The Wealth of Nations

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