The ongoing war on corruption or lack thereof has drawn mixed reactions from all over Kenya. Strong supporters of the President believe he wants to mop up this mess and leave a legacy. Those who support his deputy think it’s a witch hunt to settle political scores. Other critical voices think we’re missing the point focusing on the President or his deputy, that corruption begins right from the budget making process.
And if these allegations are true then our MPs as the people charged with the duty to approve government spending are squarely at the center of corruption in this country, but I digress.
Whether the thieving done in the budget making process is purely out of errors of omission and commission is something that warrants a study to be ascertained. What we can ascertain however is that this year’s budget didn’t have the common man in mind and if it did, it was not well thought out.
For starters, the President’s big four agenda strikes the right code in the hearts of majority Kenyans. I mean, who wouldn’t want affordable housing, food security, and jobs through manufacturing and universal health care? These are indeed the things that Wanjiku craves.
So should we rest easy that the government has allocated over Sh400 billion to these big four agenda in this 2018/19 financial year? Absolutely not. If anything, past budgets with mega projects like this big four have only served to put billions of shillings in the hands of a few rich folks as the majority poor continue languishing in poverty and servicing bad loans resulting from the same projects. In short, mega projects are synonymous with corruption.
Take the universal healthcare for instance. The government introduced a community health programme dubbed Linda Mama with a clear goal of reducing the gap of pregnant women dying or losing their babies due to complications arising from giving birth at home. At the core of this problem was poverty and so the Linda Mama’s key objective was to bridge that gap by offering free maternity care. Yet the statistics show we still have many women (in rural areas) preferring to give birth at home through the Traditional Birth Attendants (TBA).
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