Don’t mislead Kenyans with false figures

NAIROBI: Every now and then, a cloud of opinion forms, temporarily impervious to fact, reason, or even common skepticism. The Eurobond debate, and the wider public contest about the economy, may generate one such, but only if we fail to keep our wits around us. It’s useful to pick out representative bits of obfuscation, if only to pre-empt or dispel the fog.

Former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, has been the loudest voice in the broader economic, as well as the Eurobond, debate. He kicked things off with the claim that a select number of economies were growing faster than Kenya, and that we were underperforming, and could expect to be left behind. Liberia, we were told, was growing at 10.4%, Niger at 8.0% Cote D’Ivoire at 7.9%, Ethiopia at 7.5% per cent, Ghana at 7.3%, Mozambique at 7.2%, Tanzania at 7.2%, and Kenya at 5.2 per cent.

Unfortunately, none of these numbers is even close to being true. We turn to page 174 of the World Bank’s World Economic Outlook 2015. There we learn that Liberia grew at 0.7% in 2014, and is projected to grow at 0.9 per cent in 2015. That is nowhere close to 10.4%. Far from Mr Odinga’s 8%, Niger grew at 6.9% in 2014, and is projected to grow at 4.3% in 2015. Far from the 7.3%, Ghana grew at 4% in 2014, and 3.5% in 2015.

It is somewhat tedious, but the interested reader can check the rest of the numbers. They are strangers to Mr Odinga’s claims. It is genuinely dismaying to see a senior Kenyan make such blatantly false claims. One must assume that giving Kenyans accurate information on the state of their economy is not high on his list of priorities.

Over the past week or so, the former Prime Minister also chose to make a number of intriguing claims about the Eurobond — perhaps not quite as wild as Mr Juma’s but equally distant from the facts, and just as inconsistent with what he has said before. Perhaps the most interesting was that Sh141 billion of Eurobond proceeds remained unaccounted for. He then said Kenya’s economy couldn’t absorb that amount of money in a single year — it was simply too much.

Now, few of us will have forgotten that Raila also demanded a pay raise for teachers — indeed, he was at it just a few weeks ago. He said they had been paid too little, and that government had the money to pay them. As it happens, the total bill for teachers’ salaries in the last financial year came to Sh140.8 billion — just short of Sh141 billion.

One now has to ask: what will it be? If Sh141 billion is so much money that it cannot be absorbed by the economy, then anything more than Sh141 billion cannot be absorbed by the economy either. Why, then, did the former PM spend weeks telling Kenyans that teachers should be paid more than Sh141 billion? We have learned not to expect answers to common-sense questions, but this is a particularly pressing one; one hopes the former PM will take a moment from his busy schedule to answer it.

We may sum up thus: These are uneasy times for Kenyans. But they can certainly be made worse: we can give way to cynicism, uninformed bluster, or sheer misinformation. That would ultimately cost us our hard-won economic freedom. It is safe to say that once that consequence is made clear to us, we will do all we can to avoid it.