{UAH} Pojim/WBK: More monkeys than tourists at the Coast! - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/More-monkeys-than-tourists-at-the-Coast/-/434750/2917436/-/otnp2n/-/index.html

More monkeys than tourists at the Coast!

By L. Muthoni Wanyeki
Posted  Saturday, October 17  2015 at  08:15

Hearing about what insecurity has done to tourism is one thing. Seeing it is another.

Bringing home just how one hotel feeds so much around it. Its staff salaries. Its suppliers' pockets. All the rag-tag small businesses that live off tourists — the sellers of small crafts on the beach come across as dejected rather than their usual determined selves. It is terrible.

Then a dinner back in Nairobi this past week. Somebody recounts a visit to one of the big Nairobi markets. The complaints from all the sellers. No business, no buyers. Nothing is moving.

The comment of one made us all laugh. Truly, he said, choices have consequences. He is having second thoughts about the candidate and party he reveals he voted for. He is angry about all the media reports of theft and waste and high living by all levels of our elected representatives. While he sits in the market unable to move his goods.

Those anecdotes are the micro-expression of what is going on at the macro-level. With commercial lending rates now averaging 20 per cent, we can only be thankful that such a small proportion of Kenyans have mortgages — those that do must be having palpitations rights now.

We can also only be thankful that commercial banks have so slowly moved to productive lending to small and medium size enterprises — because the owners of those SMEs must also be having sleepless nights wondering how long this will last and just how they are going to make it through. We are now at over Ksh100 to the dollar.

We have yet to hear any plausible explanation for this steep depreciation. The Central Bank of Kenya speaks incomprehensibly about the manipulation of interest rates to help stem the tide. Those 20 per cent commercial loan rates are to be borne in the short-term for the good of the long-term.

Then the reports of the Treasury having no cash — to pay public salaries, to disburse to the Constituency Development Fund and so on. The relevant parliamentary committees, having failed so spectacularly to address the alarming revelations of theft and waste of public funds revealed earlier this year by the Auditor-General, suddenly swing into action.

Why, they demand of the Treasury, do we have no money? We imagine the Treasury officials wanting to smack their heads together, thinking to themselves the obvious: Money doesn't grow on trees.

But the Treasury officials respond politely. We have no money, they say, because revenue collection is nowhere near enough to meet projected expenditure. We have to borrow. And the aforementioned exchange and high interest rates have rendered us unable to roll over our public borrowing instruments.

But don't worry, they say, they'll simply borrow more. Externally using another Eurobond-type instrument. And internally, not through Treasury bills but through those commercial banks.

Yet the fate of money borrowed in the first Eurobond is unclear — it has reportedly been held illegally in an offshore account with withdrawals going also as much to debt servicing as to investments in infrastructure development. And it is the height of irony that multinational banks are now going to salvage our ever-so-precious sovereign pride.

Has the writing been on the wall all this time? Have we failed to take seriously the macro-implications of all the micro-complaints of theft and wastage? Does anybody really understand what is going on?

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International's regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes

More monkeys than tourists at the Coast! - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/More-monkeys-than-tourists-at-the-Coast/-/434750/2917436/-/otnp2n/-/index.html

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