A billion shillings has today lost meaning

Back in the eighties, there was a time when you heard someone had a million shillings, you looked at that person in awe. They walked on air and carried with them a halo. And then, a million started being rather common. A midget of a man known as Kuria Kanyingi had a hand in demystifying a million shillings.

He would attend numerous church fundraisers and ask how much the church needed. He would then dramatically remove the entire amount that had been ferried by his handlers in huge manila envelopes to the ululation of the women guild. After this, it was time for a grand address, telling the crowd, in not so many words, that they can keep the miserable fifty or a hundred bob notes they may have intended to give.

The  Goldenberg heist did not help either: for the first time, we were told that the government had lost tens of billions of shillings to hoodlums in suits. These are figures that we could not fathom them: they were fantastical figures that only existed in the realm of Kenyans’ imagination.

A million shillings had by then slowly and surely lost its allure. It became common place. Today, nobody mentions a million anymore. A billion is the in-thing. Take the yearly ritual by the Auditor General of the grand theft that takes place in government: the report rarely mentions any scandal that is in the millions. No sir. It’s either a couple of billions or nothing at all. A billion’s time has come for it to be normalised.

When the head of state and his minions are talking about his development projects, they will casually throw around figures in the tens of billions of shillings. When we hear of a stadium that has cost over Sh40 billion (and the final payout to those who invested in the paper for the Talanta stadium will more than double this figure), you start wondering whether we have a country left any more.

Give the devil his due: the stadium is a sight to behold for sure and will remain a landmark for the city. But, shouldn’t we have spent the money in a better way. By the way, why do we have this fascination with stadia in Kenya? The other day, the good people of Wajir were promised a stadium costing a couple of billions (that number again!).

I believe the average resident of this water stressed county would have been better off with boreholes rather than a stadium that will stay empty for most of the year. But, what do I know?

I do now think we have now totally lost it. When we read and hear that a road that’s less than a kilometre is costing a staggering Shs3.8 billion, I am totally lost for words. This is insanity on steroids. The road is not even an engineering marvel: it’s just a glorified over-pass.

We have seen in the news that the Kenya Ports Authority has gone one up and is also building a road within its complex that is even more expensive: Sh8.3 billion for 1.4-kilometre stretch. This is where we raise our collective hands and ask for divine intervention. Only the good Lord can deal with this kind of insanity that appears to have infected our people.

We have money but we seem to have our priorities upside down. I would prefer that such billions spent on a kilometre of road be poured into a rail commuter service which would not only be better value but will improve the lives of thousands of urban commuters not just a few motorists and matatu bound passengers. But, again, what do I know?

Roads and stadiums may not have any productivity attached to them in that we cannot compare them with, say, an industry that has a measurable return on investment. They are meant to improve the lives of the citizenry. But when such money is spent on projects affecting a very small population, they cease being of any value. They simply become edifications for the political elite.

-The writer is a communications consultant