It’s a tough budget, but you must stay ahead of the thieving hordes

Dear Mr Kenyatta,

I hope you are well-prepared to present the budget for fiscal year 2011/2012.

I presume by now your spiel is ready and all polished up for reading in Parliament on Wednesday, if efforts to rob you of your moment in the spotlight come to nought.

Experience is the best teacher. Therefore, by now, you should have learnt not to rely wholly on Treasury boffins, but to personally go through the speech and the voluminous estimates with a fine tooth-comb.

This is necessary to ensure that you are not embarrassed by typographical errors, miscalculations and other howlers that might raise suspicions that there is hanky-panky afoot.

This presumes, of course, that you were neither aware nor responsible for “errors” in previous budgets that called into question your performance as minister.

Note that while being unaware of such errors might absolve you from blame, it adds no gloss to your performance review.

Anyway, you must also go beyond accidental or willful errors and miscalculations to also satisfy yourself that that the budget will not, as in the past, provide an opportunity to launder cash stolen from the public through such mega-scams as Goldenberg, Anglo-Leasing and associated thefts.

The high and mighty that you consort with have routinely used the national coffers as personal piggy-banks, and artfully covered grand theft through figures hidden deep within the budget that easily escape the attentions of MPs and the public until it is too late.

You may recall that the grand larceny called Goldenberg was approved by a Parliament that unknowingly passed the payments under some obtuse budget line.

It also escaped attention for many years that well-known crooks who are good friends of yours earned billions in export compensation for phantom exports to the UK – the United Kingdom, not Uhuru Kenyatta – of pangas, jembes, slashers and other stone-age implements.

Of course, this was well before you became Finance minister; in fact well before you ever thought of entering politics.

Nevertheless, there is a salutary lesson that thieves close to power will do anything to rob the taxpayer and then launder the ill-gained proceeds through the national budget.

Goldenberg may read like ancient history, but let us never forget that there is no statute of limitations for criminal acts.

There is also the chance that immunity against investigation, arrest and prosecution granted some of the perpetrators by a corrupt Judiciary could one day be overturned.

Actually, some of the Goldenberg culprits serve with you in the present Cabinet, as do some of the key figures in the other mega-scandal – Anglo Leasing.

No wonder it has been noted in recent years that hidden deep within the budget have been provisions for payments in respect of the ghost projects we were all told had been cancelled.

Under the new dispensation, it would be prudent of you to dispense with the opacity of the past and produce a budget that has no provision for those who would bleed the public coffers dry.

Mr Kenyatta, I do not envy you. We may be wowed by the figure of a budget that crosses the Sh1 trillion mark, but the headache you have trying to raise the money might need more than a two panadols or a stiff double of the finest from the Scottish highlands.

Now, I do not boast much expertise in the arcane alchemy of economics. Any extended viewing of numbers gives me palpitations.

However, my better half who manages the kitchen budget has told me that some delicacies we previously took for granted have had to be removed from the menu.

Money cannot be conjured out of thin air, and neither do we have recourse to the Del la Rue printing presses.

We could try borrowing, but the interest rates are not looking too good right now and the banks that are so generously throwing money around are brutal in case of default.

Mr Minister, I honestly don’t see how you will raise a trillion. Borrow too much, and you starve productive sectors of credit in addition to creating repayment headaches.

Raise taxes, and you only punish innocent Kenyans and discourage investment. Maybe we have the magic bullet: Arrest waste and theft in the security, energy, health, education, communications, public works and other “lucrative” dockets, and you could cut your budget by a third.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com.