It is official. The highly contentious Housing Fund /tax/levy/collection/contribution/donation/charity/gift whatchamacallit is not about filling a critical gap in affordable housing. It is about creating jobs. This was brought clearly home by National Assembly Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah, speaking in support of the Finance Bill last week.
Ichung’wah told a captive House that provision of housing was only secondary to the millions of construction jobs created that will pull unemployed youth off the streets and crime into productive pursuits.
There will also be the cement, doors, steel, window frames, concrete blocks, nails and other local inputs whose production will grow in leaps and bounds and catapult Kenya into an industrialised nation; and ultimately into a major economic power.
That was the gist of the government pitch in Parliament, meaning we can forget Kenya Breweries, Bidco, Chandaria, BAT, Keroche, Coca Cola and other major industrial concerns.
Step aside Safaricom, Airtel, Zuku, Jamii and others in the infotech sector. Take a walk Equity, KCB, Co-op Bank, NCBA, Absa, StanChart and the rest of the banking giants. Move over tea, coffee, avocado, cut flowers, horticulture, milk, beef and other agriculture sector historicals. And you can remain in slumber tourism and the entire hospitality industry.
Our Kenya Kwanza geniuses have found the solution, a sure and guaranteed way to rapid wealth and prosperity that has eluded all other countries in the world. Not even the United States, Japan, China, Switzerland, India, Germany, France, Britain, Russia and other industrial and economic behemoths grew out of such a simple and brilliant solution.
Neither did Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia hit on such ingenuity in pulling themselves out of the Third World and into enviable prosperity. Also, we don’t need the oil of the Middle East or the gold and diamonds of southern Africa.
We might as well abandon that quest for oil riches in northern Kenya, because the unparalleled Hustler Nation Mensa-class eggheads will lead us into El Dorado faster than any other country in history.
Kenya will not only be the first nation on earth to make the giant leap from poverty to superpower merely by building houses that are not needed, but will bequeath the world a revolutionary new development model and economic ideology that will render both capitalism and socialism redundant.
Using the same model as the Hustler Fund, we will soon impose a tax for construction of massive shipbuilding yards all over the country. We will start in densely-populated areas of high unemployment such as Kiambu, Eldoret, Kisii and Meru towns. Some anti-development opposition fellows will, of course, ask why are building ships in areas with no seas or even sizable lakes. They miss the point by the mile, for its not about satisfying any demand for seafaring vessels, or whether such vessels will ever take to water; it’s about creating employment, stupid!
Idle youth from those towns and the large rural catchment areas will be employed to build ships. They will have money in their pockets to splurge on the local economy in meeting their basic needs of food, clothing, shelter and entertainment. And of course they will be able to afford rents in the units put up by the Housing Fund. And let us not forget additional spinoffs in new steel industries in those towns, as well as factories producing turbines, gears, pipes, propellers and other requirements.
We will not stop there. We already have a small satellite launching pad in Kilifi. We will expand it a hundredfold, and also replicate it across the country, starting in towns such as Banisa, Sabarel, Loruth, Naitatikokin, El Wak and others in the previously ignored and marginalised regions of Kenya’s far north.
It will not just be about building launch-pads and all associated facilities, but about building giant space ships capable of reaching the Moon, Mars and the outer reaches of the solar system. We will also build dozens of space stations capable of lengthy human habitation. One can only imagine the high-tech job opportunities that will be available for our nomadic youth, who will be motivated to settle down and abandon the life of banditry and cattle rustling.
Like with the housing and the shipyards, we will ensure that the launch stations are built using labour-intensive methods so that our unskilled and uneducated youth have first priority on the available jobs. The spaceships, launchers, rockets, control systems, space stations and everything else will also be built largely using local technology and products from the jua kali industries that will grow around those towns. Opportunities for welders, plumbers, electricians, painters, sheet metal workers and other crafts will be limitless.
As Ichung’wah told Parliament, the future is urban. Our people must be moved from idleness in rural areas to occupy the hundreds of thousands of dwellings to rise like magic in the next few years under the affordable housing programme. Construction of the houses alone will itself create millions of jobs and act as a magnet for rapid rural-urban migration.
Those not working on house construction will, of course, take up employment in the other industries that will come up specifically to create employment; no matter that the craft will never float out to sea or shoot off to Mars. So, who will remain to work the fields in the rural agricultural areas that have been the mainstay of the Kenyan economy?
Everybody knows that our tea, coffee, maize, rice, sugar, horticulture and other agricultural products are controlled by cartels that collude to keep consumer prices out of reach for the ordinary Kenyan. Kenya Kwanza administration promised to lower prices.
We will kill the cartels by giving trusted and loyal merchants exclusive permits for tax-free imports. The cartels will thus die a natural death. Kenya Kwanza ingenuity at work.
