Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi returned from a visit to the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, with a bruised ego. The former Gwasi MP is also a former ODM chairman.
Members of the party joined President Ruto’s government in what now passes for a broad-based government.
Mbadi, who previously chaired the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee, has extensive knowledge of what goes on in the public sector. What bruised his ego was the treatment his team received in Washington, the head office of the global financial lender.
With all the trappings of office in Nairobi or any other capital in the developing world, the officials land in Washington.
They are then put in strait jackets and forced to make presentations, answer questions, and hopefully get their requests approved for loans that would then be administered under the supervision of Washington.
But Mbadi comes from a proud people whose pastime is spent in self-praise and not given to being treated to indignity. Going to Washington or anywhere else with a begging bowl hurts the self-image of the man from Suba.
Why Kenya or any of the other countries that troop to Washington year in and year out to request funding had yet to reach the stage of self-reflection, and believing that they can do better, could be baffling.
Mbadi said that if the Kenya Revenue Authority gets its act together, the money Kenya receives from Washington could be raised locally, saving the mandarins in the Treasury the challenges of the annual trip to Washington.
Solutions to the undignified treatment of Africans can be found here on the continent. Every year, Africans travel abroad, seeking a better life, environment, and living conditions.
From the world’s capital, Africans send home pictures of glittering malls, running water, and clean residential areas, among other things. It is not that these are a preserve of the West. To have the same at home on the continent, one would need only self-pride and discipline.
New estates in Nairobi are usually a sight to behold. They boast well-designed units with paved driveways and a clean environment. It has been repeated times without number the wonder that the Buru Buru estate was a mere four decades ago.
Then, people moved in, threw out the regulations, and started building extensions to the buildings. Where there was one servant quarter, additional ones were erected, and soon, the units lost their design, the population increased, and the middle-class estate descended into ruin.
The then-city council failed Buru Buru as it failed the rest of the city. Roads were not maintained, the planning department ignored its job, the enforcement unit disappeared, and everybody on the ground did as they pleased.
The story of Buru Buru has been repeated across the city and, indeed, across the country. Roads have been built but sometimes not completed to specifications, then left without maintenance and become no more than cattle tracks.
As Mbadi observed, it is not that the country does not collect taxes. The Kibaki administration demonstrated that the government can move to self-sufficiency. Instead, it is a question of how those in authority manage those taxes.
The few who had access to the national coffers looted them and thus dragged everybody with them to the large slum of the country. In the meantime, officials make the annual pilgrimage to Washington to beg for more resources.
At the heart of this is the lack of self-pride that would shame the officials into desiring self-dignity for all citizens. With loopholes for looting the resources, including those borrowed, sealed, the country could become a wonder to behold. The health system would be operational, saving citizens the indignity of long hospital lines with neither physicians nor drugs.
If only this country had the self-pride of Mbadi and could say, “Enough is enough,” it could improve the local infrastructure and facilities using local resources, and the annual pilgrimage to the lending capitals would be a thing of the past.
— The writer is the Dean of Daystar University’s School of Communication
