I
didn’t attend any of the Ivy League institutions but am proud to have passed
through the hands of Dr. Baraza, a public finance guru. Most of the
class time sessions were spent watching video clips, and there I got a
different view to wealth.
Forget
everything else I might write down here, but don’t forget this one thing: If
you want Kenya to be rich, you must have great productivity. The value you
produce in return for the inputs you consume is the only thing that matters. It
doesn’t matter how many people, machines or resources you have.
All
that matters is the equation connecting inputs and outputs. Talk of a positive
value; a positive net present value.
The
former president beat this particular drum for more than ten years: ‘’fanyeni kazi’’. I’ll keep beating it
even louder until someone listens and we fix Kenya’s productivity problem. The
inefficiency with which we use our human resources, incidentally, is not just
about manual workers. The problem of meaningless, valueless jobs starts very
high up.
Let’s
shift to the Kenyan government and public offices.
Koigi wa Wamwere once allowed
journalists to spend an entire morning in his office. There, they recorded his TYPICAL
DAY:……”he reads the newspapers, checks
the post and e-mail, he surfs the net, he speaks to his secretary, he calls
home,………. many hours of barely worth activity. Later, the journalists
leave, amazed by the sheer tedium of it all.
Inactivity in government and public
offices.
One
might ask: do people especially public servants, go into office and wait to be
given work to do?
I
ask this because with all the resources at their disposal I would think that
these servants should be able to come with plans to better their ministries and
offices. It is easy enough to blame the government for appointing these people
and not making use of them, but I think it would be better to ask why they do
not seem to have any personal initiative to work.
And
the joke’s on us. Most of these servants carry off hundreds of thousands or
more of our money (tax revenue) every month in salaries and allowances. They
have staff joining them in doing nothing; they have guards guarding their
inactive serenity; they have well-appointed offices in which to do nothing,
well, doing nothing in style. Some, it is alleged, have up to four cars given
to them by the state to ferry them around in supreme comfort so that they can
do nothing in different places.
This
problem begins from the top. We could sack all unnecessary/inactive officers
and the only reverberations we would feel in the economy would be that of money
being saved and available for investment. Allow me to call this The Wealth of
Nations.
Bad
work and jobs keep us poor and unskilled. We are poor because we do things
badly. That’s all there is to it. Good work the otherwise. Every time I travel
via Thika road I usually tweet/facebook that Vision 2030 is possible_(confirm
from my tweets). Every time Dr. Alfred Mutua speaks on media: productivity,
work well done
Jobs
should be measured by the work done. More jobs are created when work is done
well. Wages go up when work is done well. Companies prosper when work is done
well. Standards of living rise when companies prosper and workers are paid
more. Good jobs equal prosperity for all.
This
is the Wealth of a Nation, but it’s quite a job to explain it.
Let’s keep tweeting
@fredbursar
