries such as Liberia, which was one of the most stable countries in Africa until 1980. Liberia has never recovered after the political indiscipline presided over by Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor after Him. Kenyans must reject political indiscipline. History tells us that within the few hours that renegade junior Air Force officers attempted to take over Kenya, property worth $1.5 billion was destroyed. With inflation adjustment, that would be $8 billion today. Using a simple regression, theoretically, it is right to hypothesise that were it not for the attempted coup, our GDP would today be $80 billion by close of 2016, and we would still be ahead of Ethiopia.

This is the cost of national indiscipline, which when it happens at the highest levels, has a multiplier effect on other facets of the social-economic construct. It is no wonder Kenya has in the past experienced many school fires started by unruly pupils, while at the county government level, MCAs can hold governors to ransom with threats of impeachments. I submit that it is time for the national leadership to apply the law appropriately to curb national indiscipline.

Mr. Karugu is a management consultant (strategy and analytics). fkarugu@revamp.co.ke