Of NGOs that make Kenya poorer and politicians who are above the law

The NGO types who run Kenya in the absence of any semblance of Government services love seminars. Look, a seminar is a God-sent opportunity for our cosseted NGO do-gooders. I

t’s an opportunity for them to get together with like-minded tree-huggers and churn out voluminous reports, showing why the country is such a mess and the best way to deliver ourselves to national nirvana.

The seminars that these extravagantly-paid fellas attend are many and varied, addressing all manner of issues from, for instance, why villagers in Nyanza choose to use mosquito nets for fishing rather than to protect themselves against mosquito bites, to why providing free sanitary towels to girls in Turkana could lead to improved economic performance.

And this is all fine, but our teeming NGOs are the first reason we are poor. There is no such thing as a free lunch in development and economics, but our NGOs have tried to sell us the idea that we can live off someone else’s sweat — forever.

They are aided in this by the tax dollars dutifully submitted as aid by gullible, guilt-ridden western taxpayers who see their own countries’ colonial past as an awful wrong that was committed against Africans, and one which they are obliged to pay for.

The average African, of course, knows that colonialism was more good than bad. I mean, there really wasn’t anything commendable about living a half-naked existence, chasing after bugs and assorted small mammals to help eke out an existence that was as short as it was nasty and brutish.

And so the NGO money keeps pouring in, and is swiftly diverted to buy large cars and rent palatial mansions for the “monitoring and evaluation specialists” of the NGO world.

Never mind that the world they monitor and evaluate is literally a world away from that in which they live themselves.

But in helping foster a false hope and create an unrealistic environment, our NGOs are the primary reason we are poor. We need to close every single one of them — how many NGOs were involved in helping Singapore become a first world country? And then there are our politicians.

Break laws with impunity

This past week, Kenyans were treated to the refreshing spectacle of a politician being totally honest about what he and his fellow politicians do — making and breaking laws at will.

It was not so much eye-opening as a confirmation of what everyone knows but prefers not to think about or even discuss: the second reason we are so messed up is our leaders.

The management people tell us that a project succeeds or fails depending on its leadership, not its resources. The leaders of Kenya have always been politicians, and we saw the other day just what politicians are like.

They are a conniving, cheating, corrupt class, a nefarious bunch of pseudo-criminals who specialise in cutting corners that they expect the rest of us to negotiate fully.

What is really incredible is not that we finally saw a politician confessing, live on camera, that he and his comrades break laws with impunity.

What is incredible is that for all this time, we believed that the Kenyan politician really was a force for good, an upright citizen committed to the development and well-being of the country.

Well, shock on us: the politician is not interested in any well-being other than his own and that of his corrupt friends, and he will go to ridiculous extents to ensure that this interest is protected and enhanced. And if we ever thought otherwise, well, the joke was on us.