NGUGI: They’d love that we blame our poverty on the art subjects we studied at school

Why is Kenya poor? Why are we so far behind the Asian Tigers? According to Deputy President William Ruto, it is because our schools and universities teach history instead of science. This is not the first time Ruto has attributed our underdevelopment to teaching of social sciences.

In countries where the academia participates in shaping public debate and the national agenda, such an assertion would be immediately challenged and exposed as revisionism designed to bury a certain history, distort particular viewpoints, and make certain values obscure in order to weave a particular narrative.

In Kenya, however, our thinking is distorted by tribal considerations. As a result, obvious lies become truth, thievery becomes a justifiable means of accumulating wealth, and the ethno-philosophy of “It is our turn to eat” becomes our ideology.

Kenya has engineers, planners, IT innovators, agri-scientists and other professionals who can ignite an economic and technological renaissance. Singapore and South Korea began their economic revolution in the 60s with much less. Despite this, our research centres add little to national growth, IT innovation is not maximally harnessed, and our manufacturing is negligible.

We don’t build dams even when our survival depends on them and when we do, the money is stolen as in the case of Kimwarer Dam. Buildings collapse every year, yet we have no shortage of civil engineers serving in all manner of inspection and building boards.

Technocrats at Kenya Bureau of Standards look the other way so that cartels connected to the political class can repackage carcinogenic foods to sell to the public. Our road engineers, before the Chinese came, made shortcuts in order to amass wealth. Our agri-scientists have never figured out how to end famine.

It is not lack of people trained in science or technical subjects that has kept us a poor Third World country. Rather, it is lack of a certain national ethos and a certain kind of political leadership. In his seminal essay, In Praise of Alienation, Abola Irele argues that we need not just science but the scientific spirit as well. In similar fashion, I would argue that we need not just IT programmers, road engineers or planners, but a national ethos that values and rewards personal and professional integrity and a high work ethic.

However, cultivation of such a national culture cannot happen without a certain kind of leadership. The Singaporean miracle would not have happened without the leadership provided by Lee Kuan Yew. After independence from Britain, he realised that he had to redirect national effort from breaking down the colonial edifice to building the foundations of a new future. Slowly, he re-engineered a national culture that expected nothing but the very best of themselves and their leadership.

Unlike Singapore, we have created a culture where no one takes responsibility or is sanctioned for failure. We recycle old somnolent “tumbocrats” in crucial positions. We have nurtured, especially during the Uhuru-Ruto years, a symbiotic relationship between cartels and government.

Every department, as exposed in never-ending corruption scandals, is under the influence of cartels. Our politics has nothing to do with creating a stable society welded together by values of justice and equality but everything to do with grabbing power in order to accumulate more personal wealth. Instead of fostering intelligent debate as an integral part of politics, we have elevated sycophancy, tribal demagoguery and buffoonery into political virtues.

Unlike Singapore’s zero-tolerance for thievery, the Uhuru-Ruto government has presided over the resurgence of Kanu-era corruption which almost brought the Kenyan economy to total collapse. For instance, over the last six years of the Jubilee administration, some KSh4.2 trillion ($420 billion), according to annual reports by the Auditor General, was “lost, not spent well or not accounted for”. Such an amount of money, lost or misused within such a short period, boggles the mind. Such a sum, properly used, could have transformed millions of lives and grown Kenya’s GDP by leaps and bounds. Instead, the Jubilee regime ranks right up there with South Africa and Egypt in the creation of dollar millionaires. Guess how 90 per cent of our new billionaires were created?

Mr Ruto’s revisionism will never eliminate the history of struggle against our unequal and tribalised society. His demagoguery can cover up but never eliminate the truth of why we are poor. The political class’ philosophy of theft and dishonesty can run but it cannot hide. One day, the poor will remove their tribal blinkers and see the truth. And the truth shall set them free. 

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator