President Uhuru Kenyatta recently angered Kenyans after claiming that he doesn’t understand why the country is undergoing tough financial times even after all the infrastructure projects he has launched.
“The President wondered where all the money being used to construct government projects is going. In fact, he specifically asked us the question: Why are people broke; why is it that there is no money in their pockets?” reads an expert from People Daily.
Whether the question was rhetorical or not the president has received a barrage of brutally honest answers and one of the answers come from Yvonne Okwara.
In a hard-hitting news segment, Yvonne told the president that the reason we are broke is that we are biting off more than we can chew when it comes to projects and money that we are borrowing.
She blamed the hard-economic times on employees of the government who are plundering the country’s recourses while the president watches and yet he has the power to fire them and hire better workers. Others like the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) have failed to meet revenue targets for close to three years now.
“If my president wants to know why we are broke, let me give him a few answers. My president, we are broke because your government owes suppliers 300bn shillings. You are ordered to settled these debts in June this year only resulted to a partly 10bn shillings being released. County government owns another 98bn to suppliers,” said Yvonne.
She then went on to add:
“My president we are broke because your executive is crowding out SMEs by borrowing heavily in the domestic market thus squeezing them out and forcing many of them into hard times if not completely out of business and if indeed you think we should have more money because of your great infrastructure projects then it’s time to rethink them? Instead we are going full speed ahead with more and more projects which cost more money like the Express Way through the city of Nairobi. Speaking of which, what happened to your directive of stopping new projects until an audit of all ongoing ones is done to determine their value for money?”