radiomast wrote:
Yes not all are thieves.
Asante! At last I get a straight answer
Quote:But the article states that the increase in the number of super-wealthy people is largely amongst politicians or people with political connections. That is troubling.
No it doesn't! Allykhan Satchu may have
sort of alluded to it and even then what he exactly said is this:
Alkhan wrote:Investment analyst Aly-Khan Satchu said Kenya’s economic performance in recent years only points to the fact that its list of the newly super-rich is likely to be dominated by politicians and the few investors in fast-growing fields such as ICT.
“Certainly news that Kenya is among the top 10 worldwide in ultra high net worth wealth creation with double-digit compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2017 is an eye-catcher particularly at a time when 'You can’t eat GDP' is the refrain you hear from Kisumu to Mombasa,” said Mr Khan.
“What these reports tell me is, first that there has been a massive skew of wealth accumulation in favour of those at the top of the pyramid, a reverse Robin Hood as it were,” he said, adding that politically exposed persons, investors in ICT and PEs, fintech as well as growth in monopolistic businesses explain the outcome.
These are his
opinions not facts, and even going by his opinions, he does not say that politically exposed persons are the ONLY category of HNWI's! Knight Frank on the other hand does not make any pretences at knowing what the composition of those numbers are. It simply states facts below:
Quote:Wealth-X’s findings are, however, in line with other reports that have ranked Kenya among the hotspots for accumulation of wealth in Africa.
Realtor Knight Frank has, for instance, published a report showing that Kenya created 180 new dollar millionaires in 2017, increasing the number of persons with net-worths of more than Sh500 million to 1,290.
Knight Frank said that out of the 1,290 dollar millionaires, less than 10 had a net-worth of over Sh50 billion, while 90 were worth Sh5 billion and above.
But what about Kunal Ajmera of, CEO of Grant Thorton? Did He say anything different? Let's see for ourselves;
Quote:Kunal Ajmera, the chief operating officer at Grant Thornton, a consultancy, said that compared to the wealth generated by the new startups in technology and other emerging sectors in the western world, most of the wealth generated in Kenya still relates to the “old money” and comes from traditional sectors like manufacturing, real estate, and finance.
“Real estate in particular stands out as a sector that has given handsome returns to anyone who had large cache of land in cities like Nairobi,” he said.
“We have also seen increased appetite by the private equity and multinational firms in Kenya looking to buy well-established businesses in agriculture, hospitality, medical and manufacturing sectors and grow their footprints in Africa,” Mr Ajmera said, even as he acknowledged that the report is a painful reminder of the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
“A clear trend emerging from this report is also the sad reality of increasing gap between those who have it all and those who have nothing. Income inequality in Kenya is surely worsening as is evident in our Gini co-efficient, which currently stands at 48.5 per cent ( a Gini index of zero means perfect equality) and has been worsening in last 15 years or so.”
He says NOTHING about PEPs dominating the list. Interestingly, he claims the GINI index is going up, yet a few sentences later, this is what the article says;
Quote:A recent World Bank report said that poverty rates in Kenya remain relatively high compared to other lower middle-income countries.
This is despite the proportion of Kenyans living on less than the international poverty line of $1.90 or (Sh191.88) per day) declining from 43.6 per cent in 2005/06 to 35.6 per cent in 2015/16.
Kenya’s economy expanded by an estimated 6.3 per cent in the first six months of 2018, offering hope for more jobs.
Now which one is it.
Is poverty going UP or poverty going DOWN, and
are the red hot GDP growth numbers having a POSITIVE or a NEGATIVE impact on poverty reduction? It cannot be both!
Bottom line it is laughable to say in an economy growing at 6.3% this quarter, in which poverty numbers are rapidly declining, that
"things are getting worse" or that
"PEPs alone are getting wealthy" without providing even one iota of evidence besides
an opinion which does not even truly say the above things. Numbers never lie and the numbers in this article are very clear;
1. Poverty is going DOWN
2. HNWIs are being created at rapid clip and they are NOT all PEPs
3. The economy is growing rapidly at 6.3% as of the last quarter
And this will only get better as more investments in infrastructure and social safety nets to cushion the poor come in place, as well as a sustained war on graft. Not everybody can be "rich" but poverty numbers can be rapidly trimmed if the economy continues to boom as it has been doing the past 16 years (since 2002)
There is a bright future ahead in Kenya for the hard working. It is easier today than in any time in our history as a country for an average Joe with financial literacy and a excellent work ethic to get out of poverty and join the swelling HNWI numbers in Kenya in their lifetime and this is an incontrovertible
FACT that the numbers in the article above have shown.
Shalom.