It’s disastrous to pay such hefty salaries

Anybody with a smattering of economic history must wonder greatly that, in countries designated as poverty-stricken, the clamour today is for lavish consumption. Even among the ruling elite -- the stratum educated enough to know better -- the consumer appetite is simply flaming.

Led by the most shameless of all the parliaments you have ever heard of, Kenya’s political and administrative class is the most embarrassing of the global examples in which the national elite has never even heard of the terms “national saving” and “national investment”.

The campaign has now reached its zenith to force the Chief Executive to open a floodgate of all official treasuries so that cash can pour without let or hindrance into the pockets of high-powered public employees in the form of salaries and perquisites.

Every MP has arm-twisted the Treasury into paying him or her a cool Sh5 million – no, not for investing in anything – but to consume by buying a sinuous limousine. This colossal sum is a grant that the MPs will not pay back.

In the predictable manner of a Johnny-come-lately, every new county governor is demanding the whole of Buckingham Palace for an official residence and a multitude of aides and servants, a number of sinuous chauffeur-driven cars and even a personal jet and private airfield.

Uhuru Kenyatta -- our new President – seems to be wasting his words when he pleads with our nouveaux puissants to summon up even the commonest of their senses to see the obvious. It is that production is the only possible basis of consumption.

National hunger

Pleading with our consumer class to restrain its carnivorous appetite for public property, the son of our founding father makes the only promise that it is possible and realistic to make in a situation of excruciating national poverty, rasping national hunger and abysmal general underdevelopment.

It is that even the clamorous and extravagant consumer demands by the elite can be met – but only if the elite itself recognises that first things must come first. It is that the elite must first roll up its sleeves to lead the country in real work – namely, in the production and reproduction of ever more and ever better goods and services.

When you consume like a maggot but do not recoup what you have consumed in the form of productive work – mental or manual or both – you are a net plunderer and your net effect is to destroy, impoverish, emasciate and underdevelop the whole eco-system that you call the economy.

By its very nature, of course, an elite is usually inward-looking and as ravenous as the queen bee. And – as the sardonic French writer Blaise Pascal once quipped -- it takes “more than a little” to fill a monarch’s belly. Nevertheless, both a monarch and an elite are human beings.

It is possible for them to learn lessons from every historical situation. If the 16th-century French revolutionaries had not executed King Louis, even he might have learned that only if you give your self-interest a very long-term view can you see it with the greatest clarity.

And only with such clarity of vision can you pursue your self-interests with wisdom and long-lasting benefits. But if you do not use your binoculars – if you dismiss la canaille, les sans coulottes and other suffering masses with the contempt and arrogance of Queen Marie Antoinette, the guillotine is what you are often inviting.

If we do not begin investing in the real producers of what we consume – in the peasantry, the labour force and the school teachers who train us -- if we do not stop squandering all our meagre savings into paying astronomical emoluments to a class which consumes like larvae but produces neither goods nor original ideas – we are courting a national disaster.

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