The Saba Saba showdown was a wake-up call for private sector
What you need to know:
- If there is anything to learn from the Saba Saba shutdown, it is that the outrageous social inequality in Nairobi where 60 per cent of the population lives in slums and a majority of people have virtually no stake in the city makes its economy awfully vulnerable to political instability.
- When riots broke out in the mid-1960s, after they owned homes and property, they acted differently. I saw young men carrying their scooters parked on the roads to safety up their stairs of their HDB [Housing and Development Board] blocks.”
One of the best images of last Monday’s Saba Saba rally called by the Opposition Cord was that of a defiant female hawker displaying her groceries on a Nairobi street under armed police guard amid the tension that engulfed the city.
The stunning picture taken by my colleague at the Business Daily Salaton Njau contrasts sharply to the general background of inactivity – closed shops and offices, empty parking slots and low traffic.
More importantly, it highlights the huge gulf that separates the perceptions of loss from political instability within Kenya’s tiny Big Business class and the hawking masses.
The woman in apron’s risk-taking instincts were most probably reinforced by a feeling that she had little to lose anyway in the event that large-scale rioting broke out in the city.
For its part, Big Business, fed on weeks of scaremongering propaganda by the government and its own hawkish lobby, the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa), imagined huge losses and decided it was not worth the risk.
Well, the prophecy was somewhat self-fulfilling with the Nairobi Central Business District Association estimating at least half of businesses were shut down and losses running into billions of shillings.
No stake in the city
If there is anything to learn from the Saba Saba shutdown, it is that the outrageous social inequality in Nairobi where 60 per cent of the population lives in slums and a majority of people have virtually no stake in the city makes its economy awfully vulnerable to political instability.
Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of the modern and prosperous Singapore, narrates in his autobiography From Third World to First how he grappled with problems associated with social tensions to creat “a fair, not welfare, society”.
“My primary preoccupation was to give every citizen a stake in the country and its future,” he writes of his effort to have every worker own a home and access medical care using a provident fund.
“During the riots of the 1950s and early 1960s, people would join in the rioting, stone windshields, overturn cars and burn them.
When riots broke out in the mid-1960s, after they owned homes and property, they acted differently. I saw young men carrying their scooters parked on the roads to safety up their stairs of their HDB [Housing and Development Board] blocks.”
The trouble with Kenya is that Big Business has been rabidly hostile to the idea of a fair society. The government’s bid to strengthen the National Hospital Insurance Fund and the National Social Security Fund to expand medical care and boost workers’ savings have been partly derailed by the private sector.
Hopefully, the Saba Saba shutdown was a wake-up call.
Otieno Otieno is chief sub-editor, Business Daily. Twitter: @otienootieno. Email: [email protected]
