Here's perfect present for the President for tips on how to ward off opposition

Last week, Lupita Nyong’o swept into town, fresh from the Mara, with elephants in the air in the Villa Kempinski room where she held a press conference to announce that, going forward, she was a WildAid ambassador and was working to save the majestic pachyderms.

Wildlife in Kenya means tourism money which translates into employment, especially for the youth, and that’s good. The downside of dead pachyderms and unemployment is idle youth, who can be radicalised by extremists, causing insecurity, a drop off in tourism, and a literally vicious cycle of fear, poverty and loathing, in the Mara and everywhere.

At the same start of the week, President Uhuru Kenyatta was hosted in Kisumu. CORD leader Raila Odinga chose to acknowledge the elephant in the room, the controversial National Youth Service (NYS) and said, through gritted teeth, that he wasn’t against slum up-grading. “(I) was the first one to upgrade slums,” said Raila, “but it must be done in a transparent manner.”

Kisumu County Senator, Anyang’ Nyong’o, aka, Baba Lupita, was more hard hitting in his ‘Straight Talk’ column .

‘The ruling coalition has put in place a sinister project (NYS) to claw back our democratic gains and to stall the implementation of devolution,’ charged the Kisumu Senator. He pointed out that the number of NYS recruits this year had tripled to 30,000 youth - and their budget shot up to close to Sh30 billion.

Jubilee hawks like Devolution CS Ann Waiguru say NYS has merely expanded to train youths to undertake public works as a means out of unemployment, a point President Uhuru reiterated in Kisumu the other day.

Actually, that idea is nothing novel. Way back in 1933, 80 years before Uhuru became President, the newly inaugurated American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was conducting a social experiment called the New Deal.

And all the shenanigans of that ‘NYS-ish’ mega-project are well captured in the Ted Morgan biography of the man, titled ‘FDR.’

As FDR’s first unemployment relief, his administration set up the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) where the federal government gave each corpsman a dollar a day, food and boarding to undertake forestry work - much like NYS youths are slum-upgrading.

Even then, FDR had his critics, including his own labour secretary, Frances Perkins, who complained: ‘Just because these guys are unemployed doesn’t mean they are natural lumberjacks. You can’t just take chaps off the breadline and turn them loose in the woods of the Adirondacks.’

People like Baba Lupita worry that since the NYS youths also have military training, they could later be misused against political opponents - we saw them demonstrate - and become like Papa Doc of Haiti’s notorious ‘ton ton macoutes’ militia.

Even in the US, CCC corps in places like Mississippi were mobilised in 1934 on behalf of the Democratic party in mid-term elections. There was exploitation of the CCC programme for patronage ends like two percent of their budget being siphoned off to start the infamous 2% clubs.

In Kenya, we already saw a high tech fraud attempt to steal nearly a billion shillings, over three per cent of the NYS budget, from the Ministry of Devolution. An event organising company was alleged to have been paid a clean Sh40 million for a one-off NYS event, raising a stink like a dead skunk in a Kibra pit-latrine.

The CCC budget in 1935 was $25 million, or almost half a billion dollars in 2015, or Sh50 billion - just under double our current NYS budget.

But for that money, FDR got real value for his dollar.

The CCC got people employed in socially productive work at an unprecedented rate. It took uneducated and unemployed young men, turned them into wage earners and gave them a leg up in life. And it reduced the drain on states that had been paying them relief, as well as promoting the social status of African-Americans.

It also lasted a decade, until World War Two ended it.

Uhuru Kenyatta recently announced the NYS programme here will be extended by another year till the end of 2016, causing CORD jitters that the project is just a political carrot to bribe their youth constituents for political expediency.

Will Waiguru get NYS value for her shilling, a la FDR?

In any case, the Roosevelt New Deal was a whole socio-economic war against poverty and the Great Depression - and majority of Kenyans exist in a state of depression.

When figures like Sh1.2 trillion tax collected are triumphantly rolled out, it reminds this writer of the skeletal figure of a man in a night-gown (in the rock video ‘The Black Parade’) holding up a handmade sign that reads: ‘I Starved to Death in the Land of Plenty.’

FDR legislated a slate of radical bills on the Minimum Wage, regulating banking bills, the Securities’ Act, Unemployment Benefits’ Act, farm subsidies to make American farming produce competitive, revolutionary bills that have stood the test of 80 years so that someone like Barack Obama, here with us in a fortnight and who, like FDR, came into office just in time to save the banking industry from its own excesses, only had Universal Healthcare to do for legacy.

FDR is, once more, all the rage, and the authoritative biography has been re-issued 30 years after it first went into print. If there ever was a Saba Saba day present to give the President (his birthday, October 26th, ni mbali sana), it would be this book - even if it is on Kindle, seeing he is a digital leader.

He may even find it fascinating that FDR was born into landed gentry and great wealth, yet in his presidency, crippled by polio but capacious of spirit, became the greatest champion of the poor and down-trodden and an avowed foe of Big Business and Tammany Hall corruption cartels.

In an age where NSE listed banks like National Bank are imploding and names like Uchumi are in big trouble, we need more legislative safety valves beyond the handing of billion bob cheques to bail out businesses badly burnt by their big managers - who often then move on to governing positions.

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