Kenya's troubles started long ago

The reason people become garrulous with advancing years is that one disjointed memory leads to another and before you know it, it has turned into an incoherent flood of recollections.

One week I am going on about the old improvident unbanked days, the next I am babbling about mone-ylenders and their sinful ways and then I touch on a thought that gives vent to even more memories.

Last week, I told you of a time in the 1970s when a shilling took care of bus fare between Eastleigh and the city centre and Sh20 could buy you three beers with enough change left over for a few sticks of cigarette.

That was long before the culture of conspicuous consumption took root in this country and ostentation of any kind was frowned upon.

In any case there was little money to throw about unlike today when the burial of a man few had heard about before his death seems incomplete unless the body is escorted by a swarm of helicopters and a convoy of expensive limousines.

The Kenyan middle class, such as it was, was still guided by the old British ethos of frugality and understatement. Even top public servants used modest cars and these were so few that in Nairobi, traffic jams were still something we read about in the newspapers as happening in the major world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo.

Indeed, traffic was so light in Nairobi that on a Saturday afternoon you could sit at the verandah bar of the old Cameo Cinema and enjoy motorcycle races up and down Kenyatta Avenue without a single car getting in the way.

In the late 1970s, I worked from an office overlooking Kenyatta Avenue and Monday to Saturday at 8.45am, witnessed the ritual of the presidential motorcade delivering the Head of State, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta to work either at Harambee House or State House from his Gatundu home. The reverse would happen at 430pm.

To the best of my recollection, there never was any need to disrupt traffic for the presidential passage.

It is on record that old Jomo never spent a night at State House, the only exception being the State party and dance on Independence Day in 1963 — when actually nobody slept a wink.

Colonial Governors

Jeremiah Nyagah, who served in the Kenyatta and Moi cabinets, would disclose to me years later that the reason Jomo gave for never sleeping at State House was that the “place is haunted by the ghosts of white colonial governors.”

Before I digressed, I was talking about a time before tender-preneurs made a billion shillings seem like small change and money had to be earned. It seems like only the other day when earning a six-figure salary was such a big deal.

Those with long memories will recall the incident in the mid-1980s when a reporter with one of the national dailies “exposed” the fact that Henry Kinyua, who at the time was managing director of Kenya Planters Co-operative Union, was paid a monthly salary of Sh100,000.

The country was shocked and Parliament was in an uproar that anyone could be paid so much money.

As one disgusted MP protested, that was much more than the president of the country himself was paid at the time!

In the chorus of outrage and condemnation, the only contrary voice came from Njenga Karume, the millionaire member for Kiambaa who informed the House that he paid his farm manager Sh30,000 a month.

Why, he wondered, would it then be such a big deal to pay Sh100,000 to the man who managed the country’s leading source of foreign exchange at the time?

When did we as a country make the transition from frugality to opulence?

Some years ago, a man who served in government in the 1960s and 1970s told me about something known as the Civil Service list that dated back to colonial days but which the government quietly shelved in 1979 or thereabouts.

There are those in this country who trace our current troubles, including runaway corruption, to that action and I promise to devote some attention to it one of these fine days.