We need a national developmentalist coalition urgently

Senior government officials face criticism over their response to rising fuel prices and worsening cost of living in Kenya. [Courtesy, Standard] 

The current fuel crisis was a reminder of Kenya’s ongoing lack of a coherent developmentalist industrial policy. We have a government that is monomaniacally focused on revenue maximisation. Everything else, from service delivery to support for private sector-led growth have been subordinated to revenue maximisation.

The government does not seem to care about much else, perhaps except for the intensification of the spoils system that makes it impossible to rationalise public spending. We spend over Sh1.1 trillion on operations and management. State House alone gobbles up a budget that is orders of magnitude larger than the typical county.

If current trends persist, we are on course to see a deficit of over 7 per cent of our output. That means more government borrowing and more scarcity of credit flowing to the private sector. What would it take to have a coherent developmentalist industrial policy?

Well, first, we would need to build a developmentalist coalition bringing together different parts of our society, from civil society, to religious organisations, to the private sector, to public bureaucrats, to politicians. This coalition would necessarily have to cut across partisan lines to provide stability to the developmentalist agenda.

Then we would all agree on core priority things that we need to do as a country to improve our material conditions. Back in the day, we had Vision 2030. It may not have been perfect, but it provided a blueprint that ought to have focused minds on a few priority areas across administrations.

Do we have the capacity to build a developmentalist consensus and the supporting coalition? The simple answer is no. At this point in our history, we are led by elites sorely lacking in ambition or strategic thinking. Most are trapped in the petty games of ethnic politics and wanton plunder of public resources.

To the extent that they care about prudential management of the economy, it is always motivated by the need to perform to outsiders, the international financial institutions, foreign capitals, foreign creditors, and the hordes of shady foreign investors who they use to steal from public coffers.

Notably, this is not a partisan problem. It cuts across the board. Beyond the political leadership, we also have a non-government sector conflicted about development.

Our civil society is still largely restricted to the language of rights and political reforms, with little attention to economic development as one of the tools of empowering our people and freeing them from dependency on predatory politicians. And so we are lacking a coherent understanding of how our economic development ought to contribute to our social development.

Ideally, the private sector ought to be a powerful font of ideas and mobilisation potential to shift policy debates and politicians’ incentives. However, they find themselves captured by mediocre politicians.

Instead of disciplining the policy-making process, they rely on favours from the government. Too often, they go unpaid as we accumulate a mountain of pending bills.

Finally, there are the bureaucrats. Since Kibaki left office, their ranks have been hollowed out. There is increasingly little evidence that bureaucratic technical know-how disciplines the policy-making process.

The political whims of senior leadership always carry the day. This is no way to run a Sh19 trillion economy. It’s time leaders from different segments of society woke up to the fact that we are quickly running out of time.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University