The sufferers have nothing left to eat, so they will eat the rich

We have reached a crossroads as a country. Life is getting harder every day, and there is no likelihood of a change of fortunes any time soon.

The news these days leaves a bad taste in the mouth. This week, the prime-time bulletins have been dominated by the news of companies closing down. What began as a manageable trickle years ago has now grown into a heavy downpour, and there are no signs of the government coming through with emergency floodgates to forestall the avalanche threatening to bury us alive.

You might know someone who knows someone who has lost their job in the recent past. If you earn your bread in the private sector, you might have come across a business operator who has been struggling to maintain their bottom line, forced to shut shop, selling off their investment to cut losses and retreated to the village to agonise over their next move — if ever there was one.

For those still hopeful, you witnessed the windstorm this week. In spite of the Meteorological Department's assurances, we now know that the dust of change is inevitably coming our way and, if someone high up the government food chain doesn't fix our economic windshield soon, this country’s roof is about to be blown off. Then we will bear the brunt of a direct hit from retrenchments, salary cuts and loss of livelihoods.

Now is not a good time to be a Kenyan. We are waking up to go to work, only to be met at the company gates with termination letters asking us to clear with the Human Resources Department before picking our send-off packages, which are not even enough to transport our household belongings back to the village.

Those lucky enough to be retained are being forced to take pay cuts, against their family's wishes and out of personal desperation. This ravaging tsunami has battered employee morale and thrown families into an unprecedented meltdown. Ambush might be an effective war strategy, but when it comes to the job market, no employee wants to be blown out of the water without being given time to evolve their gills into an adaptive lung. If ever there was a time an emergency rescue team was needed to show up at a disaster scene, that time is now.

Official statistics put the mean size of a Kenyan household at 4.4 persons. It means that every household averages five members. When you lay off one employee, you not only send one person for a face-to-face confrontation with poverty, but you also enjoin the other four members of their household who rely on them for security, care and support. It goes without saying that when a company retrenches 400 employees, they have directly thrown 2,000 people out in the cold, and that is not a small number.

It means there are children currently in school who will not report back next term, because their parents will not afford their fees. While it would be easy to advise the affected parents to downgrade their family’s lifestyle and enrol their children in nearby public schools to benefit from free public primary education, the reality is that there are many parents in wards like Ngando in Dagoretti South, who have no public primary school to downgrade their children to, and who will now be forced to stay home with their children.

Isn't it an oxymoron that the same government criminalising stay-at-home children of school-going age is the same one that robs you of your means to take them to school? When we start giving financial advice to Kenyans who are short of fair alternatives, we not only reveal our ignorance about other people’s experiences, but also expose our insensitivity commentating from the comfort of our privilege.

When companies started posting profit warnings, economists used the opportunity to sound the bell for the government to do something before the situation ballooned into a full-blown economic crisis, but this government has demonstrated, times without number, that it is not only allergic to expert advice, but also pays little attention to the cry of the suffering.

Kenyans need to be told if there is any further use of participating in the affairs of a country that is no longer responsive to their basic needs. If the government doesn’t intervene in this looming crisis, there will be little option left but for desperate Kenyans to heed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s timeless advice that “ … when the people shall have nothing left to eat, they will eat the rich.”