You don't empower people with Sh200, salivating at their votes

Do we fail to get it, or do we deliberately sidestep issues? Even our highbrow scholars engage in appalling bawdry in the countryside, and give band-aid solutions to mortal conditions.  

These past few months have witnessed Kenya’s intelligentsia in the political space cut across the country in a futile exercise called empowerment. And they are marshalled by the quasi-schooled. Why do people who have enjoyed a good education fail to see the obvious? Why do they add nothing to government and governance?  

A European colonial administrator in Achebe’s ‘No Longer At Ease’ has given a cynical take. Mr Green, as he is called, attributes it to our climate. He is disturbed that people cannot face what he calls the fact. “The fact that over countless centuries the African has been the victim of the worst climate in the world and of every imaginable disease,” he says, and continues, “But he has been sapped mentally and physically. We have brought him a Western education. But what use is it to him?” 

Really? Are we so mentally sapped that even our professors cannot get it? Our government is headed by two of the most learned people anywhere in the world. The President wears the heart of his PhD on the sleeve. His deputy is a law scholar of global repute. The Cabinet is a veritable university faculty. Yet they run around the country splashing money on an inutile mission called economic empowerment.  

They will arrive upcountry loaded with multiple millions of shillings. After being choreographed through music, dance and drama, they will hurl abuses at their adversaries. They move on to obscene jokes and crown the day with handouts. The beneficiaries are trooped in groups in several scores of numbers. When the millions are eventually shared out, their per capita worth is laughable. Individuals in rural Malava in West Kenya will, for example, go away with Sh200 each. A more domineering member might get a thousand, or even two. 

Degreed people

So, what will they do with the paltry handouts? A sensible mother might buy the day’s meal for the family. What they will eat the next day is, however, left to the elements. We call that economic empowerment. It is a part of our government’s effort to shore up waning popularity. The speakers ask for votes for President Ruto. They scream about “a second round,” draped in sexual obscenities and innuendo. They laugh. They leave. A couple of weeks later, angry youth still go out in demonstrations against the Ruto regime. Why don’t these degree-holding people in the government get it? Doling out piecemeal bribes and calling them “economic empowerment” is not the solution to the serious challenges confronting Kenya. The facts are that the country is smarting under a heavy load of frustrations that a one-day handout will not solve. A regime that seemed to have all the answers when it campaigned for office has nothing to show. 

The swollen population of frustrated, educated youth is violently bursting into the streets. It is upsetting an economy that has locked them outside. For, even as universities boast about the numbers they have added to the frustrated educated mob, they too have no idea what these people should do with their degrees. There is no alignment between the imagined Kenya of tomorrow, the labour force that will drive us there, and the training and skills the force requires. 

Admissions to university and college programmes have zero bearing to post-training days. The only sure thing is the expansion of the brackets of frustration. And now the brackets are bursting. It is true that the problem did not begin with President Ruto. But he is the person in office. His government is expected to provide sustainable, viable and productive solutions. Whether Kenya’s political elite will admit it or not, they can take simple lessons from little Rwanda and Burkina Faso. Away from President Paul Kagame’s tendency to be despotic, he has brought order, discipline and economic planning and empowerment to Rwanda. Kagame has focused on building a knowledge-based nation, whose programmes are aligned with the big picture of sustainable economic and human development. He has eradicated theft. He is building infrastructure and giving a fair chance. Traore is doing the same. You don’t find political idlers and professors cutting across Rwanda and Burkina, sowing seeds of discord, and spewing lewdness and profanity. 

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke