Fighting ignorance, disease and poverty fifty years on

By Mugambi Nandi

Twitter@MugambiNandi

Some sage said that if you haven’t grown up by age 50, you don’t have to. Kenya has done quite a bit of growing up in the last 50 years. However, our growth can aptly be described as stunted, considering how far we are behind the Asian Tigers, our economic peers at independence. Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan are now developed, high-income economies, thanks to deliberate government policies that facilitated rapid industrialisation and sustained growth rates above seven per cent over the years. Their leaders identified areas of competitive advantage and invested heavily in them.

On our part, we identified the triple evils — ignorance, disease and poverty — as our enemies. We mistook the symptoms for the illness.

As the diagnosis was wrong, the prescription was not bound to cure the malady.

While we were fighting the three enemies, or pretending to fight them, corruption made a surreptitious entry into the scene. It consumed the generals and the troops who were leading the fight against the triple evils. And that is how we lost the battle.

Ignorance, or lack of information, has been used by the political class over the years to its advantage. Nothing demonstrates this better than the tribal voting patterns which we witness at every election, and the quality of some of the leaders we elect. Yet we are famed to be amongst the most literate people in the world!

Our education system must be designed to solve our problems. Hopefully, the dawning of the age of a laptop for each child will herald a new generation of Kenyans, through whom ignorance will be dealt the final blow.

Poverty is a social problem characterised by low levels of income and lack of access to basic services and amenities such as food, education, health care, sanitation, clean water, transport and communications. In a stroke of genius never before seen in that august house, members of the tenth Parliament identified low pay as the source of poverty – at least their own. Having identified the problem, they proceeded with alacrity to solve it by increasing their own pay tenfold. Soon, other public sector employees took the cue, and the result is that Kenya is labouring under a public wage burden that will hinder our attempt to take off like the Asian Tigers.

Instead of enhancing productivity and marshaling savings, we have turned to consumerism, as poverty flourishes.

One of the key drivers of any economy is a healthy workforce. Apart from being involved in productive activities, a healthy population provides a market for goods and services and contributes to the eradication of poverty. Although we are doing better than our neighbours in terms of medical health facilities, we are far from where our potential as a country requires us to be. The growing outward-bound medical tourism mainly to India, South Africa and the UK speaks volumes about the confidence our own people have in our medical facilities. On the bright side, there are things we have done extremely well. Our athletes remain our best ambassadors out there. The widespread use of mobile money transfer services and other technological innovations have earned us the tag Silicon Savannah.

Although Henry Ford said that you cannot build a reputation on what you are going to do, our Vision 2030 seems to be pointing us in the right direction. We need to grow our exports, enhance savings, and continue to develop a healthy, educated workforce. I did not mean to dampen your mood. Knowing that the authorities would harp on the things that we have achieved, conveniently forgetting to mention our failures, I thought I might balance the equation by taking a look at the other side of the coin. If life begins at 40, then we are yet to see Kenya’s teenage years, and all the misdemeanuors associated with teenage. Happy 50th, Kenya!

The writer is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya