[kictanet] A small axe to the Safaricom IPO]

Wed Aug 29 09:12:52 EAT 2007

alex some action from your association needed here as well what do
kictanet members have to say shall we abdicate our role to political
scientists?

On 8/28/07, alice <alice at apc.org> wrote:
>
>
> A small axe to the Safaricom IPO
> By L. MUTHONI WANYEKI
>
> I am not the daughter of a Big Man. Neither am I married to a Big
> Man — or even to the son of a Big Man.
>
> I had the good fortune to have essentially middle-class parents who
> worked hard to give my siblings and me a good basic education. And I
> had the good fortune to have a mother whose citizenship made it
> possible for me to attend university, courtesy of the student loans
> system of her country.
>
> The student loans covered fees and accommodation. But my parents
> couldn't afford to send us much money — getting $100 on birthdays and
> at Christmas was like getting a windfall. So I worked to supplement
> the student loans, from the time I left Kenya at the age of 16.
>
> Of course, I now recognise that, despite not being associated with a
> big man's family, in comparison with the majority of people in Kenya,
> I am not only fortunate, I am actually extremely privileged.
>
> But, despite that recognition, having worked since the age of 16, I
> also know the value of my money. I have worked for what I have. This
> is why, for instance, I get apoplectic with rage about corruption.
>
> Under Kenya's ridiculously constructed tax brackets, I fall into the
> same top tax bracket as Kenya's Big Men. And I get nothing for it,
> having to pay privately for everything—including security where I
> live and medical insurance. But, my privileges taken into account, I
> certainly wouldn't mind paying the amounts of tax that I do pay if I
> felt the money went to help those with fewer privileges, not to pay
> the obscene salaries of those who cannot be bothered to assure the
> House of a quorum sufficient to pass even 10 Bills a year — or to
> build the "bigness" of the Big Men.
>
> The other night, some friends and I calculated the share of
> Safaricom's reported Ksh17 billion ($253.7 million) profit that would
> have gone to Mobitelea — the company that, according to the Public
> Investments Committee, is irregularly in possession of no less than
> five per cent of the mobile phone company's shares, meaning that
> there are apparently no records of Mobitelea having paid for that
> shareholding.
>
> MEANING THAT MY TAX MONEY, which went into building and sustaining
> Telkom and Safaricom, was essentially given away. Meaning that,
> coming back to our calculation, the alleged owners of Mobitelea — the
> son of a Big Man and the son-in-law of another Big Man under the
> former regime and a Big Man in this regime — earned themselves no
> less than Ksh850,000,000 ($12.6 million) last year alone. From doing
> nothing at all, except live off the profits of having stolen from us.
> Ksh850 million off my back (and your's as well). Again, I am
> incapacitated with rage.
>
> And yet, the Treasury insists that Safaricom's initial public offer
> will proceed, regardless of the outcomes of the PIC debate within the
> House or any court cases that might ensue.
>
> What?!
>
> FRANKLY, DESPITE OUR NEWFOUND fascination with IPOs, I don't think a
> single one of us should put a single shilling forward. Those of us
> who do work hard and honestly deserve better. If shares in Safaricom
> could essentially be given away to Big Men, their sons and sons-in
> laws, then they can be given away to us. Why should we pay for them?
> They're our property in the first place, which the government was
> meant to hold in trust for us. If it breached that trust for three of
> us, then it should share the love with all of us.
>
> It might not seem like it, but there are, in fact, victims of
> corruption. Those victims are you and me — every single Kenyan who
> dutifully pays his or her taxes. I'm furious. I'm ready for a tax
> boycott — the residential associations led the way and it's time to
> scale up their efforts. We need to say to hell with that IPO until
> the issues raised by the PIC have been satisfactorily dealt with. We
> need to be the "small axes" that Robert Nestor Marley talked about
> and cut down all those "big trees."
>
> L. Muthoni Wanyeki is a political scientist based in Nairobi
>
> http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/current/Opinion/Opinion2708079.
> <http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/current/Opinion/Opinion2708079.>
> htm
>
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