A quasi-religious Kikuyu tune, Ndahuyukite ngiuma kwa Waiin’ga is popular again. It translates to “By the time I left Waiinga’s place, I had nothing left”. The soloist in a recent remix proclaims, pausing at appropriate intervals to let the revelers join him in completing the lyrics.
One account of the history of this tune, told by my friend Professor XN Iraki, is that Waiinga was a real medicine man who lived near Tumu Tumu in Nyeri, a little over 100 years ago.
He was quite talented in his vocation. But, in a cruel turn of fate, he soon faced competition from an unexpected quarter – The Church of Scotland.
The arriving colonials had brought leprosy with them two decades earlier. The ever innovative Waiing’a figured out that the ashes of the muiri tree could bring some relief to a person suffering skin lesions from the leprosy. It must have been quite a sight - folks leaving his place all ashen, after careful application over the entire body.
The missionaries offered an ointment alternative. They required the afflicted to wash off the ashes, before applying the remedy, and offered garments to cover their clients’ nakedness.
To win over more people from Waiinga, the missionaries coined the song, Ndahuyukite. Quite clever, as it distinguished the washed from the heathen.
The modern remix expresses frustration. Here is the context. In the run up to the 2022 General-Election, many pundits were astounded when Mt. Kenya rebelled against their favourite son, asking him to conclude his presidential term and leave.
What could fuel such negative feelings against their leader, for whom they would have sacrificed their lives only a few years earlier?
To a man, the mountain embraced the Kenya Kwanza formation.
‘We shall wake up early’, they sang with conviction, deaf to my spirited Azimio campaigns. But inside two years, simmering anger. That anger and frustration boiled over through the Gen Z, who, in dramatic scenes never before witnessed, stormed parliament in June 2024. What is going on?
“It’s the economy stupid”, Bill Clinton’s campaign advisor, James Carville famously said during the 1992 US presidential election. The incumbent, George Bush Snr had just won the first Gulf war giving him what seemed like an insurmountable lead.
Many leading lights in the Democratic Party shied away from the contest, leaving the relatively unknown Governor from the State of Arkansas (population of 2.35 million people), to take on the challenge.
By hammering on this one issue, and painting his opponent as being out of touch with the economic woes of the ordinary folk, Clinton won the elections.
To appreciate the true depth of our economic issues, consider the trends in real wages in Kenya over the last decade. Your wellbeing is more than what your employer pays you, or what you make from your small business.
It is about what that money can buy. To figure this out, the economists and statisticians at the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) remove the effects of inflation from the amount you are paid, and publish real wages in the annual Economic Survey.
The results will surprise you, but offer a glimpse on what is fueling public frustration. Over the last decade, private sector average real wages peaked at Sh62,796 per month in 2019, then declined steadily to Sh57,204 by 2023.
Workers lost, on average, nine percent purchasing power in that five-year period. To be fair, that was after a period of improvement. From 2012 to 2019, real wages rose 22 percent.
No sector was spared in the decline. Not even financial services, where banks were posting record profits. Real wages in that sector declined 10.6 percent in the five years to 2024.
Construction sector real wages remained stagnant from 2016 to 2020, then declined 11.2 percent by 2024. Agricultural workers have lost 16 percent of their purchasing power since 2019.
Their colleagues in wholesale and retail trade, and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles, lost 6.5 percent in the same period.
Improvements in physical infrastructure notwithstanding, the citizens are, to their frustration, worse off. Some economists, me included, think that it is because of the re-allocative effects of high interest rates.
Wealth is moving to owners of financial assets and away from labour. Others argue that productivity has stagnated or declined.
Whatever the explanation, few politicians survived the wrath of citizens in 2022. Will their colleagues do any better in the next cycle?
Ndiritu Muriithi is an economist and partner at Ecocapp Capital. He is also the chairman of KRA and former governor of Laikipia County. Email: [email protected]
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