Stop taking loans to go on holidays, Matiang’i advises Kenyans
Interior Cabinet Secretary Dr Fred Matiang’i has taken issue with Kenyans who have poor financial discipline, especially those who take loans to go on holidays or buy alcohol.
Dr Matiang’i, while addressing police officers during the Kenya Police Sacco Annual General Meeting at Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi Wednesday, wondered how a civilized person would spend huge sums of money on leisure, when saving and investing reaps so much.
“You take a loan of Sh800,000 to go for a holiday of four days in Dubai then you come back and you can’t even service the loan. That is not a culture of we people who are savers. We must train them, especially those who started earning money recently and realise after saving some money they can borrow a million shillings. They think it’s a huge amount which will never end they say ‘if I drink Sh400,000, I will still have Sh600,000’. But before long you and I know it will be all gone,” Dr Matiang’i said.
OLD AGE
The CS encouraged police officers to embrace a saving culture, to enable them acquire assets and accrue other financial benefits. This he said would save them the blushes of poverty in old age.
“Let us encourage our fellow police officers and anyone else who is able to belong to a Sacco. We cannot make a directive on that matter, if we could I would have ordered that. But the law doesn’t give me such powers,” the CS said.
“There is a direct correlation between financially stable workers, their confidence at work and the service they provide. Most of our people who engage in these all manner of monkey business we are stressing about are people who are not concerned in making genuine, sincere basic savings.”