My friend and colleague Wayua Muli put it
best. ‘2015 is only three weeks in and there's been drama every week’, she
sighed on Twitter. ‘How tired will Kenyans be by March?’ The year, if you
hadn’t recognised it yet, has truly been a cacophonous one. From teargassed
schoolchildren, through mysterious landowners and unrequited resignation
threats, to foulmouthed, unrepentant MPs whose only sin, they say, is to look
out for the poor people of Kenya; this January has not lacked for noisy
distractions that have held Kenyans in thrall.
Of course, in the best tradition of
Kenyans, the fun thing about all the events is how much they have given rise to
conspiracy theories. Life in Kenya is better than living in the Matrix movie
series, and nothing illustrates this better than a cabinet secretary who
reportedly promises to reveal the ‘names behind the names’ of a hidden land
grabber, and then resign. In the event, she only revealed the first layer of
names, leaving the ‘hidden’ ones unrevealed for now, and her resignation letter
unwritten. Kenya is the sort of country in which even the conspiracy theories
have conspiracy theories, with some claiming that the tirade by MP Alfred Keter
at the Gilgil weighbridge last Sunday was a smoothly engineered effort to
distract from earlier scandals and conspiracies.
Of course, you are free to take the latest
wave of scandal, with its attendant debates, jokes and outrage as you will, and
decide whether it is a return to old ways of doing things, or evidence of a
newly impatient, inquisitive citizenry. What’s certain is that all this does
have an economic and business impact, in both predictable and unexpected ways.
The predictable ways are a bit schizophrenic.
Foreign investors, particularly Western ones like quiet, docile countries. As
long as human rights abuses are not too evident or persistent, predictability
and a government that can make things happen by fiat are characteristics
beloved by international moneymen. This is why you keep hearing paeans sung to
China. China can build entire cities out of nothing in a few months flat, and
decades of communist life makes people move largely in lockstep. Contrast this
(as many investors do) with the closest comparable country – India. India is a
raucous democracy where China is a dour dictatorship. While this is great for
the people of India and their democratic voices, it does slow down development
significantly. Every major development is an obstacle course of having to
negotiate with individuals and interest groups, and every big project can be
held up by months of hearings in different legislative bodies.
Not so fast, though. You will increasingly
hear economists – development and otherwise – tell you that India has a much
more resilient economy than China. The effort that has to go into convincing
everyone of the wisdom of a particular government action means that consensus
is the driving force, however painstakingly gotten. Some Kenyans, especially
after yet another public protest over one thing or the other, call for a
benevolent dictatorship. The simple retort is that getting the dictatorship is
the easy part – the benevolence is never guaranteed.
The flip side to the investment question is
that the sheer volume of noise in the Kenyan public sphere makes it one of the
most attractive places in Africa to place your economic bets on. Get into any
scandal and count how long before all the memes come flying out of the
Internet. They are hilarious, often irreverent, and, above all, produced
lightning fast. It points to a people who are creative, and there’s no better
indication of economic potential than a creative populace. Even industrial
economies have realised the importance of recognising, capturing and exploiting
the creative tendencies of their people. Thus, every Photoshopped caricature
that gets shared on Twitter and WhatsApp is an indication of the health of the
economy.
Of course, all this may be a negative sign.
Every minute wasted creating (and sharing) these caricatures may be another
minute not spent improving the economy. Kenyans, in their perverse way, may
take the willingness to discuss scandal to its Warholesque extreme – every
two-bit hustler and politician competes to do something stupid in order to have
their fifteen minutes of fame. And the more they make it into the headlines and
the trending hashtags, the more of a confused joke the country seems. If these
are the people in national leadership, any investor has a right to ask, what is
the state of the country they lead?
The most unexpected outcome of all this is
the discovery that the greatest tools in the protection of democracy might end
up being mobile phones with cameras. While smartphones might have been sullied
in their early years by the selfie craze, the fact that everyone is now a
television journalist in their own right means that the relationship between
government and governed changes, maybe irrevocably. And it is not just in the
arena of politics and democracy. Customers whose rights are infringed on by
corporate monoliths have a tool and an avenue to make their voices heard.
Reputations are made and lost with the press of two buttons – ‘record’ and
‘share’.
So let the drama continue. Maybe the
economy will come out the winner. But for Wayua’s sake and mine, please keep it
down.
Also published in the Business Daily on 27 January 2015, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Which-way-for-the-economy-in-2015/-/539548/2603022/-/item/0/-/vdib4k/-/index.html
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