By Donald B Kipkorir
On April 16, Uhuru Kenyatta delivered his inaugural address to the joint session of Parliament. The speech didn’t have the wit of Winston Churchill (1874-1965) or the bravery of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) or the oratory of Barack Obama, but had the promise to us that Kenya shall succeed on the nine pillars he espoused. The President told us the areas he needs focused on for us to succeed. Now that he has his Government in place, I offer my suggestions on how we can have an industrial take off.
It is now a cliché that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. History always abounds on the choices we can make as a country. England is credited to be the first country to industrialise in the 18th & 19th Centuries in the reign of the House of Hanover, whose famous monarch is Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Singapore industrialised in the 20th Century under Lee Kuan Yew (1923) and Turkey has done so this century under Recep Tayyip Erdogan (1954). By studying how an absolute monarchy and benevolent dictatorships succeeded, will we find our roadmap. For all intents and purpose, Kenya is a primitive economy. Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), a distinguished Economic Historian, and true like most legends, died young, was the first to use the word “industrial revolution”. In his lectures at University of Oxford, he said industrial revolution occurs when a society moves away from an agrarian economy based on land, farmer and hard human labour to one based on manufacturing and new class of capitalist employees. Kenya is yet to make this transition from the primeval type of economy to a modern industrial one.
The first building block for industrialisation is the human resource. There must be a collective or majority change of mind-set that we need to industrialise. When Lee Kuan Yew banned chewing gum and littering, he was conditioning his people to have groupthink before leading them to industrialise. In Rwanda, Paul Kagame is doing the same. He has forced every Rwandese to wear shoes and to have a toilet in their homes. These look like mundane matters, but they play a big role in re-orientating the people for the next level. Uhuru must begin similar steps to condition Kenyans to think similarly and face same direction.
Related to the above is engendering skilled and innovative workers. This is achieved by having an education system that prepares the various cadres of workers needed for industrial revolution. We need a large workforce of industrial inventors, chemical engineers, bankers, agriculturalists and of course supporting services of lawyers, doctors and other social scientists.
An honest relook of our education system is apt. Is our current education training us for invention or employment? And then, let Kenyans have absolute freedoms of thought and expression. It is only when people are allowed these freedoms that we can reach the shores beyond. A developed legal system is another paramount requirement. Rule of law, respect of private property, security and independence of Judiciary are the irreducible minimum for an industrial takeoff. Investors and inventors want an environment that protects their ideas, property and wealth and has legal certainty. If title deeds are not sacrosanct, court orders are not obeyed and insecurity reigns, we will never experience an industrial takeoff. The Government must offer unconditional support to the Judiciary and the police if we are to succeed. And never negotiate with criminals. Kill them if need be.
It is the role of all governments to build and facilitate infrastructural development of roads, railway, ports, airports and power supply. These are the basic ingredients that spur industrial revolution. The state of our infrastructure is deeply wanting. There should be no county that doesn’t have a simple tarmac road. Lamu and Mombasa need to be outsourced to Dubai or Singapore at attractive concessionary rates. JKIA may be undergoing expansion, but it must be an expansion that makes it truly modern and big enough. JKIA, as it is now, is an architectural failure.
Uhuru spoke of reversing rural-urban migration, and that was an erroneous aberration that undermines his entire vision for Kenya. Developed countries are so because of urbanisation. Each industrialised country has urban population in excess of 62 per cent. Kenyan urban population is 22 per cent. We must up rural-urban migration. Each county has to either redevelop their existing headquarters or develop new ones, as Governor Alfred Mutua wants to do. The engine of capitalism is its consumer class, and with tremendous respect to my Cheptongei village, rural population will never drive industrialisation. And the Central Government needs also to develop model cities. I suggest that Nairobi, Mombasa, Nyeri, Embu, Garissa, Kakamega, Kisumu, Nakuru, Eldoret and Nyeri be re-designed even if it means flattening them. To develop, 70 per cent of Kenyans must live in modern metropolis.
The regulatory sector that deals with banking, insurance, tax, capital markets and all trade-licensing demands change. The Central Bank, Kenya Revenue Authority, Insurance Regulatory Authority and all Licensing Departments have to experience epiphany to re-align them with the vision we need. In Africa, Johannesburg is the only ranked financial centre and the fifth in the world. Service industry is what made Singapore experience phenomenal development.
Kenya needs to develop genuinely and sustainably. We don’t want to be like Ireland that was transformed from a backward into an industrialised country in less than 10 years on potion magique, which turned out to be steroids. Ireland is a study in how not to develop. In a seminal paper to the Royal Irish Academy, Prof Peadar Kirby of Limerick University said that Ireland failed because it did not have a robust and deliberative policy making consensus and its political leaders made economic choices that turned out to be chimerical and all had their careers ended. Our choices are written in history. Our paths are marked. Uhuru, kazi kwako.
