Sammy Wambua
12 September 2008
Nairobi — It is just amazing how the failure to, as they say these days, think outside the box in Kenya translates into loss of billions of shillings.
Why is it that we specialise in cherishing decisions and processes whose financial folly and other implications are too grim to contemplate just because some bureaucrat somewhere cannot think on his feet?
Take, for example, the tragic case of reverse logic that will see 700 cars destroyed at the port of Mombasa and the mess sold as scrap metal.
Consider this, too: Somewhere in this country there is a hospital that manages with a rusty bucket of an ambulance, meaning that people who should be alive today have died as the thing was being fixed somewhere or lying on its belly in the hospital compound.
Somewhere in the country there is a village polytechnic and a college of technology that could teach the real thing had it a real motor vehicle which students could dismantle and assemble.
I can also bet my last shilling that the violent rituals of cattle rustling in northern Kenya can be drastically reduced if the security agencies there were given, say, an extra 70 Toyota Land Cruisers.
But our bureaucracy is too professional to see this logic, if statements by government spokesman Alfred Mutua and acting Finance minister John Michuki are anything to go by.
Of course, the law demands that port-congesting contraband be destroyed. But, you and I know that the laws that give our ministers the legal teeth to do this and that also allow them some discretionary powers.
This time round, Mr Michuki could ensure that the cars are donated to deserving cases.
The problem would be corruption as port and Kenya Revenue Authority officials allocate themselves the big, four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Fine, but don't we have such a thing as the law which should be enforced? And isn't Mr Michuki about the only Cabinet minister who sticks to the law and gets things done? Defeatism has taken us very far backwards.
The car destruction madness is just one of the many pseudo-solutions we could do without, as was the case this week when the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research came up with bizarre answer to the phenomenon of students torching dormitories and other manifestations of a sick educational system.
How would the scrapping of national examinations solve the problem?
Whereas one can see headteachers get promoted by "ensuring" that the internal examinations are leaked so that none of their students fails, with the result that their schools appear among the top 10, I cannot understand how this inevitability would help this country.
The institute also recommended the scrapping of the Teachers Service Commission and the Kenya National Examinations Council as if the institutions were the problem, and not the people who run them. Is having the right people running the institutions not the solution?
At this rate we might as well recommend the dissolution of the Republic of Kenya because it pretends to fight corruption by scratching it on the surface, cannot take care of the sick without charging them and is totally incapable of enforcing the speed limit law as blood flows freely on its roads.
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