This blogger isn’t a cynic, at least to my understanding of the word. But I try as much to look at issues with an open mind as well as realistically.
Statistics and Mathematics (except cash arithmetic) weren’t my forte when the teacher was eating chalk dust in class donkey years ago. However, I do have a semblance of knowledge to make sense of numbers and figures being touted about by the Planning Ministry.
That more people today live above the Ksh70 per day index is far fetched as far as I am concerned mainly because there is no plausible explanation to this issue.
Consider this: Oil which has gone down in the International Market, has failed to reflect the same, instead, it has gone up in cost with a ripple effect on other consumables like foodstuffs.
Evidence of diminishing purchasing power is abound. Look at the so called ‘kadogo economy’! It started with blueband and now it encompasses virtually all essential household useable from milk, tealeaves, sugar, salt, wheat and maize flour, toothpaste to bath and laundry soaps! If the manufacturer hasn’t packed it in minute packs, trust me, the retail kiosks are doing it!
Yes, we may have cleaner streets to walk on, well lit roads in town but, hell; we can’t turn them into food!
The survey, am sure (recall, figures baffle this blogger) doesn’t factor in recent upsurge in crime (that only the police seem to win it in their minds), nor did it factor in the cost of transport and how many Kenyans now walk to work!
I still find the Ksh70 index as laughable! Pray, I ask what you can purchase with Ksh 70 today. Tea leaves, sugar, salt, bread, maize flour? I don’t know, but I have this feeling that I am lost somewhere in all this!
While these figures may give the Government something to brag about, like the proverbial 5.8% economic growth and use it as a campaign tool, the situation on the ground is in total contrast and they can discover this if they really go out there and conduct unbiased polls! They will be surprised by what they will discover.
I can bet you one thing though, that Kenyans aren’t gullible as the powers that be think, methinks that this will dawn on them when it’s too late to do anything! On 31st December, 2007.
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