FIVE FINGERS: To End DEBT SLAVERY and BASKET CASE

By Robert Mwangi

FIVE FINGERS offer practical solutions to end Debt Slavery and Basket Case disorder in Africa. FIVE FINGERS cautions Africans from confusing Investment for Trade, Debt for Solutions or Donations for Philanthropy. In other words, Investment is for the investor, Debt is for the creditor and Donation is for the Trojan Horse – of many varieties.

It investigates the etiology and offers liberating prescriptions for the perennial diagnosis in the abundance that’s Africa, known as scarcity or simply Povertitis. Most of what Africa consumes is not made in Africa or by Africans using African raw materials. The book is a call the African Citizen and Leader to make in Africa, by Africans, using African raw materials, for Africans and Export.

The current focus on mega infrastructural development in ports and railways are facilitating more imports which inadvertently is exacerbating poverty, unemployment and trade-deficit in Africa and which is not sustainable. Expectedly, African Central Banks and indeed African countries are continually tethered to massive debt transfusions but the profuse bleeding is left unattended – on the advise of debt merchants aka ‘developmental partners.’ As debt is deficient to maintain minimally needed circulatory volume, to prevent an economic cardiac shock, Africa goes around in the world with a golden begging bowl to make ends meet. The Debtor or more precisely the Debt Slave is also a Basket Case.

FIVE FINGERS starts with analyzing leadership culture and etiology as the abating tool to our current sorry state. It however focuses on solutions inside and outside of policy and the responsibility of citizens even where African leadership is challenged or compromised. Nonetheless, all stakeholders are sufficiently informed for a concerted effort to regain our dignity and allocate Africa resources to its rightful owner, Africans. It’s all in the FIVE FINGERS of our hand. The African Hand!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716878916

Book preview

Five Fingers to End Debt Slavery & Basket Case

Copyright © Robert Mwangi 2020

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Published in the United States by

www.LuLu.com

Author’s Contact

[e-mail]

Interior and cover design including Africa map illustration

Endless Inspiration | www.endlessinspirationke.com

Photographs of the Modern Fashion Designer and Modern Furniture Creator on front cover from Shutterstock.

Paperback ISBN: 9781716906527

Ebook ISBN: 9781716878916

Dedicated

To my wife Sarah. Your insight, patient and support made this work possible. In encouraging me to soldier on, you once told me elephants’ gestation period is not nine month with a good a reason.

Contents

Author and Five Fingers Introduction

PART I - A Call to Five Fingers

1| Africa’s Beg-Worthy Status Maintained by Dysfunctional Leadership

2| The Basket Has Become the Market

3| IMPORTitis – Perpetuated by Blood Merchant and China’s Chains

4| SACCOs – Awakening the Giant to Defeat the Dragon

5| Waiting for Milk from Bulls?

6| Africa's Diaspora - Skills are More Valuable than Diaspora Remittances

PART II -Capture and Robbery Strategy

7| China’s Chains

8| Theft by Awards and Trophies

9| How To Rob African Banks

10| Shrouded in Swahili

11| Stolen with a Virus

PART III - Economic Mirage and Crimes

12| Kenya is not Japan – Misleading Economic Metrics

13| The Banker is the Ruler & the Thief

14| Economic Crimes Against Humanity

15| The West and the East Grab Africa’s Fertile Land

PART IV - Kenya Specific Solutions

Preventing Cancer, Accidents and Traffic

16| Death by Weedkiller?

17| I’m Licensed to Kill in Kenya

18| Move Parliament, End Traffic

PART V - A Warning to Posterity not to Repeat History

19| If You Lead the State, You Will Lay in State

Acknowledgments

References

Author and Five Fingers Introduction

Robert has extensive and diverse academic and professional background. He is the author of the book DOLLAR ALTAR which investigates Capitalism failures with clear symptomatology of wealth inequality and anchoring economies on NCD’s (Non-Communicable Disease) otherwise known as preventable diseases. As a result, his published work on Global Health seeks to inform communities’ and individuals’ responsibility as well shape policy on Diabetes, Hypertension and Cancer prevention.

He submits that in the name of efficiency, unbridled Capitalism concentrate wealth on a few hands to the detriment of all. It’s analogous to forests' animals extracting 100% of the energy in the grass and foliage they eat. In doing so, all the animals and plants eventually die as the animals dung (manure) lack the nutrients needed by the grass and foliage. In other words, the inefficiency in energy extraction by animals, feeds future flora which feeds existing fauna in the future. Extreme efficiency in Capitalism which manifest in automation and super conglomerates has resulted in permanent unemployment whose size will keep growing. The result is permanently destroyed nations; a destruction now at advanced stage in Europe and the U.S. midwifed by the 'too big to fail' corporations.

In DOLLAR ALTAR, he labors to inform policymakers on the importance of preventing black-holes known as monopolies which over time demonstrably transforms Capitalism into Socialism. A social economy whose control is not under elected government but a de facto one in billionaires born by the same monopolies to the detriment of the labor force and communities and thus a nation. In it, he cautions Africa from confusing Development with Concrete, Steel and Glass Structures. In FIVE FINGERS, he cautions Africans from confusing Investment for Trade, Debt for Solutions or Donations for Philanthropy. In other words, Investment is for the investor, Debt is for the creditor and Donation is for the Trojan Horse – of many varieties.

His experiential journey spans Insurance, Banking, Logistics, Manufacturing, Retail, Media and Healthcare sectors in different capacities. He is also clinician who has practiced in critical-care settings in Medical and Surgical ICUs in the United States and Cardiothoracic ICU which specialized in open-heart surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. He received his BSc. Nursing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and earned his MBA in Finance from California State University both in the U.S. This rich background and the clinical process of Assessment, Diagnosis, Intervention and Evaluation is a tool he consistently applies in the prescriptions he’s compiled into Dollar Altar as well as this book, Five Fingers.

After some absence in the Kenya for studies and professional engagements, he sought to understand what ails otherwise endowed Africa on his return. As if assessing a patient, he first inspected the economy by going to different supermarkets and would stay there for hours on end. On examination, he picked each product and noted its country of origin or more precisely the country where the product was made. He was investigating the etiology and possible prescription for a perennial diagnosis in the abundance that’s Africa known as scarcity or simply Povertitis.

Horrified by what he noted; that most of our consumer products and hardware are not made in Africa or by Africans using African raw materials, he embarked on a campaign to sensitize the patient and stakeholders on the need to make in Africa, by African, using African raw material, for Africa and Export. It was obvious that by investing in infrastructure that facilitated more imports, Africa was inadvertently exacerbating poverty, unemployment and trade deficit. Expectedly, African Central Banks and indeed African countries are continually tethered to massive debt transfusions but the profuse bleeding is left unattended. As debt is deficient to maintain minimally needed circulatory volume, to prevent an economic cardiac shock, Africa goes around in the world with a golden begging bowl to make ends meet. The Debtor or more precisely the Debt Slave is also a Basket Case. Shame on me!

Five Fingers is consistent with the effort to change that began in Kenyan supermarkets and provides a sure solution to end Debt Slavery and Basket Case disorder. Five Fingers starts with analyzing leadership culture and etiology as the abating tool to our current sorry state. It however focuses on solutions inside and outside of policy and the responsibility of citizens even where leadership is challenged or compromised. Nonetheless, all stakeholders are sufficiently informed for a concerted effort to regain our dignity and allocate Africa resources to its rightful owner, Africans. It’s all in the Five Fingers of your hand. The African Hand!

The book prominently features Kenya’s situation which can be extrapolated to each country in Africa with varying degree for relevance.

PART I - A Call to Five Fingers

1| Africa’s Beg-Worthy Status Maintained by Dysfunctional Leadership

‘Leaders’ visibly hard at work to keep Africa beg-worthy or maintain its donations magnet status. A beautiful and delicate balance between filthy personal wealth and keeping the country beg-worthy or donations dependent. When the prefect has really tried, he elevates the nation from a basket case to enviable debt slavery (or a schizophrenic mixed status) with Western and Eastern masters.

If you were a consultant hired to figure out why a firm’s financial performance was declining, you would take a holistic view. You would mine its historical financial performance to gain insight in the past. Gleaning overall firm’s strategy would paint its targeted future and analyzing its market you would discern changes in tastes and preferences that may be affecting sales. Economic, demographic data and regulatory parameters would give you further insight into the operating environment to discern external forces’ influence on performance.

The first place I stop at is The Board of Directors’ and Executive Management’s profile. Their training and experience reveal their strengths and personal problem-solving constraints which may hamper the overall performance and indeed pose existential threat to the company. If management does not have a diversified field of training and experience, group think may prevail on how they develop strategy, communicate vision, lead teams and manage the 3Ms (Man, Machine and Money.)

For instance, if management is dominated by accountants; given that accounting is not a science but an art, one might expect creative accounting practices which may hide poor performance for years (to the detriment of shareholders) by using various accounting treatments. One might also expect cost accounting to dominate decision making which is focused on cutting cost as opposed to looking for other markets, developing a new marketing strategy in the same market to grow revenue or develop a new product or service borne out of customers’ complaints.  

In this environment, employee turnover is high as firing is used to prop up profits, which creates a culture of I might be the next one. Employees are never invested in the company’s success as they are busy looking for greener and permanent grass fields elsewhere. In healthcare, a successful team of doctors is the one with a diverse background not just medicine. One of the secret to high quality healthcare delivery in other countries is that the doctor’s undergraduate may have been Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Medical Technology or Exercise Science. The doctor begins his training with an inherent ability to think outside medicine box. Consequently, diversity in training or the lack thereof in the individual or a team can determine a company’s success or failure. Cliques always breed group-think or group blind-spots. Blind-spots are sighted by neighbours. If neighbours have the same blind-spots, the whole experience or organization is one big blind-spot. In other words, a leadership team without diverse training leads with permanent blind spots; decisions here are manifest groupthink.

Leadership analysis seeks to gain insight into a leader or a team in an attempt to understand why one company or organization succeeds while another in the same industry closes shop. The analysis, cast it’s binoculars in the past for sure patterns.

Leadership Kiln is Informative

To illustrate, professionals with trained hands not just trained thought and speech, seems to take the leading role in global companies. It’s no secret or randomness that the leading CEOs in the world have some science, engineering or economics background mostly with an MBA to infuse business acumen. It’s this criterion or the background that elevates them to the helms of their respective organizations or the reason for such organizations’ conception altogether. [1][2]

Safaricom’s Peter Ndegwa –BA Economics and MBA

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, BSc Electrical Engineering and Computer

Apple’s Tim Cook, Bsc. Industrial Engineering and MBA

General Motor’s Mary Barra, Electrical Engineering and MBA

Alphabet’s (Google),  Sundar Pichai, Bsc. Metallurgical Engineering, Msc. Material Science and MBA

As revealing as education and training is, leadership analysis goes beyond these to life experiences, age brackets, height etc. It dives further into the leader’s formative years and exposure, birth order and upbringing geography and circumstances which all interplay to produce the figure called a leader. This figure’s (or a group of them in a team) formation determines a company’s performance in finance, innovation, growth and expansion, brand equity, talent retention and its posture on true social responsibility.

Leadership analysis is not limited to evaluating organizational success but is instructive even in appraising countries or counties. This study is a magnifying glass that seeks to understand the reasons for success, growth pace, poverty levels, respect for the rule of law, human rights record, education systems, innovation, production, self-concept and worth, amongst a host of other parameters which are directly attributable to the leadership in a given country. Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya are not so ethnically different but each country’s life and progress (or its degree) after independence is partly a reflection of successive leadership or leadership culture.

Thinking Outsourced

When Africa is visibly heading in the wrong direction as evidenced by excessive borrowing to wastefully spend, bankrupt college education with no production or problem solving skills, runaway corruption, mammoth trade deficit, rampant cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure, unbelievably high poisonous chemicals levels in our water and food, atrocious police brutality, and outright outsourcing of our thinking to IMF, World Bank, WHO and China; the case file beckons.

It's evident that the private sector exudes zero confidence with obvious paralysis without the ‘Best Practices‘ input of the Big Five consulting firms, yet there is a willing African diaspora with the same skill’s set that would keep the money paid in consultancy fee circulating in the continent. One has to ponder. When an endowed nation stands on the world stage with a begging bowl to fund basic services delivery to its people with or without a crisis, it begs the question, who helps the helper? Or who helped the helper? Additionally, when leadership is perceived or misconstrued as