Budget cuts and BBI not solutions to country’s woes

It is unlikely that the many presentations to the parliamentary Committee on Budget asking it to intervene to prevent severe cuts to initial allocations to key departments will yield much, because the supplementary bill that contains those proposals will pass and those departments will just have to live with the situation.

As a consequence, the Judiciary will be hit for Sh3 billion, with devastating consequences to the delivery of justice. The country is already suffering from the impasse between the Executive and the Judiciary, after the President rejected the list of appointees that the Judicial Service Commission had nominated for positions in the High Court and Court of Appeal.

Cases listed for hearing at the Appeal Court are piling up because there aren’t enough judges to form the desired quorum. Judiciary Registrar Anne Amadi explained this week that the operations of that arm of government will grind to a halt in the next two months if the cash is not reinstated. Court services will be severely curtailed in most places — already critical services that were provided through mobile courts in many not easily accessible areas have been suspended.

I am not sure the enormity of the crisis sank in with members of the committee, whose response was that the Judiciary should shut down corruption cases and only serve justice to the common mwananchi! They see punishment against those charged with corruption as a luxury that can wait and that has no relation to the numerous burdens that the common mwananchi has to shoulder because corruption has severely corroded the system. Strange logic from our legislators.

The fact is that if courts presiding over corruption cases shut down, operations in all the other courts will be impaired for the same reasons. It will be impossible for magistrates to access pens and paper that they need to record the proceedings!

Wananchi need a functioning Judiciary more than they need the Huduma Number, whose delay has now been explained as being caused by the Treasury holding back Sh1 billion that was earmarked for generating the cards. The Interior ministry has, however, denied the claim. Although this means that Kenyans will continue holding on to the ridiculous piece of paper on which is written the Huduma reference number, that is okay if the one billion can find its way to the Judiciary.

But it will not. The Treasury is effecting these cuts and looking for additional cash to disburse to, among others, SGR repayments, the Dongo Kundu project linking Kwale and Mombasa counties and President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Big Four legacy projects.

None of these, unfortunately, bring any immediate benefit to our common mwananchi, who has to spend more to buy food; to the millions of youths that do not have meaningful jobs; to hundreds of thousands of desperate parents at a loss about what to do in the face of relentless economic pressure. For these Kenyans, the urgent and real problems are immediate — school fees, food, cash to pay for health, transport costs, poor returns for their harvests, job insecurity, security to self, etc.

The benefits that they are told will come from these mega infrastructural projects are too distant for them to relate to. As they ponder that, they are now being told that the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) will provide all the answers they need to unpack Kenya’s development puzzle. Even before the handshake baby has been received, bemused Kenyans have been told that they should support it because it will establish the foundation to build a more cohesive, loving, considerate, etc. country.

Kenyans have been trying to be all these things for the last 60 years. It has not worked, because you cannot be loving, considerate, cohesive, peaceful etc. when you are hungry, exploited, lied to and generally treated as a rug by those you think are friends and leaders. The BBI is not going to be the solution because the premise on which it was set up is wrong and political camps have already weaponised it against each other.

Neither short-term budget cuts nor the BBI is the silver bullet that will put a smile back on the desperate faces of Kenyans.

That answer is also unlikely to be provided by this regime. The least Kenyans can hope for is that it is able to manage the coming transition peacefully.

Tom Mshindi is the former editor-in-chief of the Nation Group and is now consulting., @tmshindi