Mr President, the rich must add value

Dear Mr President,

My name is Tim Kipchumba, a 30-year-old young entrepreneur. I was born in Elgeyo Marakwet District - some 450km North East of Nairobi.

We, Kenyans, are ingenious. God loves us. We work hard to secure the future of our families and build our country.

We are a resilient lot. Like other human beings, we shape our odds.

What we now need is a government that can do its part to allow us all to pursue our dreams and happiness.

My fear now Mr President is that we have a tragedy in Kenya and in ?Africa.

It is the tragedy of billionaires who have done nothing.

Elsewhere, people become Billionaires and there is a solid company or value that they have created. You can trace their wealth to the value they created for people. Their wealth can be explained.

Steve Jobs, Ellon Musk, Bill Gates, Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Sam Walton among others became billionaires doing something great with their lives. They did things. They built real value. They built industries. They changed our lives. These people become our heroes and heroines because of the incredible value and opportunities they created.

Walmart today is one of the biggest employers. And many young people around the world now want to do SOMETHING to be like them.

To be fair, we have our own too in Kenya and Africa. We have our own billionaires who have actually created value and as a result they also got rewarded. Equity, Bidco, Comcraft are just among those companies that we are proud to know.

What is worrying Mr President, is the rising number of billionaires who have created nothing.

One of the biggest contributions to entrepreneurship that you can make is to inculcate, in law and practice, a culture that encourages and rewards ingenuity and hard work while also punishing harshly those many billionaires who just rob Kenyans.

The true cost of corruption is not just the money that taxpayers lose but also the message that millions of young Kenyans get.

When young Kenyans see corrupt officials that robbed the lives of their parents walk out of jail or just step aside, or a system of government that continues to deny them an honest pursuit of their dreams and aspirations, they become just disillusioned and hopeless. They become radicalised. They have little to lose.

This is the real tragedy of these billionaires and millionaires who have done nothing.

Your Excellency, we need to turn this corner as a nation. We need to have people jailed and hanged. We need people to be disgusted at people who steal and be inspired by those that work hard.

We need to jail millionaires who have done nothing and celebrate millionaires that have done real things for our nation.

We need men and women of enterprise to build real value and become rich.

This way, many young people will stop chasing deals, looking for ways to cut corners and instead settle for ways to built real value. We need good people back.

We need a new moral fibre for our nation and continent. Young people will start investing in skills.

They will start believing they too can do it. We need the men and women in enterprise to be respected more than our public servants and politicians who profit from their positions.

We no longer need more representation per capita. We need more income.

I think the single action of jailing corrupt officers will reverse insecurity, improve enterprise and inculcate a more cohesive Kenya and in fact create employment.

A research done at Strathmore Business School (unpublished) reveals that the young men who participated in the violence that ensued after the 2007 General Election had a very weak relationship between their effort and the things they desired (self-efficacy). We need more young people to start believing in that critical link between their efforts to things they need in life.

That's what brings meaning, peace and prosperity.

This is, indeed, a bigger legacy.