Kibua: We can stop slide to society of beggars - The Standard

Updated Monday, February 25 2013 at 00:00 GMT+3

In his 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith, the American economics professor, satirist and (later) diplomat, painted a very vivid picture of his adopted country in which most people would be relatively rich or, in his more elegant term, affluent.

Prof Galbraith, a Canadian by birth, was one of a team of the so-called ?action intellectuals? who helped shape the major policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the 1960s. More than half a century later, Galbraith?s enlightened vision has more or less become the reality in the United States.

Is it possible for Kenya to visualise and build what could loosely be referred to as the ?OK Society? along the lines of Galbraith?s Affluent Society? What would such a society actually be like? Would it be affluent in the sense of Galbraith?s America or would every Kenyan citizen be equal, economically, to everybody else?

Apparently, none of the above.

According to Dr Nzioki Kibua, the former long-serving deputy governor of the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) who is now running for governor of Machakos County, and is certainly one of our very own action intellectuals, the OK Society would be a society in which every Kenyan family received a legitimately earned income of at least Sh500 per day and had access to both clean running water and electricity within the home.

Such a family would also have to be in a position to take all its children to school all the way up to university; have ready access to appropriate health care and live in the peace and tranquility that would be both provided and guaranteed by our national and county governments.

This country would then cease to be a nation of beggars and handout-seekers and the endemic corruption that has embedded itself into both our politics and economics would be wiped out.

But what would we need to do to transform this country so fundamentally? According to Kibua, we need to do at least four things if this country is to be transformed into an OK Society within the next 30 years.

Money printing

First, we need to get our macro-economic policies and structures correct and build the national infrastructure around the pillars, which have been spelled out in Vision 2030, the national development blueprint.

Second, we need to empower our people economically, by providing the economic opportunities through which they can generate their own incomes without depending on handouts from their political or community leaders.

Third, we need to review and strengthen our public financial management systems and procedures, particularly with respect to revenue generation and collection, and to ensure that we spend our tax revenues in the most efficient and transparent manner.

Finally, we need a moral transformation that can enable us to generate the resolve to face corruption squarely and then move on to fight it with all the legal, administrative and moral weapons we can muster.

Source: http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/?articleID=2000078040&story_title=Columns:%20Kibua:%20We%20can%20stop%20slide%20to%20society%20of%20beggars

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