The official release of the BBI report has bore mixed reactions from Kenyan who had been anxiously waiting to know its content. In summary, the main point of the nine key issues highlighted by the report was to end tribalism,
corruption, impunity, and electoral theft, nepotism and politically-motivated, development and employment.
However, hawk-eyed pundits have been quick to publicly fault the report expressing t their dissatisfaction in what many imagined would be the magic bullet to saving a troubled Kenya. According to some leaders, the issues raised from the BBI report especially from the economic angle, are things that the government of today has struggling to handle. The many problems that are raised especially the report’s view on public on unemployment, national savings, development expenditure are all things that the government can proactively work on.
“BBI report did not provide real solutions to these problems. I think they identified the problems especially on economic problems but the recommendations they gave were quite ambiguous. One of them was that we need to prioritize the East African Market for local investment. We are bigger than that, as a country, we need to look need to beyond. The report also talks about resource allocation. I think from an economic angle, economic growth is not primarily from developments.
“Example, building an expressway from Westlands to JKIA at Ksh 60 Billion, yet the number of people who will use it is not even 1% of the population. But if you could take the same from the recurrent side and pay salaries worth Ksh 80 Billion in counties, the economic impact of the two are different, because when you pay salaries with that money you are creating liquidity. There is an economic fallacy that around 70% of economic expenditure will directly lead to economic growth, it depends on how you prioritize,” said Economist Tony Watimaina in a panel discussion at Citizen TV.
President Uhuru has however urged Kenyans to take time and carefully go through the report so that they can internalize its contents and be aligned with the country’s goals and objectives.
