Youths who turned up during the recruitment of police officers in
Eldoret on July 14, 2014: People from well-off families have better
chances of landing a job in Kenya. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA
By Tony Watima
Milton Friedman wrote in his book Free to Choose that life is not fair, attempting to believe that the government can correct the effects.
John Rawls, the late American philosopher, answered
Libertarian laissez faire economists like Friedman that although life is
unfair, we have to get over it and find ways of maximising the benefits
that flow from it.
He said: “The natural distribution is neither just
nor unjust nor are the persons born into society at some particular
position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the
way that institutions deal with these facts.”
What we must then confront is what kind of
principles we would choose to govern social and economic inequalities to
guard against the risk of finding ourselves in crushing poverty and is
the subject that David Ndii, an economist, tackled in a recent article
in the Saturday Nation.
Rawls says that at first thought we might try and
favour equal distribution of income and wealth, but it would occur to us
that we could do better for those at the bottom.
The analogy he gives is the case of doctors offered
a higher pay than bus drivers; we could be improving the situation of
those who have the least — by increasing access to health care for the
poor.
Rawls calls for permissible inequality, more so
equity, as the principle of addressing moral desert and entitlement to
legitimate expectations.
So if we were to ask Rawls about President Uhuru
Kenyatta’s issuing title deeds to the landless, what would be his
response knowing that an estimated 75 per cent of Kenya’s population is
directly dependent on land yet land distribution is skewed?
Natural facts
That 17.2 per cent of Kenya’s total landmass of
587,900 square kilometres carries 80 per cent of the population while
the remaining carries only 20 per cent of the total population, which is
mainly made up of pastoralists. About 13 per cent of the population has
no land at all.
Rawls’s answer would probably be that natural
distribution (talent, endowments) is neither just nor unjust, nor is
someone born in a serfdom or marginalised group, but how our
institutions address these natural facts (marginalisation, inequality,
deprivations) is what defines what’s just and unjust.
Rawls’s theory is not meant to assess fairness; it
is concerned with the basic structure of society, and the way it
allocates rights and duties, income and wealth, power and
opportunities.
On whether we have ever made a leap from our social
and economic position, let’s look back to Independence days and compare
with the current situation.
If we did, there is no reason to say we are winding
back. We have been making baby steps moving forward only to back-pedal
looking for the horizon.
There has always been systematic marginalisation, discrimination and deprivation, national disparities and poverty levels.
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