Friday marks eight weeks since Kenya’s first coronavirus case was officially announced.
We’re
coming to the end of our sixth week of a national dusk to dawn curfew,
and we’ve just passed 30 days of partial lockdown with the news that
selected areas in Nairobi and Mombasa are going into harder lockdown.
In the past week, we’ve confirmed that community transmission is real, as the virus curve rises steeply.
coming to the end of our sixth week of a
national dusk to dawn curfew, and we’ve just passed 30 days of partial
lockdown with the news that selected areas in Nairobi and Mombasa are
going into harder lockdown. In the past week, we’ve confirmed that
community transmission is real, as the virus curve rises steeply. Then,
just when increased testing suggests it’s getting worse, we all want to
get out and about.
We’ve also learnt that the
“curfew-breakers” that we are will no longer be detained in quarantine,
or quarantined in detention; we’ll go straight to special “concentration
camps”. Knowing full well our “two beers per sausage” proclivities, the
police are making a killing, and occasionally killing people too.
This
biblical Kenyan moment is nothing without floods. Over 200 dead in
three weeks, and going to a million people displaced. Add a fresh swarm
of locusts eyeing our “greens” in a third of our counties. It probably
isn’t the best time to forcibly displace 5,000 people for a sewerage
plant, but our government isn’t one that, to quote my favourite
consulting adage, “listens, thinks and consults; (and then) acts”.
‘Out
and about’? As many commentators predicted early on, we were never
going to sustain social distancing and “shelter-in-place” without food
on the table and social safety “nets and ropes”. 2020 might be the
worst, or longest, year in our lifetimes, but we’ll go down fighting
with and for our lives.
And, from what I see on the
news, it seems that our leadership has promised to assemble an advisory
team to “recover Kenya” once this pandemic is done. That’s probably the
wrong way to look at it. Our lower middle income economy of low income
tax collections was stuttering before Coronavirus.
Without the SGR, our real (ex-corona) GDP growth is back to
normal, average levels. Private investment has waned for some time; with
an economy increasingly reliant on debt-fuelled government spending.
Businesses have collapsed, retrenched or relocated at the first sign of
headwinds and crosswinds.
In our unequal country,
growth bears little relation to human development outcomes, yet our
leaders ask “why we are broke”. Our 1963 “poverty, ignorance and
disease” condition looks terminal in 2020.
Maybe the
task of this advisory team shouldn’t just be to “recover”, but to
“remake” Kenya. I once suggested that Kenya’s economy, which former
Chief Justice Willy Mutunga once referred to as a “bandit” economy, has
three essential parts. At the top is a “casino economy” where politics
and business interacts and intermingles as easily as Samson and Delilah,
with often similar results.
At the bottom is our
informal “kadogo (little) economy” of unitised, miniaturised trade and
commerce that gives meaning to the term “daily bread’. In between is the
“bubble economy” of our politically somnolent middle class; a car here,
fancy “digs” there, mall close by, club even closer and it’s all good.
Well,
guess what? Coronavirus has exposed the real truth of our “mkono-mdomo”
(hand to mouth) economy. All the way from top to bottom, except for
Safaricom, it’s lamentation galore. Many will be flat broke by the end
of this month, yet we should expect to ride this tiger through 2021.
The human and humane Kenyan conversation for 2022 has begun, so here are a couple of thoughts.
New
skills, anyone? I want to learn how to develop mobile apps that will
probably refer you to other apps that link you to others; and get my
teeth into data science and all that is great about ‘Big Data”. Simple
example, but the fast looming “future of work’ makes this a great time
for self-improvement.
On the business front, the
conventional wisdom is that “high touch” is out and “low touch” is in
for the foreseeable future. Digital will drive this transformation, but
the true advantage will come from real answers to basic needs, like
food, schooling, health, shelter and living conditions. It’s a great
moment for business self-improvement that addresses humanity’s
challenges, without pandering to its excesses.
And then
there is government. The singular lesson from this pandemic is that a
government “for the people” must be “close to the people”, literally and
figuratively. A future in which counties drive our development,
including agriculture, education, health, shelter, water, sanitation,
industry, trade, commerce and services, culls reliance on a gluttonous
national government that spends our taxes badly.
Here’s
a rocket idea (the lawyers will slaughter me) in this time of
self-improvement. Why don’t we postpone 2022 (elections and political
noise), and use this and the next three years to “remake Kenya”?
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