Youth Development Fund Fraud

The much-talked-about Youth Development fund was launched in Nairobi yesterday.

The president had some interesting remarks in launching it at the KICC that confirmed the obvious—that this is nothing more than a campaign tool to bribe his way back to power in the forthcoming elections. He said that the fund will be made larger and funds will be allocated in the next budget towards this. The president said that he did not want o reveal "how much bigger" the fund will be made, but he promised that it will be "a much bigger" (his exact words in quotes).

There are just two points I would like to draw to the attention of Kenyans. The first is in the form of a question; why is this happening in 2007 instead of 2003 as part of the campaign that was never implemented to create the 500,000 new jobs annually? The answer to that question is really simple. It is because the Youth Development Fund is not designed to succeed. That is not its' chief objective. It is designed to distribute cash to impressionable young voters in an election year. The full results of it's failure will only be fully realized after 2007 and by that time President Kibaki and First Lady Lucy will be safely back in State House for another 5 years.

Secondly the correct approach for anybody who wants to promote an entrepreneurial spirit in the country is to start with intensive training first. The initial government funding should have gone towards this. The truth is that with the right training, funding is never the key factor in the success of a business. It is the business idea and skills that come first. Over and over again in history it has been proven that a good idea will literally finance itself or easily find eager financiers. Not to mention the fact that we have quite a number of NGOs whose big problem is finding enough viable enterprises to fund.

By starting off with the funding component, what will happen is that the whole project will fail and anybody who comes in later wanting to promote enterprise amongst the youth will be told that the idea has already been tried out and it failed. This is really sad because my firm belief is that this is exactly where we need to put emphasis in order to reverse the dangerous direction the country is hurtling towards which is rapidly increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.

This emphasis on cash is what has brought about talk of Kshs 50,000 being too small an amount to launch a business. I can give you a list of 101 businesses that can comfortably be launched with Kshs 50,000 or less. It seems that in the minds of many would-be recipients, all they want is to receive the money, divide it amongst themselves and then swagger off into the sunset.

But then we understand why the deliberate emphasis is on cash don't we now?

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