BY HENRY MUNENE

As Greek myths of old go, the story of Sisyphus is a classic.  Sisyphus was an amorous, incurably avaricious and crafty king with lots of blood on his hands. He had the cheek to trick even the gods, as he did when he chained Thanatos, the god of death.

His sleight-of-hand eventually earned him the punishment of forever rolling a huge boulder up a steep hill; after which it would roll downhill, only for Sisyphus to roll it uphill again, ad infinitum.

Today, the name Sisyphus may refer to unlucky chaps who never seem to have a snowball’s chance in hell of wriggling out of misfortune.

And the hardworking people of Kenya, those whose backs are forever bent in labour, seem to share in Sisyphean fate.

First, let me state from the outset that Kenya is changing.

As a young man, I recall going to bed late and tired every day, and then at the witching hour, just before cockcrow, there came the inimitable voice of my father.

“A man does not sleep like that!” he would thunder with mock disappointment, as I rubbed my eyes to ward off vestiges of sleep.

Now, though we cherish the so-instilled work ethic, I particularly pitied his generation’s thankless farming business. They made virtually nothing out of it, apart from repaying loans that some officials somewhere always embezzled. And with such phony debts being offset by the State, things may be looking up, albeit painfully slowly.

The problem with this slow growth is that it cannot match our exponential population growth and the fact that it is actually the poor who are multiplying fastest, in a country where more than 47 per cent of national wealth is controlled by less than 10 per cent of the population.

It helps little that many poor Kenyans live from hand to mouth, rely on ‘dirty’ energy and can hardly afford basic needs.

They call to mind what Sembene Ousmane calls God’s Bits of Wood.

And the problem seems to be that many of our youth, even after acquiring an education, remain unemployed, or are in the kind of pseudo-employment that sees many Nairobians sleeping in buses at Machakos Country bus stage or on city verandahs.

 While in the UK you must pay your workers at least Sh795 per hour, or Sh6,356 per day, arrangements such as AGOA benefit the rich who pay their eternally ‘casual’ workers Sh4,000 per month, despite high State incentives aimed at alleviating poverty!

Clearly, we need to not only invest more in initiatives that can spur growth and give our people more incomes, but also get creative and innovative to reduce the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots.

Kazi Kwa Vijana cash

We just can’t pacify the surging troops of unemployed youth and destitute old people who have reached the end of the economic tether by extending handouts to them.  Other than the fear that much of this money may go the way of maize and the Kazi Kwa Vijana cash, it is not sustainable.

And as we form a million commissions to do this or that under the buzzword of “entrenching devolution”, we seem to have forgotten that the only way to avoid a Nairobi spring, like the Arab Spring in Africa’s north, is by making sure that the millions of unemployed, wasted souls at least have something to eat; which means pumping more money into entrepreneurship and innovative ideas in food production and in the Jua kali sector.

We need to reduce unemployment and help our youth save for old age from their sweat, rather than wasting their virility and waiting to give them Sh2,000 every month when they grow old.

They should be helped to make clothes they can export to countries from where we now import second-hand clothes.

For while we need short-term interventions to mitigate the dire economic straits our people find themselves in, we must ensure that we have a long-term plan to fix our problems once and for all, rather than pumping cash into symptoms as the disease called poverty festers. 

For relying on short-termism could end up sinking us further into the fate of that mythical Greek King – Sisyphus.

Writer is Revise Editor The County Weekly, a publication of The Standard Group.

hmunene@standardmedia.co.ke