Still Proud to be Kenyan.

I am sitting here and wondering where all the jobs have gone and better still how to get them back. I am sitting here looking at all the leadership and all that they have done to aid and abet the current unemployment levels in the country. Of course, with the level of ignorance and in some cases arrogance that our leaders have carried themselves with, it is painfully obvious that they have no freaking idea that what is happening is actually a well researched and documented area. But one would also argue that they will have no idea what the corrective measures would be if all the data stared them right in the face. Our sins are those of omission because we have the best brains on the continent in this country as evidenced by the quality of our policies. But the implementation of these policies has always been the issue and one is left to wonder what incentives will finally drive these people into doing right by Kenyans and finally stop exporting our jobs abroad.

I was in my second year of campus when I came across the concept of value addition. Our economics and finance lecturers mentioned it every now and then but they either did not give it due weight or most students were too busy cramming to conceptualize its inherent implications. Anyway, I learnt something very valuable from this concept and which I would like to share with you today.

Kenya has been stuck in the unemployment quagmire for over two decades now. Successive governments have somehow managed to increase the revenues collected several folds while all the while failing to reduce unemployment levels one bit. They have approached unemployment with the surprised look of wonderment of laymen and attacked it head on with rhetoric. Only politicians can still act surprised that crime is rising but since more and more people are out o jobs and less are retiring; with the age limit for retirement just recently being scaled up to Sixty, it is only obvious the crime levels will also escalate.

I am here today to give the way forward when it comes to Job creation; my take;

STOP EXPORTING THE F*#ING JOBS IN THE FIRST PLACE…

Yes. It is that simple.

I have watched politicians proclaim with a misplaced sense of pride how much we have earned from exporting tea, and coffee, and all that other raw products that we export. We have been ill advised that we are a farming nation and yet we cannot even feed ourselves. We have had this stupid idea that we are farmers yet all we can generate from our over-subdivided, economically insignificant portions of land are merely subsistence crops that we hope to sell to passers by on the road. One cannot raise a family on minimum wage and especially those wages pegged on chance (that hopefully someone will buy the potatoes I have on the roadside etc.). That is no way to create jobs and that is not farming, it is called “barely getting by,” “barely eking out a living,” “struggling to stay alive.” And when thousands of families are struggling to stay alive, it effectively points towards a failed sate status. Something we are fast approaching according to the failed state Index (Yes. There is one.)

We export a lot but it is only those who own large tracts of land and who are responsible for the majority of the exports from this country. These people, who are usually sons and daughters of the immediate post independence generation of leaders; leaders who stole the land of peasants, are the ones benefiting from these exports.  These people can at last be of great service to their country if only value addition is embraced here at home. Instead of shipping the tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of raw products which are then processed and sold back to us at exorbitant prices, why not process them here and then export them. And here is the logic…

By exporting the raw materials, we are in essence exporting the following:

• We are exporting the job of those construction workers who would have put up the plant to process the raw material.
• We are exporting the jobs of those suppliers who would have sold us the capital products necessary for the processing of goods.
• We are exporting the jobs of those watchmen who would have been employed to guard the plant premises.
• We are exporting the jobs of those entrepreneurs who would have set up shop outside the plant premise to sell the workers newspapers, lunch, breakfast etc.
• We are exporting the job of the distributors who would have set up base across the country to distribute the products.
• We are exporting the job of the retail sellers who would benefit from stocking this product at their shops at low costs.
• We are exporting the jobs service industries such as banking, which would have provided financing services to these processing industries.
• We are exporting the branding industry that would have created local brand names for these products instead of the Nestles that we now know.
• We are exporting the sales and marketing industries which would have come up to market these products.
• We are exporting the work of the blue collar workers who would have provided the workforce for activities such as packaging, etc.
• We are exporting too much value that is found in the forward and backward linkages between industries.

All these are products of Value Addition. That is what vale addition does to a country’s economy. It is in value addition that jobs are created.

We have therefore exported the lives and livelihoods of Kenyans and yet we dare complain of brain drain. Well, guess what? This brain drain is just smart Africans following their jobs that have been exported abroad.

This country’s leaders have consistently failed to appreciate the simple fact that we can no longer afford to sit back and do nothing, hoping that our faith, which we dwell on too much will somehow see us through even without us putting in the necessary investment, monetary or otherwise. As a friend once told me “hope is for Sundays and Sundays only, the rest of the days we work.” It is about time that legislations which require companies to create jobs here at home came up. It is about time that tax incentives or subsidies are given to those companies that create jobs here at home. It is about time that we reassessed our trade deals, bilaterally and multilaterally, to ensure that we get the best out of any deals that will be made in future and to correct those mistakes that were made in previous deals.

But there are those who will accuse me of selective ignorance because it is obvious that raw products attract no taxes by the importing countries and that semi processed goods attract some taxes and finished products attract maximum taxation. I understand that, but accepting it would mean that we will continue to live in this perpetual state of dependency. I am not ready to do that and hence my offering a way out. My contention here is that once we become exporters of finished products, we might loose the raw product market that the EU and the US have been, but we will also gain a finished product market in countries within Africa, which is where we should have started with in the first place before heading over to EU. We will become to these neighbouring countries what EU currently is to Kenya; and exporter of finished goods and an importer of our raw mostly incidental products.

Yesterday, I heard some guy in one of those TCM movies proclaim that, “In order to have a revolution, you must first have a country.” The context may be different, but the point is that we cannot afford work with the existing systems and structures and expect to remain competitive in the long run. No! Things need to change on a structural level and I hope that we get people who can make the difficult decisions. Otherwise… We cannot have an economic revolution, evolution… if we do not take charge first.