Why Kenya remains ever so poor despite its immense resources

A Kenyan appropriately called Gachie Baraka published a letter in one Nairobi daily to plead with our political class to spare the country “all further theatrics”.

He warned that only if we nationally graduate from our usual tribe-driven infantile behaviour — especially in politics — can our country begin to catch up with the rest of the world in development.

The name Baraka was appropriate both because, in Kiswahili — the Bantu language through which our coastal brothers and sisters have borrowed that Semitic word and now share it with all of us — Baraka means a “blessing”.

Yet — as any Christian priest will tell you — God helps only those who, in the practical arena, seek to help themselves.

RELIGION
Yet, unless you qualify such a statement in some way, it means that God will help the believer even in this ungodly manner.

But, of course, it may depend on what you mean by “self-help”. For it is not always a positive idea.

Negatively, there are no better exemplars of “self-help” than those who have recently discovered cornucopia by fleecing the poorest human beings with absolute shamelessness.

They do it by preaching to them the message of “heavenly salvation” in the name of the Jesus Christ whom a European autocrat reportedly crucified with incredible cruelty in classical Palestine.

In fact, in survival terms, Kenyans need some “blessing” as desperately as a young desert plant needs water.

TRIBALISM
To be quite sure, Kenya has some of the world’s sharpest brains.

The only problem is that our sharpest minds are spread out extremely thinly throughout the country, namely, among our myriad of ethnic and racial communities and labouring classes.

There, many of the brightest and most skilled Kenyans are so extremely underused — nay, even disused — that, although the taxpayer pays them handsomely, they contribute practically nothing to our national mental and economic granary.

Our brother Koigi wa Wamwere habitually reminds us of the other problem, namely, by calling it “negative tribalism”.

The question is: Why use such a term? Doesn’t “negative tribalism” imply the existence of its opposite, namely, “positive tribalism”?

For, indeed, negative tribalism refers only to the habit by the leading classes in countries newly independent from European colonialism to favour only members of one’s tribal community whenever one is in a hire-and-fire position.

CORRUPTION
Both in administration and in the economy at large, the problem with such tribalism — especially in the allocation of key jobs — is that it keeps the brainiest and most skilled members of the new nations permanently on the peripheries of policy-making and policy implementation.

One consequence of it is that it keeps a poor Third World country permanently in need to import certain extremely expensive skills and techniques from either Western Europe or North America.

Either through ignorance or in order to maintain the situation in which corruption and other forms of robbery can go on without the public’s notice, the leaders of practically all Third World countries — especially Africa’s — make some very inappropriate policies, often designed to help them to siphon off the public’s finances into their own pockets or personal bank accounts.

EMPLOYMENT
Such are the policies which they then proceed to implement only in the most haphazard and nationally most ruinous manner.

They discourage all our best educated and most skilled individuals from seeking to serve the nation where they are most needed.

That is why Kenya’s most qualified and most experienced cadres do not apply themselves with anything like enough dedication and self-sacrifice.

Kenya’s extremely poverty-stricken public sacrifice themselves to educate whole cadres extremely expensively only for the private sector — a sector composed only of foreign interests — to snatch them from us by offering them terms and remunerations that are, in fact, only a tad better.
[email protected]