Amani National Congress (ANC) party leader Musalia Mudavadi said that Kenya is one of the countries that you can call a public rally at Uhuru Park on a weekday and it will be full because of unemployment. True to his words unemployment is one of the many challenges facing the country. Despite the government promising to create over 800,000 jobs this yeat most of them in the informal sector, this promise is yet to be realized and headed into 2020 has the country found a footing in dealing with these economic challenges?
Ms. Wanjiru Gikonyo, the National Coordinator of The Institute for Social Accountability in a panel discussion on the Kenyan economy in 2019, explained in detail what is really ailing the Kenyan economy, a question that many citizens have been asking themselves.
“Our economy is shrinking, government revenue is shrinking because payments from the informal sectors are also shrinking as well as the private investments. And this is because the government has made investments in infrastructure projects based on debts and heavy borrowing both locally and in commercial markets and the impact of this has put us in a spiral.
“We are borrowing to pay our debts and we are squeezing the economy to a close. Agriculture is the largest employer but this sector is getting lower and lower investments year in year out since 2015. The health sector too is decreasing yet the recurrent wage bill increasing due to economic mismanagement,” she said
According to Ms. Wanjiru, we should be asking ourselves which projects have forced the state to borrow at rates really damaging to the economy? Which institutions have been compromised to enable this environment because of the constitution provides for prudent financial management and political accountability? She insists that are a lot of issues ailing this country but all of them are attendants to economic mismanagement others are while the rest are just sideshows and distractions
There is the need to have a national recovery strategy, and debt restructuring to ensure repayment does not compromise service delivery, despite World bank’s projections that Kenyan economic outlook remains stable.
