Our leaders need to lose their roving bandit mentality

On Tuesday, National Treasury Cabinet Secretary submitted to Parliament a supplementary budget that is Sh55 billion lower than the original Appropriation Bill. If passed, the government will be on course to spend Sh2.971 trillion in 2018/19.

And if the past is any indication, Sh980 billion (one third) of this money will be stolen. Meanwhile, the President insists Kenyans must pay for development.

It is hard to make the moral case for why ordinary Kenyans should bear the burden of habitual fiscal indiscipline and crass theft of public resources. Despite repeated proclamations by Uhuru against grand corruption, the level of stealing has become so bad that one would be forgiven for thinking that Kenyan elites are ready to wind up the country. And maybe they are. Back in 1993 Mancur Olson, an economist, came up with a simple conceptualisation of states. He envisioned states to be dominated by either stationary or roving bandits. States dominated by roving bandits were doomed to failure.

Lacking an encompassing interest, roving bandits would seek to maximise their individual benefits – for example through arbitrarily high and unpredictable taxes – without considering the implications on the productivity of the societies they preyed upon. Having decimated their “host” societies with their rapacious pillaging, roving bandits would simply move to the next society and subject it to maximal taxation.

Olson’s stationary bandits were different. They also dominated societies with the sole purpose of private benefit. However, because they had a longer time horizon, they had incentives to engage in optimal rather than maximal taxation. This enabled them to invest in increasing the size of the pie – with the knowledge that this would increase their realised income without necessarily having to increase the tax rate.

Unfortunately for us, we seem to be stuck with marauding hordes of roving bandits at both the national and county levels of government. The roving bandit mentality is what drives adults of sound mind to loot whole budgets in departments, without a care of the consequences. It is what produces tragedies as emerged this week at Pumwani Hospital; or the brutal murders of young women that we have been exposed in the recent past. These men (and some women) do not care about growing the pie, the sustainability of their actions, or their reputation in the medium to long term. All that they seem to care about is maximal looting now. Which takes us back to the fiasco that is this year’s budget process. If it was so easy to cut off Sh55 billion from the budget, what else is possible? And why did the Budget Committee or the budget team at Treasury identify these cost saving measures before passing the original vote heads? Is CS Henry Rotich equal to the task of being the chief custodian of our fiscal affairs?

The only silver lining under the current circumstances is that voters are beginning to realise the link between their political choices and everyday cost of living.

-The writer is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University.