Ruto should know ban on harambees set the Kibaki years apart from Moi’s ruinous rule

Taxi drivers always have something to say about the state of the economy and they seem to have a rule about giving a gloomy analysis.

Rare is the cab driver who will tell you: “Aaah. Things are just great. I’ve been ferrying a record number of passengers, all of them paying well over the usual rate.”

In the early years of the Kibaki administration, the taxi men began to give a uniform view: “Things are bad, pesa haitembei” (money is not circulating in the economy).

When Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o was challenged on this point and was told that wananchi were complaining about the lower amounts of money in circulation in, especially, Nairobi, he retorted that he was not surprised.

He said there were always going to be casualties of the reforms Narc was putting in place after years of Kanu misrule and one of these was to “shut down the corruption industry”.

Of course, corruption has never been eradicated in Kenya.

But to misquote Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Nairobi, during the Moi years, it was a crisis.

It was a badly kept secret that at the end of every working week, heads of parastatals had to send something to the big house for that weekend’s harambees.

On the news at 9 o’clock, viewers were presented with pictures of businessmen who had donated a few million shillings to a “worthy cause of the President’s choice”.

What the cameras did not capture was the payback citizens had to offer for this generosity, often translating into quiet deals allowing the “generous” businessmen to avoid paying tax.

It is true that Kanu ministers and the President would go around dishing hundreds of thousands of shillings to wananchi by the roadside, buying school buses here and there and purchasing all the bananas market women would parade strategically by the roadside every time they heard the Big Man would pass through an area.

That’s why the taxi drivers felt the pinch when Kanu was ousted because the hundreds of power-brokers through whom this money flowed were suddenly broke.

But the thing about harambee is that it is an inefficient – and corrupt – system of distributing tax resources.

Tax revenue trebled within the first three years of Moi leaving State House.

Every single parastatal which was previously making losses – Kenya Power, Kenya Pipeline, state-owned banks – started paying a dividend to the Treasury.

No Narc minister was to be spotted at a harambee but increased tax revenue financed the free primary education programme which saw enrolment in primary schools rise from five to eight million, and fuelled some of the biggest infrastructure development programmes in three decades.

All this occurred without harambee. I have no objection to fund raisers to handle social needs such as funeral expenses or finance church upgrades.

But devolved funds such as the Constituency Development Fund and cash from the exchequer should be channelled to handle obligations the state owes its citizens, such as maintaining decent public schools, and should not be left to the mercy of politicians with deep pockets.

HARD TO FIGURE OUT

Ruto is wrong on this point. The Deputy President is often hard to figure out. He clearly has plenty between his ears and, apart from Mukhisa Kituyi, few political figures can match his performance in interviews on the question of what Kenya needs to do to get ahead.

He is also a Kanu man, of course, and this side of his is sometimes on prominent display.

Ruto should understand that the Moi years were a wasted few decades.

Narc was not without blemish.

It left a poor record on the national cohesion front and knew its scandals such as the ghosts of Anglo Leasing.

From a governance perspective, though, there is barely a comparison.

Kanu hollowed out the state and crippled the economy, particularly in the 1990s, leaving damage that will take generations to undo.

Jubilee should strive to be more like Narc and avoid the path taken by Mzee Moi.

Kibaki would scarcely ever be spotted at a harambee but he left the country on a far surer footing than the government he inherited from Kanu, where both the President and Deputy President were prominent players.

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