Here is a conventional way of talking about human rights. It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach. It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.
You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals. You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.
This is not a controversial claim in principle. Most human rights frameworks acknowledge it, at least implicitly. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obliges states to realise these rights ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights goes further, protecting rights to health, education, work, and a satisfactory environment in language that has direct fiscal implications. Rights, in other words, have price tags.
The problem is that the people who design global financial rules and the people who design global human rights frameworks have, for most of the past half-century, operated in entirely separate rooms. Finance ministers talk to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Human rights lawyers talk to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. The budgets that determine whether rights can be realised are set in conversations where human rights are rarely on the agenda.
Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet. The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.
When we ask why those fiscal resources are not there, we enter territory that is far bigger than Nairobi, far bigger than Kenya, and far older than any government currently in power. This is where the real story of African public finance begins – not in the budgets that ministers read out each year, but in the flows of money that never reach them.
African governments are not poor. They are made poor. This is the argument I make in my book Financing Africa (2019), and it remains the most important claim anyone can make about development finance on this continent.
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