We are fuelling inflation with voter bribery

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Last week, I saw this group of decent-looking Kenyans whom I believe had earned an invitation to the sacred House on the Hill and as expected, they looked extremely jolly – what with the eating and drinking copious amounts of tea and other soft beverages that I now understand are the order of the day there.

I do not know what the agenda was, but when the Head of State finished with the meeting and purported to dismiss the group, they would have none of it: they insisted that there was something more they expected from the President, not mere rhetoric and politicking. Of course, the President, the deft politician he claims to be, played them along, like a master puppeteer, asking them what they wanted now that the meeting was over.

“Weka mawe”, they shouted, a not-so-veiled demand for a bribe.

“Ati niweke mawe?”

Ndio”, they shouted in unison

“Haya, nitaweka mawe!”

The ululations and bellowing by the men and women would have been mistaken for a World Cup win by our very own Harambee Stars. They were ecstatic, some looked demented, as they jumped and danced with renewed vigour. I have only seen such delirium when the false bearded prophet announces he has healed someone suffering from multiple sclerosis.

What we are doing is institutionalising graft. We have made it commonplace, such that we no longer need to hide it, or even attempt to mask it with a cloth of shame.

My take is we should even consider embedding it in the constitution so that we know that it is there to stay, that it is part of our social fabric and we must live with it.

If people can demand for backsheesh from the highest office in the land, and that office acquiesces without flinching, then we are onto a dangerous trajectory.

I would have expected the President to give them a dress down, tell them that the little money the government has is for essential services like education, health, policing you name it. But no. The President knew what they wanted, he knew what he wanted and this was just nothing more than a mating dance.

This is graft 2.0. This is how the country goes down the drain and inflation becomes the order of the day.

Let us look back to the recent by-election in Ol Kalou. The power brokers from the government said that the government would spend billions there to get their man to take the seat. And they did. Only that their man did not get the seat. But this is a good textbook on how economies go down the drain.

There was this lady who runs a small hotel in Ol Kalou who went on air saying she was having problems giving change to her customers because they had mysteriously become flush with cash overnight. There was no smaller currency note than 1,000 in the entire constituency.

The question we must ask is this: where did all this cash come from? We a little bit of history that can help unpack inflationary money.

Sometimes in 1992, there was a group of young and politically savvy fellows known as ‘Youth for Kanu ‘92’. The current president was a key part of this group. The fellows used to dish money like confetti to ensure that the election that was about to take place would be won by the incumbent. Without going into much detail, the amount of money that was dished out caused so much inflation that when conflated with the Goldenberg scam, inflation rates at one time almost hit triple digits.

Basic economics tells us that any money that is not supported by productivity is inflationary. You pay money for a service that is expected to add to the national wealth. But when you hand out cash to all manner of miscreants so that they can attend your meeting, you are just making life difficult for everybody else. I will not be surprised to find that in the ol Kalou micro-economy, the price of cheap alcohol went up during the campaigns.

Since we are going into an election year, I bet this kind of voter bribery will continue unabated – unless powers that be have finally realised that voters are no longer swayed by ‘free’ money.