It doesn’t pay to sing in Kenya

When he dropped out of secondary school, Gitau dreamed of becoming a famous musician. But he failed to find a record label to release his debut song. "I had used all my savings [to produce the single] and I had no money to promote it and it left me with bitter memories," he says.

With no jobs on offer, he started a business repairing radio sets in Thika, a small industrial town 40 kilometres north of Nairobi. This was also when the Kenyan government was liberalising its economy. One of the effects of the increased competition this created was that foreign goods – including cheap transistor radios – were entering the Kenyan market from India, China and Japan.

"Radio spare parts were costing more than a small (foreign-made) transistor radio and many of my customers ended up buying new radios. That was how I was pushed out of repairing radios," says Gitau. He turned his small repair shop into a music shop in 1990 hoping to cash in on the booming illegal music piracy business, but a record company found out and he was jailed for six months.

After being released from prison, Gitau did menial jobs in neighbouring coffee plantations – during which time he also got married. All the while he hoped to return to Thika one day and start afresh by opening a roadside food kiosk.

A familiar story

His wife Muthoni is also unemployed. A mother of four, she used to work in Thika district hospital as a sweeper but was laid off as part of the government’s austerity measures in 2000.

"We were just asked to go home," she says. With no jobs the two now have now managed to open a roadside tea kiosk on a road reserve in Thika town. "It is tough since we have to bribe the municipal council officers to let us operate [the kiosk]," says Gitau.

Gitau’s kiosk is considered illegal – the likely target of a move by local authorities to demolish all illegal structures. "What we are trying to do is to organise the town so that it is not turned into a huge slum," says Thika Mayor John Mutahi.

Gitau’s story is familiar in a country where about 47 per cent of the rural population and 29 per cent of the urban population live under conditions of absolute poverty and struggle to find regular employment.

Belinda Njiru, a Kenyan policy researcher at Brandeis University in the United States says the Kenyan government, which promised a variety of economic recovery strategies since it took power in 2002 has failed to turn the tide.

“Poverty as such has risen,” Njiru says, pointing out that the new government inherited a plundered economy with few resources, little effective machinery and badly-run institutions.

“Retrenchment too has been on the rise and the present government has failed to deliver on the promise it made in its Economic Recovery Strategy to create 500 000 jobs,” she adds.

Professor Anyang Nyongo, minister for planning, says the government is sympathetic to the plight of the Kenyan jobless, but adds that the pace of change will not be fast. “People must wait,” he says. “There will be no instant miracles. We have realised that we must first of all put structures to create wealth, before everything else. We are insisting on baking the cake, not distributing it."

This feature is published by courtesy of Panos Features.