Uhuru out of touch with Covid crisis

President Uhuru Kenyatta. FILE PHOTO | NMG

By TONY WATIMA
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Summary

• In a recession, the most important thing is to get money into people’s pockets as quickly as possible because livelihoods are being lost at a fast pace and avoid a protracted recession that may result in a depression.
• The government has rolled back the tax reliefs it offered after six months when we are not even out of a receding economy.
• Public servants are facing a possible salary cut whilst Covid-19 treatment through the NHIF policy, which serves millions of Kenyans, has been withdrawn.
• They will have to pay the cost of treatment out of pocket.

If I were to issue a summary review of 2020’s favourite book, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, I would say that the job of a President is a very lonely one when it comes to making decisions.

Your competent team will provide you with all the cutting-edge policy advice then leave you to make the decision solely and live with the consequences. And sometimes a President is faced with making even five such crucial decisions in a day. The job designation of a President is to make the final decisions.

One on the issues that Obama takes time to delve in, in the book, is about his government’s economic response to the 2007-08 financial crisis during which he managed to push a $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Though these details are not mentioned in his book, other people have suggested that his economic advisers couldn’t agree on what amounts to a measured stimulus response to the recession.

The two main guys leading his economic team, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, an adviser, were for a $1 trillion package, whilst there were others for $1.3 trillion. Then there was Christina Romer, chair of Council of Economic Advisers, pushing for $1.8 trillion. They arrived at $787 billion because his political strategists advised that Congress would not entertain hearing any figure that had the word “trillion” in it.

After agreeing on the size of the stimulus package, it was then rolled out into three buckets. First was emergency payments like supplementary unemployment insurance and direct aid to states to slow mass layoffs of public workers.

Second was tax cuts targeted at middle class as well as various business tax breaks that gave companies big incentive to invest. Third was infrastructure spending on high impact projects.

It is a fact that the US economy has been in recession for 14 percent of the time since World War 2, so they have the experience of handling recessions. This is simply to say, the three buckets are the best way to respond to a recession.

In a recession, the most important thing is to get money into people’s pockets as quickly as possible because livelihoods are being lost at a fast pace and avoid a protracted recession that may result in a depression, which is simply an economic crash. And that response was designed to achieve this.

Now against that backdrop of recession response, we come to our government’s response to Covid-19 economic impact. The government has rolled back the tax reliefs it offered after six months when we are not even out of a receding economy. Public servants are facing a possible salary cut whilst Covid-19 treatment through the NHIF policy, which serves millions of Kenyans, has been withdrawn. They will have to pay the cost of treatment out of pocket.

I don’t think, there is any government in the world that has contempt for its people like the one holding power in Kenya. Has there even been an incompetent government like this one?

Last week, it was reported that Israel vaccinated one million people in just under one week. All its frontline workers had been vaccinated providing stable cover against the spread of the virus.

Vaccinating one million people in under one week is beyond exemplary in the fight against a global pandemic. Now, this report about Israel came the same week that President Uhuru Kenyatta addressed Kenyans, on December 31, 2020. Surprisingly, he had nothing to say about Kenya’s vaccination programme. There was no mention of “vaccine” in his entire speech.

The President acted like he has no idea that the people he is governing are struggling to come out of a pandemic that can only be addressed through a mass vaccination programme.

Jesus In Heaven! What did we do to deserve such an abusive government? The incompetence is now more than enough.