@captain obvious
Here is a thread.
Guka says that population growth is the main reason for poverty. He is wrong. And I understand why he would hold onto an old Malthusian idea. He is a Guka afterall. These same people are also against population slowing down because of the pressure it puts on taxes vs dependents like pension recepients.
So what causes poverty? It’s low productivity. Full stop. We see it in personal finance. Ukiongezwa mshahara, your tastes mysteriously level up but it never catches up with you because your wage growth exceeds your new tastes. Unfortunately we are not productive. We cherish hard physical work but never measure the output. That is the problem Guka not population. Africa always had low population and it was always materially poor.
You can check our production of crops per unit of land. Food will never be cheap until this goes up. But the problem is that we lost our way abit and are focused on consumption questions instead of production questions. We waive away the fact that we are producing way less sugar than we need and obsessing over it’s availability.
Productivity requires infrastructure and better thinking from the individual. E.g; the Chinese/Indian tricycles (don’t know what to call them) replacing hand pulled carts is increase in productivity. Extracting resources cheaply and easily is productivity. E.g; value addition in agriculture would sort alot of our shortage problems, roads would sort logistics problems and farmers having storage facilities and better tools for their job would improve output.
Population is a boogey man. Population is not a problem. Just look at the population density of cities. But they do fine because money is made in cities. It brings competition and bigger markets and a bigger military pool. The mismanagement we have with our population stems from low productivity which you can find in any office in Nairobi today.
What Guka should be saying is that our population growth rate surpassed productivity. That means we sort productivity, not kill or sterilize people or discourage them from their desire and personal choice to have children. Build better schools for the children, better roads for the parents. The resources are there. But if you choose to squander then you can’t claim it’s population’s fault. Population is not why Kenya neglected Investment and Reformation of education. Population is not why you have to go through 1000 regulations to open a Manufacturing business in the country as a small timer. We have 6 representatives but we don’t have extension officers for farmers. We have a fancy import railway but farmers have no place to store surplus. WTF does that have to do with population?
People say you have 1 kid helping the 4 siblings. Yeah to pay fees. Because we decided not to make basic education heavily subsidized. You don’t say let’s kill the 4 kids. No you make education cheap for them. And it’s possible there’s just no will for it. I’ve never seen a thread here about the state of public primary schools.
We have to question whether we are working hard enough and smart enough to produce the goods. Why for example are county governments building fruit processing centers? Why not build incubators for unemployed youth to train and commercially learn to do it themselves? Anyone will tell you here that it’s hard to find a cheap warehouse for these types of business to rent as a small timer.
We do not question issues of production enough. Kenya is known as a consumption economy anyway, too soon, which is why our services sector is too prominent. Look at how hard Keroche had to fight? Look at how they go after sijui fake goods. The status quo are only interested in protecting their old import-substitution cluster fuck. Where the country is run by feudal times families. Then someone will push some silly agenda from the West about overpopulation in Africa. Lol. How many people did Africa have 100 years ago relative to other continents? Were we better off?