Why is Africa poor? Why are Kibaki and Moi rich?

 By Tee Ngugi, Saturday, June 22  2013

In Summary

• The fact of the matter is that Africa is poor because our national efforts are geared towards sustaining the megalomania of our leaders — retired or active.

The Laughing Cry is a novel by Henri Lopes. It tells the story of a fictional African country’s efforts to come to grips with modernity and development.

These efforts, however, are so ridiculous that what they inspire is a macabre sound in one’s throat, half laugh and half cry.

We in Africa are familiar with this imagery, for it captures the despair and exasperation we have felt over the past 50 years watching development efforts so absurd as to constitute a crisis of rationality.

How else is one to think, for instance, of the intention by the Kenya government to build an office for retired President Mwai Kibaki at the cost of Ksh700 million — almost $10 million — when there are so many desperate needs?

Kenya at the moment faces multiple crises, which these officials who come up with these clever ideas seem not to see. Why should they when they live in a world far removed from ours — gated compounds, bodyguards, million-shilling salaries, etc.

The country is under siege by criminal gangs. To win the country back would require investment in new terms and conditions for the police, as well as training, equipment and hiring more officers.

The solution would also require creation of jobs generally and particularly in the economically depressed areas.

The country has also been experiencing strikes by workers in key sectors such as health and education. Their demands are justifiable given the meagre wages they earn.

Congestion on Kenyan roads continues to cost the country dearly in terms of lost man-hours, energy and opportunities. The problem lies in the fact that roads that should have been built never were, meaning that we now have to build thrice as fast in order to just avoid being swamped.

There are schools to be built and equipped. To ensure food security, we need to invest in agriculture. Our health facilities need to be expanded and equipped, etc.

Therefore, to catch up with our rightful competitors — the Asian Tigers — we need to grow faster, invest more, build bigger and better, exert ourselves intellectually and physically.

We cannot succeed with our usual mediocrity.

We will continue to fail unless we build into our culture new values and practices consistent with our ambitions to be a middle-income country by 2030: Sacrifice for public good, not greed; intelligent use of public resources, not wastage on a few pampered and overrated individuals; justice and equity, not privilege and impunity for a few.

Yet evidence suggests that we are still imprisoned by values that have underpinned our underdevelopment.

Just the other day, our Members of Parliament (appropriately named MPigs by civil society) were demanding to be paid close to a million shillings a month. When the body constitutionally mandated to determine salaries of public officials refused to accede to their demands, they — like petty thugs — threatened to disband it.

Then Deputy President William Ruto hired a luxury jet to make official trips whose benefit to the country is next to zero.

Further, our new governors and senators — learning from the president and his deputy — have exaggerated security details, designed more to add to their self-importance than to fend off would-be attackers, and so on, ad nauseam.

So the retirement benefits for Mwai Kibaki and Daniel Arap Moi, of which the intention to build the former an expensive office is part, are informed by a philosophy that views the public as existing for the leaders’ benefit.

The application of this philosophy in the case above assumes an even more absurd character when you consider two factors:

One, Kibaki and Moi are among the wealthiest men on the continent. They have mansions all over the country from which they can work.

Two, their development efforts, compared with those of, say, Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, amount to spectacular failure.

Therefore, there is little, in terms of ideas, we can hope to benefit from the two retired presidents.

Scholars have advanced complicated theories explaining Africa’s underdevelopment. But the fact of the matter is that Africa is poor because our national efforts are geared towards sustaining the megalomania of our leaders — retired or active.

Tee Ngugi is a social and political commentator based in Nairobi.