The Real Tyranny Of Numbers

Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury, Henry Rotich, yesterday unveiled a budget which included measures to reintroduce the controversial VAT Bill which, he says, seeks "reduce the cost of compliance" with our tax collection mechanisms. This Bill, which will likely see a large increase in the price of basic commodities including food, sanitary towels and books, is presented by a government that during the election promised to lift 10 million people out of poverty.

How this is achieved by making everything from sanitary towels to food and books 16% more expensive and driving up the cost of living sounds very much like modern-day alchemy. But that is until you consider how our system works. You see, in Kenya, policy is not about helping human beings -individuals or even communities. It is about the statistics and indices whose upward or downward trend is a measure of our success or failure as a society.

These figures and averages, instead of providing insight, are now used to mask reality. The joke goes, when Bill Gates walks into a bar, on average everyone there becomes a millionaire. Similarly, the growth in averages like GDP, is used to hide the fact that much of society is still actually deeply steeped in poverty and that much of the increase in wealth is concentrated at the top. We define poverty by how much disposable income a family has, not by, for example, whether they can access a decent hospital and how far they have to walk to get there. Thus our solution is not to build more health centers, but to grow the economy.

This tyranny of numbers, the triumph of neo-liberal thought, is having a real and disturbing effect on how we understand ourselves and our society.  We have been transformed from wananchi to taxpayers, from citizens to consumers. The economic relationships have been privileged above all others. It is of course reflective of a global trend where entire countries and regions are now referred to as nothing more than markets.

We are encouraged to think of ourselves as disposable units of production; our land, history, art, culture, and even education as nothing more than repositories of monetary value. Thus we prostitute our traditions for the sake of a few tourist and politician dollars. Art becomes investment, not a means for society to understand itself. Wildlife is not a heritage to be studied and understood but a resource to be sustainably monetized.

Journalism is today about performance and entertainment, not information and education. The news is a show and the electorate little more than a passive audience. Why would they be expected to be interested in, much less understand, the nuances of something as boring and undoubtedly complex as voting systems or the VAT Bill? Leave it to the pundits, lawyers, politicians and economists. They know best.

We are even passing this on to our children. Earlier this week, Cabinet Secretary for Education Jacob Kaimenyi, announced that engineering and medical students in public universities are to pay more than their counterparts in the humanities. Lecturers' pay is to be similarly differentiated. The message is crystal clear. Some university courses are more preferable and profitable. Some knowledge, especially sciences and tech, is more desirable. Education is not about molding minds and unleashing creativity. It is about generating a globally competitive workforce. Students are future workers not thinkers.

A lecturer in Makerere University describes it as the “marketization” of education. “Our society has lost track of the meaning and value of knowledge and education,” says Mwambutsya Ndebesa, who teaches History. In fact, many universities have already started operating, in the words of Christopher Lucas, author of Our Western Educational Heritage, as “an appendage to the world of business.” A study carried out a few years ago revealed that although courses such as agriculture, conflict resolution, criminology, disaster management, literature, poetry, and ethical education, though more relevant to sustainable development, are being relegated to the back burner.

This contraction in our imagination of what it means to be a human being, or a citizen, explains why we are so easily bought off, so easily "misled" by our politicians. It explains why our idea of Kenya is more akin to a cake than a country; why we speak of turns to eat; and why governance is about sating appetites, not service. It is why we continue to be ruled by the demagogue, the tribalist, the mendacious and the kleptomaniac.

It is why we are content to reduce our citizenship to mere economic participation and condition fundamental rights on economic status. Why we are happy for poor kids to attend free schools without asking about the quality of the education they are getting. Why we are blind to our history, and the history of that history. Why we fear to ask difficult questions and are constantly terrified by the violence we believe simmers under the surface of our otherwise "peaceful" political life.

The fact is, we will not grow our way out of these issues. Economic growth will not be a panacea for the inequality and poverty that afflicts our society. On the contrary, it will exacerbate them. We must rethink the rationale of the state, the why of Kenya. We must break out from the tyranny of the numbers and realize that the economy and the market exist to serve us, not the other way round.

Diaspora Crucial To Somali Economy

Somalia has been engulfed in civil war for 20 years, resulting in the collapse of central state institutions, the destruction of social and economic infrastructure and massive internal and external migration. However, despite the absence of a state and its financial, economic and social institutions, combined with other challenges, the traditional Somali spirit of entrepreneurship remains strong and the private sector resilient and robust.

Indeed, the private sector has managed to grow impressively, particularly in the areas of trade, commerce, transport, remittance services and telecommunications, as well as in the primary sectors, notably in livestock, agriculture and fisheries. Aggregate trade data reported by partner countries to the IMF reveal that by 2006, Somalia’s imports had almost doubled, reaching a historical record of $461 million in 2004. In the first six years of the new millennium, exports almost tripled, reaching $266 million in 2004.

This economic activity is powered by remittances from Somalia’s vast Diaspora which, as a proportion of the country’s population, is perhaps the largest in the world. One in every 8 Somalis lives abroad, most of them having either fled the repression of Siad Barre’s military dictatorship or the chaos that followed his ouster and the collapse of the state. They constitute 80% of the country’s skilled manpower and send close to $1 billion every year to relatives in the country.

Without these remittances, the country’s private sector would undoubtedly fold. It already faces significant challenges accessing credit and other financial services. The collapse of the central government in 1991 led to the ultimate collapse of the country’s commercial banking sector, which had previously been plagued by corruption and mismanagement. There are currently no formal financial institutions operating in Somalia nor any fully functioning formal financial sector regulatory bodies, making it impossible to encourage and harness domestic savings. Further, the country is also locked out of international capital markets. Somalia relations with international creditors were frozen in late 1980s due to the economic mismanagement of the Barre regime.

The remittances also dwarf any international aid the country receives as Overseas Development Assistance. Somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world with a per capita income less than half the regional average and, in 2003, it was estimated that nearly three-quarters of the population lived on less than two dollars a day. Per-capita aid to Somalia, had reached $41 in 2003, totaling $272 million. Remittances, at roughly four times that number, clearly show that the major inflow of “aid” comes from Somalis themselves.

Most beneficiaries live in urban areas, with the remittances constituting about 40 percent of the income of urban households. Less than 10 percent of transactions are destined for rural villages. According to a paper prepared for the UN conference on Somalia held in Istanbul in May this year, individual transfers are usually in small amounts averaging $132, sent regularly to cover basic family needs. In fact, household consumption, including expenditure on education and health, accounts for between half and two thirds of remittance spending. However, studies in Somaliland show that remittances are increasingly being used to fund new organizations and development projects, and such transactions usually involve larger sums.

Whether invested or consumed, remittances have important macroeconomic impacts generating positive multiplier effects, while stimulating various sectors of the economy. Studies in Mexico show that for every dollar received from migrants working abroad translates to a $ 2.69 in the Gross National Product. Other studies analyzing links between remittances and poverty in Ghana suggest that raising remittance by 10 percent reduces the share of those in poverty by 3.5 percent and has a negligible impact on income inequality. A study in Hargeisa found that households earning less than $2 a day had no direct access to remittances from abroad and had to rely on gifts from family members or neighbors.

It is not only by sending money that the Somali Diaspora is contributing to the resurgence of Somalia. They are also giving of their time and skills. Many have returned to help the fledgling Transitional Federal Government create lasting institutions while others are undertaking individual initiatives aimed at improving the lives of Somalis. In 1999, a Somali Canadian family returning to Hargeisa identified an unmet demand for English language primary education for the children of families returning from the West. They founded the Blooming Primary School, which by March 2005 had a student population of nearly 600. Fully a quarter of the pupils wee exempted from paying fees, including 60 from the Hargeisa Orphanage.

As Somalis work to rebuild their country from the ashes of the last twenty years, it is certain that those in the Diaspora will continue to play a critical role.

Kenya: An Island of...

We Kenyans like to think that we are the most developed and sophisticated people in our corner of the planet. We consider other countries in the neighbourhood to be backwater shagsmodos. I must confess that till recently I broadly shared these sentiments. However, such smugness is sadly misplaced.

Take Malawi as an example. The last four years have witnessed an average annual economic growth rate of 7%. Over the period, the tiny landlocked country has doubled it's agricultural production every year. According to Wikipaedia,

in 2006, in response to disastrously low agricultural harvests, Malawi began a program of fertilizer subsidies that were designed to re-energize the land and boost crop production. It has been reported that this program, championed by the country's president, is radically improving Malawi's agriculture, and causing Malawi to become a net exporter of food to nearby countries.

While Kenya starves and produces a paltry 1.4 tonnes per hectare, Malawi is now producing 5 tonnes per hectare. Our production at independence was 1.2 tonnes per hectare, which goes to illustrate just how little we have improved in 45 years.

(Staying on matters agricultural, I was shocked to learn that Kenya produces nearly 1.5 times more milk than South Africa but earns 5 times less from that production. In 2006, according to the EA Report On Manufacturers & Commercial News, Kenya earned Kshs 64 billion from 3.5 billion litres of milk compared with SA's Kshs 220 billion from 2.6 billion litres which translates to revenue per litre of just Kshs 29 for Kenya and a whopping Kshs 96 for SA. With a dairy herd six times as small, the average SA dairy farmer produces ten times as much milk as his Kenyan counterpart.)

Back to Malawi. While our own fight against corruption continues to be mired in the morass that is our politics, Malawi last month re-arrested (note the re-) former president Bakili Muluzi on charges of stealing millions of dollars given to the country by international donors. And as we struggle with the aftermath of the 2008 post-election violence, it is instructive to note that Malawi has had two peaceful transfers of power.

Who's the backwater now?