Dead people don’t drive, which makes a good health system more important, in the eyes of some, than roads and railways. But without good roads, many Kenyans can’t even get to a medical centre –functioning or not – or sell their goods and services to pay for drugs.
So which ought to come first in our national spending priorities: the facilities we need to stay alive or the roads to get to the health centres and markets?
As it is, budgeting priorities stretch in every direction for our Government. Yet hardly do we interrogate the value of each initiative in getting us all farthest forward with the least possible spend.
Will those laptops to Class 1 children deliver more for Kenya, more cheaply, than, say, computer labs for all school children? Do we need computer literate pupils more than we need mothers saved from death in child labour?
For sure, there are times when the woeful state of our healthcare system and budget -- ever smaller, even as spending rises on ports and railways and first-world computer facilities for a few –- make our spending plans look like some horrific play out of the ‘survival of the fittest’ model. Fewer Kenyans will live with our deepening neglect of healthcare, but will the ones that survive get forwards any faster to make this cruel sacrifice ‘worthwhile’?
Beneath the apparent brutality in putting us ever further behind in basic healthcare is a much more profound problem of two very different Kenyas: one for those who work and another for those who don’t. A survey by The Standard On Saturday of money-earners, most of them in the informal sector and not paying taxes, found that even street vendors and fishmongers are sending their children to private school and avoiding public healthcare.
Our public facilities, then, become a system funded by the tiny minority of formal sector taxpayers for the use of the majority of Kenyans who are now unemployed and have no choice. And there lies the crux of the near impossible equation in getting Kenya forwards on our tiny tax base.
Studies show those of us who are working spend nigh on ten hours a week working to pay for our country’s public education system alone, yet hardly any of us who are working actually use it. The reality is that unemployment is holding us all back, hurting us all, costing us all. For Kenya builds fewer roads with fewer taxpayers who protest at the thought of any increases in tax.
By contrast, everyone wins when we are all working and all funding our public spending. Until then, the real truth about the national budget is that it isn’t even realistic – built with an unfunded deficit so large that ‘only time will tell’ whether we might even have that much to spend.
Yet the fault for this gridlocked reality, of having insufficient money to position ourselves to earn more, is almost entirely our own: in what we buy. For it is as spenders that we are screwing up our future, and creating our own underclass.
The spending power in Kenya lies in the public sector, the middle classes and the ‘kadogo’ economy. But of those three, only those shopping ‘kadogo’ are spending a good slice on Kenyan goods. The rest of us, in public and private sector alike, import shamelessly. And with every import we are exporting the jobs that would generate more local spending power, more local market, more taxes and better public services.
We are creating the poverty around us. Which is why there was only one measure in this budget that truly could move us forwards, and that was the rule on 30 per cent local procurement. Few in business believe much in it – knowing the rat run it is to win a public contract that anyway often takes a year to pay, driving many suppliers bankrupt.
But in a world where Uganda sources its army uniforms from a company in Athi River, but Kenya buys its uniforms overseas, we have long been creating a jobless nation that can never rise. Even the idea of funding youth and women’s initiatives has no legs if those businesses cannot sell, and they are almost all built to sell locally.
So believe what we will about what this budget can deliver and weep at how small a pot it is up against such enormous challenges. But if we really want to see better days ahead it is time we followed the Kenyan government in just one element of all this new policy: it’s time to buy Kenyan and create jobs.
