There was a joke that economists liked to tell back when Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, and worth about $40 billion. It went something like this:
Bill Gates walks into a bar. In the corner there are three economists in deep conversation. One of them looks up and sees Bill Gates. He turns to his friends and tells them, “Guys we are rich. We are all billionaires now. The average net worth of all the 10 people in this bar just shot up to four billion dollars.”
It’s not a particularly funny joke, and I am aware that quite a few Kenyan writers (myself included) have used it before to illustrate this same point: that statistics can be used to prove just about anything; and that given this possibility, economic data can be delusionary.
In this specific case, it may be true that with the famous billionaire’s entry into that bar, if you were to combine the net worth of everyone who was there and divide it by the total number of patrons and staff, you would come to an “average net worth of four billion dollars”.
But then, this illusory statistic concerning the “average net worth” of the people in that bar, could only really apply for as long as the economists shared that space with Bill Gates. It did not in any way reflect the reality of their financial circumstances. It would not put money in their pockets.
In much the same way, it seems to me that many Kenyans have in recent months come to understand just how illusory “economic development” can be. No matter what rosy pictures the Treasury mandarins may try and paint about how well the economy is performing, the general population is more likely to focus on whether they have more money in their pockets. And of course, in terms of cash in pockets, most Kenyans volubly declare that they are doing very badly.
Much of this is due to factors out of the control of our elected leaders. In some ways it is a perfect storm of uncontrollable factors that influence global commodity markets which has brought us to this pass.
It cannot be overemphasised that we largely remain what we were at Independence over 50 years ago: a nation of small-scale farmers. That despite the many gleaming office and residential apartment blocks in Nairobi, and the beautiful hotels and beach resorts at the Coast – in other words, the impressive “development” that visitors to Kenya see – most of our people still live off some kind of small-scale agriculture.
And currently we have, on the one hand, the world market prices of what had in earlier decades been our most profitable agricultural export products – tea and coffee – collapsing due to global over-production.
And on the other, the food crops grown by even greater numbers of our farmers, can now be bought at much lower prices on those same global commodity markets – inviting the attention of well-connected importers who know how to evade taxes while flooding our internal markets with inexpensive maize and rice.
So, no matter what the government may say about fulfilling election promises of “development” ordinary Kenyans will remain very doubtful.
And this spirit of scepticism has begun to infect what was once the holy grail of Kenyan development projects: Infrastructure.
If you had access to old TV news clips from the days of the authoritarian single-party state, you might be amazed at two things. First, at how often delegations of regional leaders “paid a courtesy call to President Daniel arap Moi”. And second, at how regularly the leaders of such delegations used the opportunity to beg the President for infrastructure projects for their regions.
Whether it was improved rural access roads; or connections to the national power grid; or supply of clean water; or dykes in regions prone to flooding during the rainy season: from every corner of the country came a plea for infrastructure projects.
Next week I will go into how Kenyan romanticism over such infrastructure projects ended abruptly with the SGR railway.
