Brand Kenya is suffocating under the stench of rotten governance

By: Kap Kirwok

[ Posted On: 2009-03-03 ]

I love cartoonists. A cartoonist’s work, when done well, is pure visual poetry confirming the clichÈ a picture is worth a thousand words.

As the magnitude of the challenges facing the new President of the US, Barack Obama, become clear with every passing day, the joke in a recent cartoon begins to sound more and more like humour from the gallows.

I am referring to the work of the famous Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig that appeared soon after Obama was elected president.

In the cartoon, there is a newspaper on the floor headlined, ‘President Obama: History Made’. An old white man, with an oversize hat seating on a rocking chair says: "I remember when the only job a black man could get in America was cleaning up the mess that white folks made…" His colleague, at the corner, is playing a guitar. He pauses and replies: "I guess some things don’t ever change."

Fall apart

It seems that everywhere you turn these days there is news of depressing statistics or dire stories on the economy. People freely trade stories of impending economic catastrophe as if fear is the new currency.

"The nation is falling apart, literally," screams the first sentence of a new book by the famed investment banker, Felix Rohatyn.

He continues: "America’s roads and bridges, schools and hospitals, airports and roadways, ports and dams, water lines and air control systems — the country’s entire infrastructure is rapidly and dangerously deteriorating."

It seems everyone is determined to plump the depths of horror when it comes to the state of the US economy. Yes, things have not been this bad this quickly since the Great Depression: consumer and investor confidence are down, iconic banks and financial institutions have either disappeared overnight or are teetering on the brink of collapse.

The latter are ‘tastefully’ called the Walking Dead or Zombie Banks. For a moment, there was talk of setting up a ‘Bad Bank’ (yes, bad) to buy all the toxic assets of these zombies. Nationwide, the bank failure rate is at an all time high — one bankruptcy every week since January. Compare that with three bank failures for the whole of 2007. Zombies, walking dead, bad bank … all this negative branding has been a blessing to cartoonists, as you can imagine. But I digress.

So yes, the crisis is real and a reminder that the law of gravity has not been repealed: what goes up comes down — eventually. And yet this fixation with doom and gloom misses the point. It is more accurate to say that the US, and much of the world, is living through Dickensian times.

In his famous book, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens penned a paragraph that rings fresh across the centuries. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…’

Such are the times today worldwide. There is gloom but there is also plenty of promise and opportunity.

The US economy is still the most competitive in the world — according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, which has ranked it number one for three consecutive years.

Economic resilience

And, while nobody really knows when the upturn in the economy will begin one thing is certain: the economy will recover, and, with it, the rest of the world.

As evidence of the resilience of the economy, consider this little publicised fact: enrollment rates in colleges and vocational schools are dramatically up. People who have lost their jobs are going back to school to upgrade their skills or to switch career fields altogether.

In the end, it is millions of such decisions and actions that will turn the economy around. Recessions also tend to spur innovation as entrepreneurs push the frontiers of risk.

As developed economies undergo massive downsizing — some would say rightsizing — developing countries such as Kenya need to look for opportunities to exploit even as they learn valuable lessons from the mistakes that created this crisis.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Kap Kirwok -- The writer (Strategybeyondprofit@gmail.com) is based in the USA

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