Dancing and ululations at State House won't revive the economy

If anyone ever doubted what is the official economic policy under President William Ruto’s administration, then the events of last Saturday at State House was your definitive answer. As Jesus Christ explained in his metaphor in the Gospel of Matthew 17:15-20, we shall know them by their fruits.

For a couple of months, a powerful contingent of Kenya Kwanza (KK) politicians have been traversing the country with bags of money, whose source no one seems to understand. This has been in the name of empowerment programmes.

Two weeks ago, a lawyer filed a petition in court to compel the involved political leaders to demonstrate the source of the millions that they have been dishing out against their publicly known sources of income.

I absolutely have no problem with any Kenyan visiting State House for whatever reason.

However, lining up thousands of young people at such hallowed grounds to receive campaign bribes in the form of agrarian age tools in a modern economic system is pushing the joke too far.

In exactly 77 days of assumption of office, the President launched the Hustler Fund, which was supposed to provide funding to the same groups that lined up in State House for those tools.

Official policy still propagates Hustler Fund as their genius intervention of the administration that has transformed lives and livelihoods for hustlers across the country. If that was true, why then is the need for this shadowy programme, whose funding sources is anyone’s guess?  

Ironically, this comes at a time when the government has been pushing a narrative for science-based criteria, like mean score testing, to select beneficiaries or amount to contribute towards public programmes.

Good examples here are the Social Health Insurance Fund premiums for households and the now collapsed higher education funding model. Folks were bombarded with this technical jargon to bully them into the programmes, despite obvious gaps in their conceptualisation, structure and proposed long-term outcomes.  

Has it not occurred to the President and his handlers that a similar criteria is the same that should be used in the selection of beneficiaries into any empowerment programme, if at all it was necessary at this point in time? For instance, how were the thousands of young people at the State House selected? 

What criteria was used to determine who is eligible or who was deserving of what tool of production among the many lined up at State House grounds from the entire populace in Nairobi metropolis?

Confessions now emerging on social media from those who were at State House indicate that the only eligibility requirement for inclusion into the participant list was their national identity card.

Obviously, the mobilisers were the KK local political leaders and their operatives on the ground.  

As fate would have it, this same week I found myself in a high-level workshop with a primary focus on economic governance models that would power modern economies into the future, with a specific focus on Africa.

The overarching theme was on infrastructure investments at both the country level and the necessary inter-connectivity to power the renaissance of African economies. One of the fundamental concept that stood in the deliberations of this workshop was the role of credible empirical evidence on policy formulation and decision-making.

According to the submissions and panel discussions at the workshop, policy choices not informed by empirical evidence are at the mercy of political ideation of those in power and influence of sectarian interests, anecdotal arbitrariness and unethical behaviour.

For example, what was the objective and return on investment of the billions pumped into the Hustler Fund, if the government now has to buy the very tools they are distributing to the same target groups?

The choice of State House grounds for such a misadventure last Saturday, in a way, sort of formalises the agenda as a government economic intervention. Yet, the initiative is not any of the programmes prioritised in the Budget Policy Statement and budgets for 2025/26 fiscal year or the medium term.

That raises not only a serious legitimacy question for the programme, but also on its funding sources.

This is especially at a time when billions of shillings cannot be traced or accounted for, from other policy programs promoted and forced down on government agencies from the highest echelons of power in the country. Does this not open a window for speculation or even some remote evidence on a relationship between the leaking billions from programs like the e-citizen and the so-called empowerment programme?

The medium and long-term impacts of these misguided political machinations will be dire. First is the chronic deterioration on accountability and oversight institutions in the country. There is already speculation as to the fate of the tools lined up at State House since those who were at the function were not seen walking out with their empowerment instruments. We have evidence of the tools being displayed with grandeur, but what happened to the tools after the dancing and brown envelopes, as the youths didn’t obviously go home with them?  

In addition, what happens to parliamentary oversight roles when it is the elected representatives mobilising youths and carrying the bags of money into the so called empowerment zones? How should we expect them to exercise their representation and oversight authority on crime scenes like the e-citizen, when there is a good chance the billions they are running around with could have been the leakages from that very system?

Second is the distortion in public spending away from strategic investments to fund sectarian political activities.

For example, no less than the National Treasury has admitted challenges in liquidity that is hindering effective disbursements of required cash to schools and county governments.

Many infrastructure projects have remained in abeyance over the last three years with contractors unable to proceed due to payment delays. Yet, those holding the highest offices in the land are moving with bags of money all over the country. What tragedy can be bigger than this in our development architecture?

The final point that we shall discuss here is the long term impact on our societal entrepreneurial spirit and values.  Similar to the Hustler Fund and her older cousins, dishing out cash or tools to perpetuate a political narrative destroys not only our democratic values, but also kills personal initiative, responsibility to learn on the dimension of the interactions of capital and entrepreneurship that builds sustainable businesses, regardless of their scale -small or big.

Appearing at State House for politically charged dancing, ululations and shouting does not translate the participants into entrepreneurs or creators of business enterprises that can provide livelihoods, create jobs and pay taxes back to the government. That just not how the rules of business and entrepreneurship work.

With hindsight, and three years into the KK administration, it is emerging that we must start paying a lot more interest on the manifestos of presidential candidates before casting our votes. For this column, we can officially wash our hands like Pilate in the trial of Jesus before crucifixion — we did a candid analysis of the Hustler manifesto and warned of these things before the ballot in 2022!