Do you know why Kenya developed faster than Tanzania in the first 40 years after independence?
Because Tanzania chose the Communist Central Control System and Kenya chose the Free Market system.
Free Market led to innovation, and robust ideas. For the first 40 years, Tanzania elite brought their children to Kenya to study. Kenya was like “Ulaya”.. The children who studied in Kenya went back to Tanzania and started questioning their model. This slowly brought change and State Control was slowly removed, and yesterday, Tanzania joined Kenya in the World Bank classification as a Lower Middle Income country, up from the low income group.
What is the point?
Every sane policy maker is moving from Central Control to Free market.
But for Kenya, some person made a decision in 2014 to take us back 50 years by Introducing the Government Advertising Agency.
You all have been seeing how media houses are sacking people. If you follow this page, you will agree that I predicted this 4 years ago.
Government Control always ends up in disaster, and what we are seeing in the media is just a result of the most stupid decision ever made by mankind “creating The Government Advertising Agency”
As I have said before, the motivation for creating GAA was pure corruption. Does it surprise you that ANC Deputy Party Leader, Ayub Savula is in court for receiving more than 1 billion from the Government Advertising Agency? Savula is just a tip of the Iceberg……
One Day, the whole truth will come out.
Clearly, there is a big problem.
Let me give you an example. Before the corruption inspired idea of creating GAA, a media house would approach a State Agency and develop a concept. This led to massive explosion of communication concepts because of robust ideas.
During the Kibaki Era, we saw State Agencies coming up with great ideas to explain Development.
There was motivation to use communication services and Kenyans were informed about what was going on.
On average, about 90 billion was spent every year
But some person thought of how to put all the money in one basket, then chewing it pole pole.
But the idea backfired. State Agencies cut their communication budgets because the GAA was hurriedly set up, with no structures, no staff, no offices, no technical support teams etc….
So, what happened? They resorted to only advertise very critical things like Job Adverts and mandatory Tenders.
This saw Advert spend drop from 90 billion in 2013, to less 20 billion in 2019.
Someone tried to bulldoze all the 90 billion to one basket, but it backfired. Everyone knew that GAA was just a conduit for corruption, and they resisted.
The media became a casualty of the greed of a few people.
Just because a few people wanted to eat commissions from the Government Advertising, we are all suffering.
Media Houses are being forced to sack.
But this can be reversed.
We should go back to the days of free market. We should let market forces determine communication expense.
I wonder why it is hard for people to see this.
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