The biggest focus towards August general elections remains fixing the depleted economy but, the State backed Azimio La Umoja outfit is promising to amend the constitution and expand the executive, for it looks like they don’t care about the economic turmoil that is leaving many Kenyans starving.
Kenya is not ailing from lack of enough leadership positions but leadership with the right intent, priority and economic model to fix the current mess. Public debt is hitting the ceiling due to reckless borrowing, while prolonged drought has plunged millions to starvation and increased joblessness.
President Uhuru Kenyatta’s economic policies or the lack of it, has also exposed how vulnerable majority of Kenyans are especially after the global covid-19 pandemic that forced many into cutbacks.
Deputy President Dr. William Ruto in his quest to clinch the presidency and save Kenya from the current mess is drumming up support for the much touted “bottom-up” economic model.
Dr. Ruto explains the model as a blueprint targeting to promote investments of ordinary Kenyans and empowering them financially so the country can expand its tax base and spur economic growth.
Study shows that many strong economies around the world are picking up the new model because ‘Trickle Down’ doesn’t work. Bottom up is simply the transition from consumptive dependency to productive resilience.
The model recognizes that the economy comprises of scores of smaller businesses and regional economies which in turn are built on the economic activities of households, neighborhoods and communities.
It is the trend for any government that is serious about making people’s lives better, fuller, happier and more secure because the economy after all is for people.
But Trickle down model that the regime of the day is reluctant to shift from will continue failing because it does not change lives but breed monopolies and cartels.
Bottom up is people based as it is also cognizant to the fact that local and regional economies are built around a diverse array of businesses, from the most traditional to the newest and most experimental, but all with strong links to their local communities.
These businesses not only serve their customers and workers, but also respect the places where they reside, finding ways to conduct business utilizing the gifts and respecting the limits of their ecosystem.
The model is also a proper shift from concentrated wealth to worker ownership and community capital.
Because in ‘bottom-up’, emerging economies build on the strengths and assets of their particular places, including the culture, the unique skills of the people, the built environment and the natural world.
The approach is to enable businesses and the economy to develop distinctly rather than generically, and it cannot easily be replaced or outsourced. The ownership of these businesses is primarily in private hands but is also increasingly owned by the employees, the producers, the customers and even the community.
Ruto who rallies his supporters around the bottom-up economic framework also explained that it is based on a programme that promotes investments and financial instruments that target millions who are unemployed, hustler enterprises, farmer groups and fishermen.
But, to the contrary, the Azimio camp is confused between continuing Uhuru’s legacy of increasing public debt and cost of living versus prioritizing the creation of more political positions, in none of which the welfare of Kenyans is accounted for
