Monday, January 27, 2014

Mysterious Wetangula, Ruto Meeting


Kenyan politics has gotten so confusing. The screaming headline was shocking and yet not clear in what exactly was being said. Wetangula in talks with Ruto? The article confused the matter even further and talked about the 2017 elections. The two were discussing 2017 general elections. Really??

Even stranger was the fact that there were no statements from CORD condemning the "talks." For those who are not naive enough to take things at face value there was definitely something that was not quite right here.

Let's take a look at what we do know to help us figure out what we don't.

* We know that the CORD principals (Wetangula included) told Kenyans very recently that they are sticking together in readiness for the next general elections. An interesting aside here is that Kalonzo Musyoka said at the same meeting that the next general elections will be earlier than 2017. They could be held at any time, he told the crowd. The mainstream media resported that without analyzing it. What exactly was Bwana Wiper saying? What does he know that we all don't know? Anyway that is a story for another day when I have dug around deeper.

* We know that the Luhya community are rabidly anti-JUBILEE, more so Wetangula's Bukusu sub-tribe of the Luhya. It would be political suicide for any politician to cross the floor and join JUBILEE at the moment. Even if that politician was Nelson Mandela.

* It is way too early to start having such serious discussions on political marriages for 2017. In politics a week can be a very long time and so to believe that DP Ruto and Wetangula were meeting to strategize for 2017 is to believe that a girl and boy in Standard 8 can meet to discuss their wedding after they finish school. Even the word "premature" doesn't quite describe it.

So the million shilling question is what were Ruto and Wetangula really discussing? Why are both CORD and JUBILEE cool about it? At least nobody is making any noise about it, yet.
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Sunday, January 26, 2014

I Am The President of the County and Everybody Should Shut Up

Governors in most parts of the country are in serious trouble.

They need to find money fast to fund key projects without which their political careers could be over even before the next General elections. Nothing wrong with that except that taking into consideration the current hardships Kenyans are facing and increased and more aggressive tax collection from the Central government, trying to collect any more money through taxes in the counties is now akin to attempting to squeeze blood out of a stone. Not to mention the fact that most county budgets are inflated to accommodate the ongoing fleecing of public funds through lavish lifestyles and unnecessary extras forced on the long suffering wananchi by the country reps and governors.

The response of the people to the new levies has been swift and predictable. There have been massive demonstrations and protests countrywide. In Kakamega county proposed taxes on livestock has elicited angry responses from the people with so much focus being on the beloved Luhya chicken that nobody is talking about other controversial parts of the same county finance bill that seeks to tax the dead by introducing hefty levies for burials.

In Meru unprecedented violence has swept the county over proposed taxes mostly on small traders.

As you read this, Mombasa has a serious “mboga” crisis because the main vegetable wholesale market at Kongowea has been shut down over protests that have to do with the implementation of new levies. And I can go on and on.

It is rather obvious that governors and their county assemblies need to find new creative ways of raising funds without taking the easy way out of imposing hefty taxes indiscriminately. There are many innovative ways of raising funds by cashing in on the unique attractive features of a county. Admittedly they are riskier and require lots of hard work which most governors do not seem prepared to put in. They would rather have more free time to move around in their official cars feeling important and being called “your Excellency”.

Actually most of these governors would not be facing the problems they are now facing had they hit the ground running and used most of their time to open up and improve income generating efforts for their people. Instead most of them hit the ground spending heavily. Now they are all in panic mode which makes creativity difficult if not impossible.

There are counties that can earn serious revenue by finding ways to impose levies on visitors entering the county which would have the huge political advantage of minimal effect on the locals. The ideas are really endless if one looks for them hard enough. The other way to raise taxes is to help people increase their revenues significantly and then tax only the higher brackets of income.

This is a time to think out of the box but what we have ended up with in the counties are the usual suspects as governors doing the usual things that central government has been doing to raise taxes to enable more corruption and looting by a select few. The same disease has just been transferred to the brand new county governments. County reps have ended up being miniature versions of Mpigs and just as hungry to fleece the public coffers at the least excuse. Sometime last year I was in Machakos and we bumped into some county reps who were overly excited about an upcoming trip to South Africa to “mull over the county budget.” One of them told us that they were not able “to see” the budget proposals properly in Kenya and needed to get out there somewhere to think straight. Such unnecessary trips are of course financed from taxes raised in the county.

Who or what will heal our politics? The mantra of make-maximum-cash-from-politics-who-cares-where-the-money-is-coming-from is thriving in our counties. But this time it is on a head-on-collision with the people where they can feel the impact almost immediately. Yet even the most uneducated common man can see that the burden of having too many representatives who need salaries and perks is more than crippling. There is even talk now of reducing the number of counties to 14 to cut down on costs.

Interestingly this is a proposal that could easily sail through even a dreaded referendum judging the mood of the Kenyan public just now.

But our county leaders don’t see what could be coming and would care less when they are enjoying the gravy train so much. After all it is eat and fleece to the maximum today, tomorrow will take care of itself.

P.S. The Mombasa County government's bright idea for generating revenue was to raise the levy for each lorry entering Kongowea market with produce to sell from upcountry from Kshs 2,500 to a whooping Kshs 7,500!! Some observers say that reducing the levy instead by say Kshs 1,000 would have attracted more lorries and more revenue at the end of the day. Apparently common sense is truly uncommon amongst those raising taxes in the counties.

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