While government propaganda budget on NYS now runs into billions of shillings, the same cannot be said of the ‘youths’ this budget is based on. In fact, the recruitment numbers is where the scandal starts.
While reading the budget speech in parliament last week, Treasury CS dedicated five paragraphs to NYS (67-71).
At paragraph 67, he introduced the usual loftiness with which they present NYS…”in line with the jubilee coalition commitment, we have revamped and restructured the NYS into a robust and dynamic institution to drive the youth transformation agenda”.
I have always asked myself what is so robust or transformational in collecting garbage in Kibera. This, however is not what I wanted to say.
At Paragraph 68, CS Rotich claimed NYS has been ‘expanding both in terms of scale and number of youths engaged’. Sadly, if you check the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics Economic Survey 2015, at page 62, the Bureau gives a contrasting outlook. It says that the number of servicemen and women declined from 7,543 in 2013 to 4,267 in 2014!
The same period, CS Rotich claimed the numbers increased from 6,000 to 31,000 and will peak 42,000 by end of this year! In several pro-government propaganda blogs, Facebook sites and websites, this number is in the upper of 100,000. The more religious amongst them even peddle over 200,000 youths ’employed by NYS’.
Kenya Bureau of Statistics is a semi-autonomous government agency mandated by law (Statistics Act 2006) to collect, analyze and disseminate socio-economic statistics needed for planning and policy formulation in this country. It is the last line of defence when talking about government data.
Question is: Is NYS funding supported by any statistics? If yes, why the discrepancy? Are they cooking the number of supposed ‘recruits’ to justify huge budgetary allocations? In the last two years of Jubilee regime, NYS allocation jumped from 3 billion to 6 billion and now, guess what, it has got sh 25 billion!
This bloated, non-existent number, what is it for in the long run? A friend told me that NYS recruits are forced to surrender all their biometric information. He likened it to registering to vote with IEBC. Is silent voting going on?
This huge budgetary allocation, where is it going? Who pckets it because it doesn’t help youths. KNBS even goes further to debank the claim of ‘mass employment of youths’ by the body as it indicates the allowances paid to NYS decreased from 5.3 million to 3.8 million.
To support KNBS, Central Bank indicted NYS more than CORD could ever do. The bank has revealed that the NYS paid Sh665 million to ‘suppliers and consultants’. Mutahi Ngunyi alone was paid Ksh 38.9 million by NYS.
Two backstreet PR companies – Transcend Media Group (TMG) has received Sh161 million while Brand Associates received Sh113 million for consultant services in NYS rebranding for media buying. Media buying, yes!
Remember the idiotic Kibera documentary? It may have gobbled some 50 million for the show-owners with T-shirts and hand gloves and spades for the ’empowered Kibera youths’.
CS Rotich conveniently avoided mentioning the money that would go to remuneration of NYS servicemen and women. This is because they claim it is voluntary! How can it be voluntary when the Ngunyis of this world earn millions by sending youths there with their dangerous imaginations of a militarised nation? Indeed, with this rip-off, with this corruption, if this Jubilee regime does not have a paramilitary, it cannot survive!
Mainstream media (Standard and Daily Nation) have gobbled over a billion each in NYS advertisements. The rip-off is just evil. This is the regime some unemployed youth is calling ‘our government’. Smh!
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NYS is a disaster waiting to explode.
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