No, the handshake and BBI will not fix Kenya

Ghana’s founding president Kwame Nkrumah is credied to have said that all Africans needed was reach the political kingdom (independence), and then all else would follow (economic development and improved living conditions). Nkrumah was right, but only to a point.

It is true that, throughout Africa, life after independence was infinitely better than life under racist colonial domination. And to the extent that colonialists looked like they were running more efficient systems, it is because of the inherently autocratic nature of colonial administrations. Any idiot can look like a genius if all they had to do was milk the labor of millions for the benefit of less than 100,000 people. While European sections of places like Nairobi, Harare, or Lusaka looked prim and proper, Africans were forced to live in squalor in estates, compounds, and “native reserves”.