By Silas N
The truth is, the economy is doing so badly, a Mozambique-like, Zimbabwe-like or even Venezuela like situation is no longer far fetched. Ask around about your friends in the hospitality industry, banking sector, real estate, civil society, media, agriculture, and you will begin to get a picture. You can ask them, when exactly did the rain start falling, and it is around 2012.
The effects will linger around for longer and will be felt in another five or ten years, depending on who you elect in the next 50 or so days.
Don’t be fooled by roads, SGR, and rural electrification. Find an article David Kalinaki wrote recently about Uganda. You can have a road and electricity, but if public schools and hospitals are crap, then working on the wrong thing.
As you have seen fearing Raila as a war monger, as someone who is anti-business, is foolishness. I once asked a member of the Odinga family about the charge that they are anti-business and I was handed a brief historical lesson.
Jaramogi was a legit businessman. He outlined to me the businesses interests of Jaramogi and even to date told me about the family’s considerable business empire.
David Ndii wrote a good piece about the stupid fallacy that Odinga was a communist and Kenyatta a capitalist. Both were businessmen, they only differed on how the national cake can be shared.
God intervened from the disaster that was about to happen.
Not every day people are given a second chance to review their choices.
If you are a Jubilee supporter, I am not asking you to vote for Raila. You can vote for Uhuru, and I am cool with it. You are probably a businessman, and you know better how good Uhuru is for business. Your folks probably own taxis that ferry NGO workers, and you are aware of the impending crackdown of NGOs, and this can scare donors who may set up shop in another country, notice how America has been warming up to Tanzania and And Ethiopia? That will be business gone, because of the insecurities of a regime. You are probably a farmer in Kitale or the Rift Valley and maize and wheat will be imported, so you will have to find a market for your produce.Vote for Jubilee, I will not call your names. I will respect your democratic choice.
Alternatively, you can sober up, and stop the fear.The worst thing that will happen if Raila wins is that the economy will be stronger, and the new optimist from his support base will fire up the country to greater heights like the one we saw in 2002, when Kibaki came to power.
He may not change much, but you can bet, that Uhuru is not interested in any legacy and the second term he won’t do much. Ruto will be deep into succession politics, so Jubilee will pretty much be too preoccupied. NASA can disrupt and stop any nefarious plot.
As I said, we are like a 22 year old girl, about to enter a long term relationship. On one side, you have hotshot guy full of blings and that appealing charm, can lay the pipe like the best plumber in town, drives a sports car, drinks choice whiskey, but lives with his mother and lives from one overdraft to the next. On the other side, you have good guy, a bit boring, but he is a serious investor, who at 25, has made considerable investment for a man of his age. He may not buy the liquor, may not take her to those exotic places, but our 22-year-old girl comes from a very poor background. The boring guy wants to pay for her extra diploma, probably hassle for her a job,and even make her a manager of one of his businesses.
History has shown us that the girl will go for the blings and shisha, get pregnant, the bad boy will duck, and 26, she will come back to the good guy, who by then will be married to a church girl and together they have bought plots of lands, and the man is a real estate modul in the making. It is always too late.
Jubilee are a bad boy. Good for the show, for the lay, but bad in the short and long run.
NASA may be boring, but it is what the doctor prescribed. I urge you guys to put your charged negative ethnicity and we all change the direction the country is going.
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