What our free-spending leaders can learn from Tanzania’s new president

The disgustingly conspicuous and gluttonous consumption — at the expense of taxpayers — displayed by our legislators and top civil servants is making Tanzanian President John Magufuli look like a saint.

All over social media, Kenyans are singing the praises of a man who knows where his country’s priorities lie and who understands that wastage of public money on foreign junkets (especially by a poor country) is the height of stupidity and impunity.

Our legislators spent a whopping Sh4.1 billion on foreign and domestic travel in just one year.

According to analysis carried out by Nation Newsplex, a new service by the Nation Media Group that analyses and interprets current trends, this money could buy 16 radiotherapy machines and increase by seven times the number of cancer patients that would have access to radiotherapy treatment in the country.

Half the money the presidency spent on domestic and foreign travel in 2014/2015 could equip each of the country’s 47 counties with two mobile clinics.

The Tanzanian president has ordered his Cabinet and civil servants to restrict their travel abroad and has even cancelled trips of delegates attending conferences in foreign countries.

He understands that it is absurd when, begging bowl in hand, African politicians travel first class (along with their wives or mistresses) to ask rich donors for money, especially when some of these donors’ own politicians and civil servants travel economy class.

THE ALTERNATIVE

(I was once on a flight where the Swedish ambassador to Kenya was flying economy class, while a top official of an international organisation that his government was funding was in business class.)

Our pampered politicians have acquired a taste for special treatment, like diplomatic passports and chase cars.

Even though some of them went to school barefoot, now they cannot bear the thought of living in a modest house or driving a car costing less than Sh10 million. (Remember, many of them did not earn their money through hard work, but through corrupt deals, including stealing public money.)

This kind of extravagance is not restricted to the current government.

Remember when Raila Odinga went to meet his constituents in Kibera in a Hummer?

The money spent on buying the Hummer (regardless of whether it was donated, as he claimed, or whether he bought it with his own money) could have been used to build at least 500 toilets in this overcrowded slum where residents share overflowing pit latrines with hundreds of their neighbours.

What is worse, the elite are now raising pampered children who have adopted their parents’ sense of entitlement.

Their actions remind me of a letter that went viral on social media recently.

It was written by a Kenyan who went to university in the UK and noticed that there was a crisis of parenthood among Kenya’s elite — their children were not just being pampered, they were being handicapped by their parents.

PROPER PARENTING

The letter reads: “The first thing that I discovered about UK-born white English undergraduates was that all of them did holiday or weekend jobs to support themselves, including the children of millionaires among them. I soon discovered that virtually all other foreign students did the same, the exception being status-conscious Kenyans. A quick survey would show you that only children from Kenya fly business or first class to commence their studies in the UK. No other foreign students do this.

There is no aircraft attached to the office of the prime minister in the UK; he travels on British Airways. And the same goes for the royals. The Queen does not have an aircraft for her exclusive use. There’s one core difference between the rich in the UK and us (generally speaking).

They work for their money, we steal ours!... No tree grows well under another tree, children that are not exposed to challenges don’t cook well… Is this how we will ALL sit and watch this country SINK?”

All the major revolutions, including those in France, Russian, and Cuba, took place because there was a complacent, insensitive, self-absorbed elite engaged in wasteful spending and vanity projects while the majority of the population lived in poverty.

If our legislators do not learn lessons from history, they themselves may become mere footnotes in future history books.