Shut down all the NGOs, Kenyans have become rich
What you need to know:
- Non-governmental organisations have grown on the back of the reputation of poverty, receiving money to relieve disease and hunger, as well as supply clean water and end dictatorship.
- The government has turned itself into a reputable borrower of domestic and foreign resources, growing the national debt threefold in 10 years.
Lifting Kenya out of poverty and heaving it into the bracket of top 10 wealthy nations in Africa has ended the pretence that sustained so many social parasites in the non-governmental sector.
For decades, civil society busybodies have been hawking in Western capitals piteous images of malnourished children caked in dried mucus, while secretly salivating as they wait with begging bowl for alms.
Non-governmental organisations have grown on the back of the reputation of poverty, receiving money to relieve disease and hunger, as well as supply clean water and end dictatorship. Only recently, civil organisations went around screaming about how people living with HIV and Aids would die; thousands in arid areas would perish from thirst and the uneducated would sink into a sea of ignorance just so that they could continue to receive handouts from their foreign masters.
They callously exploited this fiction to frustrate the government’s efforts to cap foreign funding for civil society organisations at 15 per cent and channel it through the national Treasury— a well-meaning plan to sever links with colonial powers who continue to pull strings that keep the country dependent.
The NGOs’ lack of patriotism and national pride motivated their leaders to persistently paint Kenya as a country that could not fund its own HIV and Aids programmes, support democracy or end poverty. Well, just in case they did not get the memo about Kenya being 25 times richer than it was thought to be, President Uhuru Kenyatta had a reminder on Mashujaa Day: There is no way the government will allow donors to take over critical national responsibilities.
After the country officially became a middle income economy 16 years ahead of deadline, the NGO wallahs are struck speechless at the reality of everybody in Kenya earning $1,294 (Sh115,000) a year, with every woman, man and child pocketing an average of Sh10,000 a month.
Where donors were falling over themselves to fund subversive activities by civil society organisations, they will find themselves rudely checked by new realities.
The government has turned itself into a reputable borrower of domestic and foreign resources, growing the national debt threefold in 10 years. Everybody knows that you cannot be allowed to borrow money if you have no prospect of repaying. It should then follow that Kenya has always been rich, nay, wealthy. It is quite capable of funding its own development.
SOILING REPUTATION
These people and their nations have been soiling Kenya’s reputation by ranking it as the eleventh largest recipient of humanitarian assistance— but the gift of $2.6 billion (Sh231 billion) is no match for the $12.2 billion (Sh1 trillion) government revenue.
If anyone wants to bring development to Kenya, they had better be ready to package it as a loan— with interest — and not a handout for beggars to be accompanied by epithets about being a fragile state.
Nobody needs the $95 million (Sh8.5 billion) NGOs received in so-called assistance from a variety of donors last year. It would be an act of diplomatic hostility to continue funding organisations commonly defined by severe patriotism deficits and entirely bent on undermining their country for the love of money.
Those nations that do not want to engage in trade and economic diplomacy should send a letter on two sides of foolscap explaining exactly what they will be doing in Kenya now that their handouts will be drying up from the source.
As it were, there is no taxpayer in Europe, Japan or the US who will be happy to give free money to people who are no longer living on a dollar a day so that they can have freedom of expression and democracy. Kenya has officially stopped being poor.
