The Business Daily has a story to the effect that the sales of new luxury cars have dropped by a wopping 32% because of high cost of funds. The instructive words here are "new" and "luxury" - we are talking of Mercedes, Jaguar, et. al.
In other words, the author of the story - or the caption - is telling us that these crazy banks are coming between the rich and their search for luxury!
While that is utter nonsense, I see a pattern in the way the Businessun Daily takes excuses and imagines they are a proper account for certain occurrences. This is what I call an attitude in search of justification.
A while back, I argued that there is tendency of the Business Daily to insinuate that the woes of Uchumi Supermarkets were occaisoned by expensive loans from banks is a kin to a akin who didn't do his homework and when asked by the teacher why he unequivocally says: the dog ate my homework!
It didn't matter to the "analysts" at the Business Daily that Uchumi was not able to issue a commercial paper - or rather the Capital Markets Authority was not keen to approve the issuance on account of Poor financials. Yet, some people imagined that banks will ignore the risk and give the supermarket chain cheap credit - in other words provide it with an interest rate subsidy!
It didn't take long before Uchumi suffered an embarrassing closure of a section of its shops in Uganda because of poor hygiene!
This story illustrate one thing: you don't need to search very hard to see the Business Daily's attitude in search of justification when it comes to matters banks and banking.
If you don't believe me, just have a go at Mr. Jaindi Kisero's commentary in today's issue. He argues, I think logically about the goings on in the banking industry and says in passing about the industry being ripe for consolidation. This is what new mentions casually and even explicitly says that it is a digressions from his thesis for today's column.
Mr. Kisero says thus: "clearly, our banking sector has never been more ripe for consolidation. I digress". My take of this is that he is yet to make a case for consolidation. Indeed this is a debate that we can have. But the Business Daily imagines that that was the core message, for his column is so titled.
Retired President Daniel arap Moi used to wittily quip that it reached a point where everything - including failure of rain - was blamed on him. Are we seeing the same for the banking industry? May be not; may be the dog actually ate the boy's homework!
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