Kenya: A Country So Broke But With People So Filthy Rich

Kenya is a country of two worlds. It is a country with two kinds of individuals; those born to eat to sweat that which does not belong to them and those born to sweat to eat that which they have worked so hard for.

Kenya is a country where the government, through the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB), refuses to buy maize from farmers saying that the silos are full and yet 3.5 million Kenyans are at the brink of dying due to hunger and starvation.

Kenya is a country where the government signs a deal with the government of Uganda to buy 6.6 million bags of maize from Kampala and yet farmers in Kenya are desperate with nowhere to sell their maize.

Kenya is a country where politicians meet, talk over a ‘cup of tea’ then come out to issue a ‘major announcement’ of the deliberations that are for the ‘good of the common mwananchi’. In the real sense, the common mwananchi here is politicians themselves.

That aside, the bitter truth is that Kenya is a country that is so broke but with few individuals who are stinking rich. With the country sinking in debts, in most cases borrowing to pay off other debts, being broke should not come as a surprise to most of us. In fact, we became broke as soon as we misused and squandered the first Eurobond.

Sometime back, the Cabinet Secretary for Treasury, Henry Rotich, shocked the country when he admitted before the Senate that the country was broke. He, in fact, said that the Treasury was in the process of reducing the money meant for the counties for between 15 and 17 billion shillings.

The following day, the man denounced his own words and said that he never said that the country was broke. As if we do not know that that is the norm with most Kenyan leaders, they say something today and run away from their own words the following days.

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Let us assume we are broke, which I know we are, but let us just assume we are broke at the moment. The question is, why are we broke?

A report released by the Auditor General, Edward Ouko, who the cartels have been fighting so hard to dislodge him from his current position, clearly shows why Kenya is so rich and yet so poor.

According to the report, the government of Kenya cannot account for $400 million (more than 40 billion shillings) in public funds. Talking of 40 billion, what is 40 billion? In Kenya, we are so used to talking about billions being lost until we think it is just a small thing. Let me break it down for you. We begin with the basics; what is a billion? A billion is one million shillings a thousand times.

If you are given one billion shillings, and you start using 10,000 shillings daily, you will use it for 100,000 days roughly 274 years to finish it. Now, if you have 40 billion shillings, using 10,000 a day, it will take you 10,960 years to finish the money.

READ: Kenya is Broke, Please Tighten Your Belts

Our leadership is so extravagant that we are spending on anything and nothing. The report for the 2015/2016 financial year describes a series of misspending and poor accounting for various government entities.

The sadder thing about this report was that more than two-thirds of the records scrutinized were found to be unclean, with either money out rightly squandered or just nowhere to be seen.

According to the report, of the more than 10 billion euros that were meant for recurrent and development spending, only 3.45 percent were used “in the right way.” Most government entities, according to the report failed to submit any statements at all while some, could not event explain huge withdrawals of millions of dollars from their accounts.

The Ministry of Defense seems to be in another league in terms of ‘stealing from Kenyans.’ The Ministry used 15 million dollars to purchase seven fighter jets from Jordan which were later found to be defective and are now used as a source of spare parts. The same ministry paid 8 million dollars for a hydraulic excavator, five times the normal price but the sad thing is, the machine never appeared.

The ministry of Agriculture could not account for 8.9 billion shillings while the Ministry of Interior could not account for 51,500 pairs of shoes that consumed 1.7 million dollars that were meant to be issued to police officers.

The Ministry of Education used billions of shillings to print textbooks for both primary and secondary schools that have been found to contain errors. In Kenya, public funds are being looted left, right and center.

Remember the National Youth Service (NYS) saga? More than 20 billion shillings were stolen. The culprits are still free, driving Range Rovers and some in leadership positions. Remember the Youth Fund scandal? Hundreds of millions of shillings were looted. The culprits are still walking free, moving around in heavy cars and owning property.

Devolution was meant to move most of the services from the traditional ‘Nairobi’ closer to the people. As things are now, devolution also meant distributing corruption almost in equal measure across the 47 counties. Devolution has created small gods of corruption, thriving on the sweat of poor Kenyans and looting everything that comes there way.