As a child in Nairobi, I often travelled on the buses operated by the Kenya Bus Service which was owned by a British Company -United Transport Overseas Services (UTOS). After Independence, the Nairobi City Council had given it a monopoly franchise to operate a bus service in return for a 25% shareholding stake. Sadly, UTOC pulled out of Africa in the Eighties & Nineties because of competition from other entities and the booming, unregulated, 'para-transit' (mini-buses) sector. Stagecoach- another UK company- took over but it too was forced out after a few years. One problem was the collapse of the insurance market. Self-insurance meant that claims would be offset against dwindling revenue which in turn meant that more and more buses would be seized in distraint and sold off.
When I moved to Delhi in 1974, I saw that the Delhi Government's DTC buses were good but, sometimes, it made sense to take a private 'mini-bus' though the charge was higher. Since then, of course, the air-conditioned Metro has come to Delhi and though the mix of transport facilities may look chaotic (In the late Nineties, I initially used to take a cycle rickshaw to cross the highway because there seemed no safe way to cross it. After a week or so I remembered I was a cow-worshipping Hindu and thus could safely cross the road in the manner of a particularly imbecilic cow.)
I was reminded of this today when I read an article, in Aeon magazine, which colourfully evokes the history of Nairobi bus transport. It is by Attiya Warsi, a Professor of Fiscal Law in Kenya. She is the author of 'Financing Africa. (2019)
This passage stood out-
I was six years old the first time I understood that a bus could be something different from matatus and boda bodas. The Kenya Bus Service still ran then (this would have been in 1980) It was a real bus, the kind that could carry 80 people upright without requiring a conductor to shout or a passenger to fold herself into a space the human body was not designed to occupy. I remember looking out of the window at the same road and thinking, without quite having the words for it, that the world felt orderly. That there was a system, and I was inside it.Rights require moneyThey require incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. In other words, the obligation holder must have an incentive to provide the remedy for a right violation or entitlement failure.
If the Government is providing the right, then its fiscal solvency is what matters. It is a good idea to spend tax money to provide remedies for some 'right violations' (e.g. robbery, kidnapping) because otherwise the productive sector shrinks. Smart people run away. On the other hand, if Law & Order prevails, there will be more investment, higher productivity & thus higher tax receipts.
It is a bad idea to throw money into a bottomless pit. You will run out of money. Poor countries have to prioritise productivity raising activities. They can't mollycoddle the poor more particularly if they keep having more and more babies.
Talk as much as you like about human rights, nothing will change until the architecture of global finance is reformedSadly, global finance can only be reformed only once Galactic finance is reformed and the richer Solar Systems send us lots of cool shiny stuff for free. However, nothing stops a country from following sensible fiscal policies rather than saying 'there is a fundamental human right to getting lots of cool stuff for free'.
The problem with the sort of shite this lady got a PhD in is that she can't give policy advise on how to raise the tax take without creating a disincentive effect. She doesn't know Econ. What she is doing is 'Grievance Studies'.
I spent years thinking about Nairobi’s transport the way most people do, as a problem ofKenyan politicians being stupid and corrupt?
infrastructure. Build the roads, regulate the operators, fund the buses.Which is what Dar es Salaam did with the help of the World Bank. Its rapid transit system is considered pretty good. However, private operators charge less & the Government has to provide a subsidy. Some would say it benefits the better off who get quicker journeys but that fewer private operators can make a living and that the poorest can't afford the fares.
But the longer I have spent studying how African governments raise money, spend it, lose it, and borrow it back again, the more clearly I see that what looks like a transport problem is really a question of political economy.Which is about fiscal and monetary policy. How to pay for stuff & what happens if you just print money to pay for stuff.
At the heart of political economy is the issue of human rights.No. Rights only exist in the Law. The Court can say 'X has the right to this thing. Y must give it to X' but if Y doesn't do so, there is little more the Court can do. Getting the judgment is one thing. Enforcement is another thing altogether. If it is too costly, there is no effective remedy. Thus Madoff owes lots of money to his investors. But, there is no way for them to get it back.
There is a conventional way of talking about human rights.
It is the conventional way of talking high falutin' bollocks.
It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach.
But lawyers tell you not to bother bringing an action because the cost of enforcement will be too great. Even if you get 'title'. The other guy has 'control'. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.
Everything requires money. Even this bullshit of Atiya was paid for by the Open Society Foundation.
You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals.
Nor can you fund hospitals without protecting the right of the hospital to that funding. If some politician steals all the cash, there won't be no fucking healthcare.
Sadly, even if you protect the guys running hospitals such that they get the money you allocate to them, the capacity of the hospital is limited. Healthcare will have to be rationed one way or another. Either the price is high or beds are allocated to those with power or there are long waiting lists.
You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.
Thus poor countries should not guarantee rights. They should do sensible things to raise productivity and hence income and hence tax receipts.
This is not a controversial claim in principle. Most human rights frameworks acknowledge it, at least implicitly.
Because they are all bullshit- 'Nonsense on stilts' as Bentham said.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obliges states to realise these rights ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’.
No President ever said 'I am doing the minimum for the poor'. They all pretend they are Santa fucking Claus.
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights goes further, protecting rights to health, education, work, and a satisfactory environment in language that has direct fiscal implications. Rights, in other words, have price tags.
So does bullshit. All the guys working on those Charters were getting paid.
The problem is that the people who design global financial rules
None such exist. Global financial rules are not a single set of laws, but a decentralized network of international standards, treaties, and agreements. One may say such and such practices exist. Some subset of them are fully legal and represent 'best practice'. Others are 'grey market' while still others are 'black'.
and the people who design global human rights frameworks
i.e. bullshit
have, for most of the past half-century, operated in entirely separate rooms.
No body cares in what rooms bullshitters are operating.
Finance ministers talk to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Human rights lawyers talk to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. The budgets that determine whether rights can be realised are set in conversations where human rights are rarely on the agenda.
No. If you say 'lend me a billion to set up a Gulag where I can rape kids', the guys from the World Bank is obliged to refuse. Say you need it for a rapid transport system & they may be more helpful provided you have a reputation for some basic level of competence and integrity.
Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet.
No. This is a story about Africanization. Both UTOS & Stagecoach were British companies. There was a Government supported service but it was crap and ran out of cash.
The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of
living in a country with a high fertility ratio. When I left Kenya in 1974, it was 8 kids per woman. It came down to about 5.4 in the Nineties and now be around 3. Fifty years ago the population was 14 million. It is now 57 million.
a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.
Economic and Demographic causes. If the population hadn't tripled, real per capita income is likely to have quadrupled rather than risen by only 50 percent.
When we ask why those fiscal resources are not there, we
are pretending to be more ignorant and stupid than we really are.
enter territory that is far bigger than Nairobi, far bigger than Kenya, and far older than any government currently in power. This is where the real story of African public finance begins – not in the budgets that ministers read out each year, but in the flows of money that never reach them.
African governments are not poor. They are made poor.
Just as I am prevented from becoming a billionaire because nobody will lend me even a measly trillion dollars.
This is the argument I make in my book Financing Africa (2019), and it remains the most important claim anyone can make about development finance on this continent.
It is foolish and useless.
The evidence is not subtle. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa loses an estimated $88.6 billion every year to illicit financial flows: money that leaves the continent through trade mis-invoicing, transfer pricing abuse, and the routing of profits through offshore jurisdictions designed to make them invisible to tax authorities.
When I was a kid, it was Whites & Asians who were blamed for this 'capital flight'. Once Africanization was achieved all that profit would be reinvested in the country. Uganda did get rid of the Asians. But then its tax base collapsed. Museveni brought them back in.
The truth is, Africans do capital flight same as other people. But they also invest in particular places in Africa where they believe they will get a decent return.
That figure represents 3.7 per cent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP). To place it in context: it is roughly equal to the combined total of all official development assistance and foreign direct investment Africa receives annually. From 1980 to 2018 alone, sub-Saharan Africa lost a staggering $1.3 trillion to these flows.
Don't invest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Smart peeps are getting their money out- even risking prosecution in order to do it.
Every dollar shifted offshore is not an abstraction. In my work as a UN independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, I have said this in negotiating rooms in New York and in lecture halls in Nairobi: every dollar shifted offshore is a hospital unfunded, a classroom without a teacher or, as in the city I grew up in, a public bus network barely built.
In other words, for the guy who owns that dollar, it isn't money pissed against the wall of some imaginary hospital or school or bus service.
Then there is debt. Most of it was not chosen freely.
Sovereign countries can renege on debt. The problem is that they may not be able to borrow.
Some was inherited from colonial administrations at independence, when newly sovereign African states were billed for the costs of their own colonisation.
i.e. the assets that they were taking over.
Some was pressed on African governments in the 1970s by Western banks recycling petrodollars,
Many African Ministers were raped by prostitutes. The Ministers did not choose to have sex with them. To add insult to injury, the prostitutes took money from them.
then repriced sharply upwards when interest rates rose in the Global North – the so-called Volcker shock of 1979. Some was raised on international bond markets in the 2010s, when yields elsewhere were too low to satisfy investors hunting for returns.
Also prostitutes, who were unable to marry billionaires who looked like Richard Gere, raped a lot of African politicians.
African countries paid approximately $74 billion in debt service in 2024, more than four times what they paid in 2010.
Really? In that case maybe it's a good idea to invest there.
More than 30 African countries now spend more on servicing debt than on public health.
Lots of young people spend more money on servicing student debt than they do on their own health. Old people tend to 'dissave' because of increased health needs.
In more than half of African countries, debt service now exceeds public spending on health. This is not the consequence of reckless borrowing. It is the consequence of a global credit system that
is based on wanting to get repaid, with interest, for loans.
prices African sovereign debt at a premium that reflects not economic fundamentals but accumulated assumptions about African state capacity that colonial history produced
Kenya has been independent for 50 years. If it was ruled by White people, it would be rich.
and financial markets have never found a reason to revise.
Smart Africans emigrate. You want to be the next Elon Musk, don't stick around in the continent of your birth.
Zambia waited three years for debt relief after its 2020 default,
Copper prices are booming. Zambia plans to triple output over the next few years.
three years during which austerity cut into the services its most vulnerable citizens depended on. Ghana’s adjustment programme has pushed deep into the social sector.
Had Nkrumah listened to Arthur Lewis, Ghana would have continued to be richer than South Korea.
Kenya faces rising repayment pressures as the cost of living climbs. These are not isolated cases. They are the predictable, structural outcomes of
Africans running things?
a debt architecture that places the greatest fiscal burden on the governments with the smallest fiscal space.
No. Governments with the smallest fiscal space couldn't get loans. Still, we understand that this lady is saying that African leaders were stupid. They fell into the clutches of usurers. They wasted whatever money they got on white elephant projects. White people should have intervened- not by recolonizing Africa- but by paying off the debts of their former wards and letting them make a clean start till, once again, they fell off the wagon. Afterall, there is a human right to inherit billions from some nice White dude which darkies are being cruelly denied.
Beneath both illicit financial flows and debt repayments lies the long shadow of structural adjustment.
i.e. having to stop pissing money against various walls & start to pretend that you mean to pay your creditors back.
The conditionalities attached to IMF and World Bank loans through the 1980s and ’90s prescribed privatisation,
Because stuff run by the Government turned to shit. Take the Nyayo Bus Service, the state-owned public transport system in Nairobi, Kenya. Launched in 1986, it collapsed by the mid-1990s due to mismanagement and fleet degradation. The initial fleet of green buses was donated by the Dutch government. They were primarily managed and operated by the National Youth Service (NYS) before transitioning into a distinct corporate entity. At its peak in 1988, the corporation boasted a fleet of 89 buses and reported a profit of 9 million Kenyan Shillings.
By 1995, the service had virtually collapsed. Massive looting of spare parts, siphoning of funds, and a lack of proper internal controls ruined the corporation.
fiscal contraction and the withdrawal of the state from public goods provision at precisely the moment when African governments might have been building the infrastructure their populations needed.
Sadly they were shit. If you can't run a bus service, how the fuck are you gonna do 'infrastructure'?
Those prescriptions were the product of economic theories that have since been substantially revised or quietly abandoned.
Because guys who work for the IMF or IBRD don't want to be harangued by woke harpies. Back in the Nineties, there was a notion that 'tough love' could get rid of dictators like Suharto. Anyway, if a country defaulted, a profit opportunity was created for vulture funds. Let smart people make money while mediocrities earn their much smaller salaries doing nothing because the activists won't let them.
But the infrastructure they prevented from being built has not been quietly constructed. The matatu on the Limuru Road is its memorial.
Very true. World Bank economists looted spare parts from the Nyayo Bus service. They smuggled them out of the continent and sold them for 5 trillion dollars- which is more than the entire GNP of the continent!
When I say the system was designed, I mean it precisely. The global tax architecture that governs how and where profits are taxed was constructed largely without African input, to serve the interests of wealthy states and the multinational corporations domiciled in them.
There are national tax architectures and bilateral or multilateral agreements re. double taxation etc. Kenya has such an agreement with UK and some other European and other countries.
The foundational rules were written in the early 20th century,
There are no such 'foundational rules'
at a time when most of Africa was under colonial administration and had no voice in international governance. They were updated periodically by the OECD, a club of wealthy nations, and handed to the rest of the world as settled matters.
No. Kenya negotiates its agreements with some other countries or else sets its own rules unilaterally.
The basic principle that profits should be taxed where they are generated,
if a firm in London buys sisal from Kenya and fabricates sisal carpets in Bangladesh before selling them to a Department Store in the USA, the profit is generated in London and taxed there. Everything else is a cost of production. Kenya taxes the sisal producer. Bangladesh taxes the value added in Dacca. If the London firm does merchandising of sisal carpets in US through a subsidiary, then US tax would be payable.
rather than where they happen to be booked through accounting arrangements, sounds obvious. The rules have historically ensured something rather different.
What she means is that there may be 'under-invoicing' in Kenya or Bangladesh or even London. The lion's share of profit may be booked to a firm in a tax haven.
The result is that more than half of African countries still mobilise less than 15 per cent of their GDP in tax revenues, below the 20 per cent threshold the UN itself identifies as the minimum necessary to fund basic public services.
No. The reason this happens is because low productivity means low income means low tax revenue. On the other hand, it is true that many hobos are not billionaires because of 'accounting arrangements' made by people who aren't hobos.
The IMF estimates that low-income countries lose more than $200 billion a year to corporate tax avoidance alone.
Sadly, they might lose more if they crack down on it. Still, for the moment, there can be no doubt that tax revenue is increasing. Some say that, longer term, there will be exit or a failure of SMEs to scale up. However, if the Government spends money on stuff which raises total factor productivity then there is a virtuous circle.
These are not the symptoms of poor administration or weak governance. They are the outputs of a system that was designed, at the level of its foundational rules, to produce this exact outcome.
In which case, it is pointless to do anything sensible. The system will fuck you over one way or another. Prostitutes will continue to rape African officials. Even the African worker will be tricked into stealing spare parts, smuggling them out of the country, and selling them for trillions of dollars.
Consider what digitalisation has done to this dynamic. Companies can now extract enormous value from countries where they have little or no physical presence: advertising platforms, data processing, subscription services, streaming. A country like Kenya is obliged to look on while profits generated from Kenyan consumers are routed to the Netherlands or Mauritius and taxed there, or not at all. The arrangement is no longer economically credible. It is barely politically sustainable.
Which is why Kenya should shit itself and scream hysterically.
The SACCO
Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies. There are several such for private mini-bus operators.
on Nairobi’s roads illustrates this same logic at a micro level. When a public function is left unfilled long enough, private interests move in.
Some Kenyans are greedily growing vegetables in their shamba and selling them for profit. The Government alone should be permitted to grown vegetables.
Once installed, they develop an institutional stake in the gap remaining open.
Bastards! Why do they want to feed their own families? How can they be so greedy!
The SACCO does not want a rationalised public transit system because such a system would make its bus routes less valuable.
These voluntary associations of hard working people are very evil. Government should fulfil everybody's human right to education, travel, health etc by taxing evil Capitalists in America or Europe or Japan.
Multinational corporations do not want a reformed global tax architecture because it would mean paying more.
Who wants to pay more? Corporations make useful things and want to get paid for doing so.
The structural logic is identical;
people who work hard doing useful things, want to get paid.
only the scale differs. This is not, in either case, a conspiracy. It is rational behaviour within a system constructed to reward it.
We reward those who work hard and are useful to us. We tell bullshitting shitheads to fuck off. Soros may pay you but that's the reason we hate Soros.
Changing the behaviour requires changing the system.
which involves conquering Europe, America and China.
I said at the outset that rights require resources.
Not bullshitters.
The argument runs equally in the other direction: resources – the capacity to raise them, spend them, and distribute their benefits fairly – require rights.
If there is no right to private property, it won't disappear. Those who can kill with impunity, will have it. Those who don't will need to come under their protection. This is how 'Stationary Bandits' get their start. The Government is the ultimate 'Stationary Bandit'.
The fiscal systems of many African countries suffer not just from a lack of
Whites?
money but from a lack of the conditions under which money can be governed legitimately.
Whites.
In Financing Africa, I drew on the work of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African scholar whose analysis of states, taxation and legitimacy remains the most penetrating framework I know for understanding why some fiscal systems endure and others collapse.
Khaldun is a Muslim. The author is a Muslim. He wasn't stupid but he was writing about warlike tribes create Kingdoms and enslaving lots of folk. Sadly, Africa is no longer allowed to export slaves.
His argument was that justice is not one principle among several in a fiscal system.
No. He said it was a fundamental prerequisite for the societal cohesion ( 'asabiyyah ) of the ruling caste. Even if they inherit the old fiscal system or impose some new and very unjust one (e.g. taxing infidels more); even if they enslave or commit atrocities on indigenous populations ; their cohesion will be maintained provided the ruler treats his own people with justice and mercy. Otherwise, they will rebel or seek to ally with an invader- or even indigenous insurrectionists.
It is the bedrock. Not a pillar to be traded off against efficiency or pragmatism, but the foundation without which nothing else holds.
Khaldun was wrong. The Ottomans did well even though they kept killing on incarcerating their male siblings. Islamic jurists decided that such fratricide was justified on the grounds of public policy. Incidentally, within a few decades of Khaldun's death, his ancestral home came under Ottoman rule. It turned out, he was wrong about everything. Social cohesion does not matter if you kidnap Christian boys from the Balkans and turn them into soldier-slaves.
A debt architecture built on opacity is a debt architecture built on injustice.
No. The fact that I don't want people to know how much I've borrowed doesn't mean the loan is unjust on unconscionable.
On the other hand, if this lady doesn't shit in public, it must be because there is something unjust about her shitting.
Opacity is precisely what characterises the current system. Parliaments in debtor countries are frequently excluded from the negotiations that determine their sovereign debt terms.
This always happens. In some countries, a loan has to be approved by parliament. But the negotiation is separate.
Citizens cannot see the contracts under which their natural resources are extracted.
That is a matter for their Government.
Creditors – bilateral, multilateral, and private – face no consistent obligation to disclose the conditionalities attached to their lending.
People are allowed to do anything legal with their own money.
The secrecy is not incidental. It is functional: it protects the interests of those with power to set terms against the scrutiny of those who must endure them.
Why is this lady not allowing everybody to watch her shit? Is it because she is shitting gold & diamonds? These Asians are very cunning you know.
Transparency, accountability and the participation of citizens in decisions about how their money is raised and spent are not soft supplementary virtues.
They are a waste of time.
They are the rights that make all other rights possible.
In which no rights have ever been possible.
Without them, you can change the numbers in a debt restructuring agreement without changing who bears the cost of adjustment.
The lender. Debt restructuring is another word for 'write off'.
You can reform a tax treaty without changing who captures the benefit.
Governments get tax money. That's not going to change.
The architecture looks different; the outcomes remain the same.
This stupid lady just said the architecture is occulted. Who can say what it looks like?
This is why the negotiations currently taking place at the UN matter so much.
The UN simply does not matter.
Writing from New York between sessions of the fourth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, I find them genuinely remarkable: 110 member states have signed on to the Terms of Reference. The fault lines are visible and contested in public: developing countries are pushing for taxing rights based on where customers are located and where value is genuinely created, not on physical presence alone. That is not a technical nicety. It is a question of whether countries like Angola will ever be able to meaningfully tax the multinationals operating within their borders.
You can present anyone with a tax bill. The problem is that if they have no assets you can seize (because they are not in your jurisdiction) then there is nothing more you can do.
There is a separate problem with digital services. I want to charge porn tax on people on my country who watch porn on the internet. The problem is that only Porn Corp located in LA knows who watched porn and for how long. I demand they tell me their names and addresses so I can send them a tax demand. They say 'sorry! Digital privacy.' I then ask them to collect money from viewers and send it to me. They tell me to fuck off. What's my next move? Get the Chinese to build me a separate internet system? That costs money. Will the World Bank lend it to me? No. For some reason, they thinking I should be focussing on growing peanuts or extracting copper from the ground.
The talks are moving forward because the alternatives have run out. Governments across the Global South have watched the OECD minimum tax agreement get hollowed out before it was even implemented. The United States carved out its own companies of the global minimum rate, and the incentive for others to follow is growing. The lesson is clear: when the rules are written by and for wealthy states, developing countries are handed the costs and denied the benefits.
Did you know Kenya used to export a lot of slaves? Guess who stopped it from doing so? Whitey. Them kuffar want us to be poor!
A convention negotiated with all member states, in the open, on the record, is different in kind, not just degree.
This is why it is important for Kenya to join Iran in declaring war on the US. Only after the US is conquered can we all follow the precepts of Ibn Khaldun and enslave kaffirs & establish asabbiyah.
It is a human rights project. The money that a fair tax convention would allow governments to raise is money that could fund hospitals, schools and public transport systems.
Nairobi did have a public sector bus company. It went bust because everything got stolen.
Every year the convention is delayed is a year in which those things remain unfunded. Rights and resources are not parallel tracks. They are the same track.
This lady has a one track mind. Sadly, it is transports nothing but shit.
The first time I saw a tram was in the Netherlands. I remember the feeling: not wonder, but something like recognition. The vehicle was articulated, two carriages joined by a concertina spine, moving along a dedicated track through a city that had simply decided, at some point in its history, that this was how its people would move. There was a schedule, and it was kept. I had a similar feeling in London, watching a double-decker pull away from a stop, and again in Buenos Aires, where the Subte, Latin America’s oldest metro – imperfect, overstretched, but genuinely transformative – has done more for the mobility rights of the city’s poorest residents than a generation of microfinance programmes.
These are countries where Whites are still in charge.
I am not romanticising. London’s transport is expensive and exhausting. Buenos Aires’s system strains at its seams. Addis Ababa’s light rail, opened in 2015, demonstrates that African cities can build rail infrastructure; its financing challenges show the importance of getting the terms correct in the beginning. Singapore invested in mass transit when it was far poorer than it is now, because the decision preceded wealth rather than waiting for it.
Kenya's GNP is 118 billion dollars. Singapore has invested $111.4 billion in its new mass transit system. This crazy lady thinks Kenyans have a human right to something equally good. Whitey should pay because of Colonialism- right?
What these examples share is simple: a political decision that public transport is a public good and that the state is responsible for financing it. Not because the market cannot fill the gap – the SACCOs are proof that markets are extraordinarily creative – but because market logic, operating alone, cannot guarantee the equitable, reliable, dignified movement through a city that ought to be every citizen’s right.
Abolishing death would greatly help families around the globe. It is a public good. Sadly 'market logic' is not abolishing it at all. Fuck you 'market logic'! Because of you my beloved pussycat can no longer say meow!
A tram line is the materialised form of a state that has decided its people deserve something.
No. It is merely something which it costs a certain amount of money to build. Amsterdam built one and it made a decent enough profit for many years.
Building one in Nairobi would require fiscal sovereignty: the ability of Kenya’s government to raise and spend its own revenues
it already has this. The problem is that Kenyan incomes are only 2 to 3 percent that of Singapore. I
without the constraints imposed by debt conditions and a global tax architecture it did not design.
Singapore didn't design it either. Nor did South Korea or Taiwan. To be fair, Kenya was underpopulated and thus was able to greatly increase its population. If it follows sensible policies, it will rise rapidly.
As a Swahili proverb has it: wealth, if you use it, comes to an end; learning, if you use it, increases.
Sadly this lady used wealth to learn stupid shit. If Kenya follows her Gospel, it will sink.
The bus we never built is a record of what happens when rights and resources are separated. Every morning on Limuru Road, I watch the accumulated cost of that separation pass in a cloud of exhaust. I also watch, in the people who board those matatus without complaint and arrive late and exhausted and still manage to build something extraordinary, evidence that the will is not lacking.
This lady was 12 when the Government launched the Nyayo Bus Service. Initially it was good. Then mis-management took its tool. I suppose this lady was studying in England when it perished. Still, it is odd that she praises a British owned company set up during the Colonial era but fails to mention an example of the very thing she is advocating.
Is this intellectual dishonesty? No. She has shit for brains. Shit can't be dishonest. It's just shit is all.
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