Where’s debate on issues in campaign duststorm?

By Jenny Luesby

This time last year, my own small business, founded some six years ago, was riding high. Until the Government’s interest rate hikes hit us, along with most other businesses in Kenya.

The fall from there was so bad that in one week this January Ist was called to three separate meetings to hear clients cancel contracts ­— painfully embarrassed that their own businesses were suddenly looking very poor too.

Maybe my company’s vulnerability was greater than some, with around half of our clients in real estate and most of the rest in the media. Both sectors were hard hit.

Indeed, one of the clients that cancelled with us went on to make almost 60 of its own people redundant. By March and April, we were likewise forced to lay off five of our 18 staff — five more formal sector jobs gone.

But this big drop was most definitely widespread.

At mid-year, our auditors told us they had seen the same across almost all of their clients — a first quarter drop in sales of typically 70 per cent or more.

As it turned out, nearly all of us businesses stayed in business. But a lot of jobs were lost. And as we have repaired our sales figures back to their former levels, most of us haven’t added quite so many jobs again — as we catch up on the losses we bore this year.

Yet the fact that seems little commented on, as we now hurtle towards our next election, is that this entire jolt, and all those very many job losses, was the product of economic policy.

Had the government taken a different path with its debt financing, had the central bank chosen to let the exchange rate settle at a more natural rate for a country importing too much and exporting too little, we might, once again, be entering an election to the soothing tune of an economic boom.

Local solutions

Certainly, many of our internal fundamentals are sweet. In Kenya, a tiny injection of capital can produce enormous returns.

And, yes, a falling exchange rate produces short-term inflation in a country importing too much, but then prices stabilise — naturally and anyway — as everyone imports less, and then start to move to local solutions.

However, that was not our path this time. Our leaders supported our powerful shilling, and kept our imports cheap and flowing.

And, as yet, we’ve not been offered any other options.

Which is the part that stumps me. For why would this be a matter for indifference, and no comment, when it will define our whole future ahead?

No matter how you look at it, the economic policy that sets our interest rates, plays with our exchange rates, rolls out, and then reverses, new tax rates and charges, has the power to shape all our fortunes. It certainly lost all those staff their jobs from January to April this year.

And that means that the policy prescriptions that each of our new leaders stands for matter now very much indeed.

Of course, we all want unity, and leadership brilliance. But let us not be silent in our search for policy promises that will get us all to a next level. United and poor isn’t much: can we hear how we’re going to get to be untied and prosperous.

For sure, we won’t all support the same policy. Maybe some voters want the government to take on more debt still, if it brings us infrastructure that will transform their lives. Maybe some voters want an over-valued currency, and with it the cheap imports it brings us all.

Maybe others among us desperately want an under-valued currency to drive forwards our foreign sales, and local productivity, and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs closing our nation’s balance of payments deficit.

But whatever we vote for, it isn’t about being an economist, or in business. The point is that whichever path Kenya takes from here, whichever Kenya will truly come to be in 2030, will be shaped by this next government’s policies.

Near total literacy

And policies aren’t some mystery you need a master’s degree to understand. America isn’t a nation full of only graduates, nor the UK, or Germany, or anywhere else.

The education profile of their populations is not massively different from our own, in an era when Kenyan youth have First World levels of near total literacy.

Yet in those countries, an election would be unimaginable without everyone crawling all over the economic policy each party is proposing.

And a policy worth voting for is a policy where the case is good, and it is well enough explained to convince us that this it can get us where we want to be.

So what policies are we being asked by our politicians to choose between, and why? At least, let’s ask.

And, at least, let us be told.

The writer is Group Content and Training Editor at The Standard Group.

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