Insulate the economy from politics

I propose we insulate the economy from politics. Here's how I propose we go about it. In football, a team is fined for its supporters’ violent behaviour.

Most of Kenyan politicians, including the NASA top brass, are football fans, so they would understand if political parties paid a price for their supporters conduct.

Mention politics to a Central Kenya businessperson, and you will get an earful of his fear of NASA especially its presidential candidate Raila Odinga, who is spoken of as an epic threat to every title deed, every fruit stall and every rental property.

Now, though, the fear has spread well beyond. NASA’s "economic boycott" is only the latest tactic that has shone the light on the link between business, private property and politics.

Will the boycott work?

The boycott against Bidco, Safaricom and Brookside won’t work: these companies enjoy too commanding a position in their sectors. But they aren’t really meant to work.

The boycotts were announced to announce something; to keep the masses fed with this latest “Baba knows” tactic. They should properly be read with what preceded them: promises (or threats, depending on where you stand) of rent control, land ‘rationalisation’, business-closing demonstrations, riots and looting.

Tactics that have succeeded in undermining the economy that the Kenyans Raila claims to champion depend on for jobs. I feel sorry for those doing exams this week; I hope they find an economy to join, otherwise they will graduate to an economy that cannot absorb them.

Before the boycotts came NASA demonstrations, many of which turned into riots and looting sprees, egged on by politicians. I am not sure there is an investor who is keenly contemplating investing in Kisumu, which endured the worst of the riots. I don't know.

Yet Raila and NASA have promised more. The launch of the national resistance movement, as they call it, will see even more companies boycotted, and bring even more demonstrations. Riots will be aplenty.

Then there was the promise to ‘rationalise’ land in Laikipia. You could hear Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe cheer from somewhere South of Laikipia, and you didn’t need to listen hard to hear the howl of protest from our British-Kenyan landowners.

Less noted was the alarm that smaller landowners from many parts of the country heard in the promise that their title deeds could also be ‘rationalised’; and especially if they were like the ‘foreigners’ who had invested outside their traditional home areas, and who were told to return whence they came.

These tactics are succeeding.

Renaissance Capital, in its November Economics Update, notes that in October, Kenya’s purchasing managers’ index suffered its sharpest one-month fall since 2014: we shall have to endure a deep dip in business confidence.

Economic stagnation

For a poor country with lots of catching-up to do for its economic stagnation in the 1980s and 1990s, and whose citizens’ greatest problem is lack of decent employment, this is a price as high as it is unnecessary.

The NASA principal is, I believe, able to mount these moves because at his core and that of his party's, is the lack of believe in a market economy as the right path for Kenya.

His party knows they will always win a huge cheer for threatening to take stuff from those who have and giving it to those who don’t.

That’s because he is no ‘social democrat’ in the Scandinavian sense of the word – though he tries to appropriate the term. Instead, he is one of the control-economy socialists who quickly pulled on business suits and toasted free trade to get on the right side of the West once the Soviet Union folded.

Does Raila subscribe to what happened 100 years ago when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, and established a system of government that killed tens of millions ‘rationalising’ and boycotting their way to the grisly end of many ‘foreigners’? I don't know.

Thankfully, we are in 2017. The NRM will not keep sabotaging Kenya’s economy or its business. What is required is simple: Parliament must legislate measures to insulate the economy from politics.

It can start by requiring event or public-liability insurance for demonstrations, as many mature democracies do.

Perhaps political party funding could be linked to claims from businesses that have been directly harmed by demonstrations and riots. And a few lawsuits for economic sabotage would not hurt. Would they?

Mabonga is MP for Bumula Constituency