Greece has been in the news for the past month or so for the wrong but very interesting reasons. The main reason has been that the country was on the verge of financial collapse. This is the equivalent of a blue chip company being on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
It’s unimaginable that such a scenario can be befall a country especially one which is a part of the European Economic block. Afterall, the Europeans are constantly reminding us that Africa is a dark continent and most of the African nations are failed economies.
However, the question to ask is what brought about this situation. Different scholars and commentators, apportion different reasons as responsible for this. One of the reasons is that the Greek government had taken numerous debts which it eventually ended up defaulting on. The sad truth is that when it was being admitted into the Euro, nobody scrutinized this record.
But this is not unique to only the Greeks, because even the Spanish and the Portuguese also have a history of default. Suffice to say that borrowing per se is not detrimental, but it was how the Greeks used these borrowings. Apparently, they pay the pensioners receive the highest pension in the Euro zone.
But the saddest contributor to their current situation is that they took loads of loans and consumed it inwardly on her people without producing anything substantial.
Kenyans are greatly guilty of ignorance. We are an ignorant population when it comes to our knowledge of how much debt Kenya owes the international lenders. We must seek to know how the country will pay these debts lest we later discover that we are broke because all we produce goes into clearing our debts.
Can we as a country survive and function without going into debt? Are we producing enough to survive on our own? What is the bear minimum that we can borrow as a country without risking our sovereignty?
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