Unless we change our work attitude, we shall remain poor

Employees of a construction company working on Kagaa road facilitated by the Murang'a County Government. [Boniface Gikandi, Standard]

Our greatest undoing as a country is that we love talking. The most utilised of our organs are our tongues. The same is true in our endless debates on how to eradicate poverty in Kenya.

Yet the solutions for our poverty lies right under our noses.

It is simple, really simple: To reduce poverty, our villages need markets for their farm products; buyers who will pay them a fair price for their produce, and do so promptly. If this is done, we will not need to go to villages with loudspeakers to tell hungry, impoverished villagers about poverty and its eradication.

Kenyans are migrating to towns because the rural setting has been unable to support them. If we improved our agricultural sector, we shall have a reverse moment within the urban dwellers moving back to the rural.

Next, we need to learn how to manage time. It is only in Kenya where we go to bed before God and wake up after God. In the most productive parts of this country, our youth - the single largest resource for us as a nation - are either asleep all the time or sleep-walking, day-dreaming in drunken stupor.

And then there is our propensity for holidays and day-offs; our laziness.

We have 52 weeks in a year. We work for five days a week. We rest for two days a week. That means we will rest for 104 days in a year.

We do not work on Good Friday, the Easter Monday, Labour Day, Madaraka day, Moi day and Kenyatta day. There is also Eid ul Fitr, Jamhuri day, Christmas and Boxing Day. We also not work on January 1.

In total, we do not work for 115 days every year, equivalent to 13.8 million man-hours, assuming that a normal working day is eight hours. If we calculate our hourly wages per person, we will realise how many billions of shillings our economy loses every year.

We officially sleep on our money. Add this official rests to 'rests' through sick-offs, a good number of them feigned) absenteeism, idleness and the die-hard habit of leaving our jackets on our chairs when we go nobody-knows-where, and we shall see where our poverty comes from.

There are some who will argue that resting two days per week makes us more productive come Monday morning. But a closer look at Kenyans' lifestyles will reveal that they do not rest on the days that they are supposed to prepare for the following week's tasks. Many disable themselves through excessive indulgence in alcohol and other unhealthy activities.

Some might argue that in other countries people work for less time than we do in Kenya. But these countries are at a different stage of development-their citizens worked long and hard in the past to accumulate the wealth that their descendants are now enjoying.

We ought to be working harder for longer than we are currently doing. If not, we can only bequeath poverty to our descendants.

But this is not happening. We love rest more than work. What became of our slogan 'uhuru na kazi' at independence? We need leaders who will whip us into changing our work ethics if we want to fight poverty. Laziness and poverty are good bed-fellows. And we will not separate the two with beautiful speeches about poverty eradication.

There will be some who will argue that there are no jobs; that some employers are laying off employees; that the Bretton Woods have government, the largest employer, to reduce its workforce as one of the conditions for aid. Still, this does give us an excuse to sleep ourselves to death.

We want shortcuts to everything. What we call corruption is in effect to our propensity to get something (be it material or otherwise) for nothing.

This is the message Kenyans need to told- that unless we change our attitude towards work, we shall remain poor.

Mr Mindo is an advocate of the High Court