On Kenya's 'silent' national economic summit

It doesn’t matter where you sit or stand as a Kenyan following our public affairs.  Last week had something for you.  First is our politics. So, you might have been dismayed or delighted by the strong and angry language pervading President William Ruto’s ongoing “development tour” of the Rift leading into today’s Mashujaa Day, particularly his own increasingly agitated diatribes against the opposition. 

Once you filter out extremist noise, this current game of cat and mouse essentially casts an incumbent incessantly demanding an alternative agenda from challengers against a riposte from challengers that “wantam” is exactly that alternative, so you end up struggling to differentiate the hunter from the hunted.

Second is more politics.  In this case, you quietly or loudly reflected on the first anniversary of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s passing in 2025, as you followed events leading to his October 15 commemoration.  Even without getting into Wednesday’s specific occasion, it is clear that Baba’s spirit remains in our national psyche – across politics and media and in society at large – even as 2027 looms.

While we must never forget his contribution to our democratic development, particularly the constitution, it is also worth reflecting on the existential national questions he left us with: the unfinished 10-point Agenda Four of 2008 with Kibaki, then the 12 issues in the aborted 2018-2020 BBI with Uhuru.  And, as his coup de grace, the 2023 NADCO report and subsequent 2024-2025 10-point agenda plus the Singapore/first world “Journey to Canaan” ideas as his legacy advisory to Ruto. It’s a heavy “to-do” list.

Yet, with a little imagination, you can see how somebody could turn Raila’s unfinished business into, say, a three-part social covenant as an alternative agenda sitting above and cutting across our super-populist staple of manifestos built on sectoral segmentation, thematic tokenisation and piecemeal projectization.

But that’s a story for another day; there is still time for the people to fine-tune their 2027 marking scheme.  

For politicos across the board, the fear might be that this time it’s about “why/why not”, not “what”, which tells us it’s fruitless to debate the “how” if the people have decided on the “whom”.  Maybe this time, voters are tired of development merchants, seeking service delivery and economic opportunity enablers.

In short, will the 2027 voter cast a ballot for the software of prospects, and not the hardware of projects?  Or was 2022’s “promise fiesta” a hard lesson, especially given the ongoing blitz of “shiny things” being launched country-wide? That’s the “serikali saidia” question that might be the faceless name on the ballot.

With all of the noise going on, did we miss the hidden story of the week?  That was the “thematic week” of preparations leading into today’s three-county (Uasin Gishu, Nandi, Elgeyo Marakwet) Mashujaa Day celebrations.  Structured around three pillars or tracks – security and cyber-security, sports and finance/economy – they offered a surprisingly quiet and little-noticed menu of exhibitions, roundtables and feedback forums across these pillars.  In theory, this is the part of government that works quietly while politicians treat us to sound and fury.  So let’s spend a little time exploring this “hidden” event.

Take the finance/economy pillar.  This was the space in which the National Treasury supposedly engaged the public on finance and economic issues relevant to the region and nation, leading into a two-day National Economic Summit comprising panelled stakeholder discussions and a presidential economic roundtable.  It is a crying shame that government communication is so poor, and its information so disjointed that you cannot tell what came out of this summit, or if it even happened at all, but let’s continue.

The only thing we heard was an announcement, yet again, about proposed PAYE reductions for low-income earners.  Yet we had been made to believe that the summit would, in Treasury’s words, “deliberate on the country’s economic priorities and map out strategies that shape Kenya’s economic future”.  It is also easy to suspect that this was a “box-ticking” exercise that will feed into the 2027 Budget Statement.

But let’s take a good-faith view and assume this really was the place where Kenya’s future was debated.  And based on this heroic assumption, let’s offer a humble view on what we might have wanted to see.

The first thing might be the big picture, which ideally should be anchored on the “beyond Vision 2030” national conversation – Singapore, First World, etc. – that was launched a couple of months ago.  Do we already have public views on what this vision might look like?  Is a proper evaluation of the current vision complete?  What has happened to the technical team’s proposals around three economic pillars and multiple cross-cutting enablers?  Or are we back to the three pillars (economic, social, political) of the current vision, as we seem to be hearing from the planning people?  Oh, and don’t forget the money-first Sh5 trillion first world speeches around three, or four, imperatives that birthed the National Infrastructure and Sovereign Wealth Funds? Today it seems like we have the funds before the plan, before the vision.

The second thing might be more honesty and courage about our economic history to date.  At a macro-economic level, using the four-sector approach, this is a story that might move from Jomo’s controlled real sector, to Moi’s honest crowding-out, to Kibaki’s productive multiplier, to Uhuru’s external debt spree, to today’s decoupled dashboard.  That’s a citizen experience that began as stable but exclusionary, moved to stagnation and survival, re-emerged through economic empowerment, dropped to asset-rich but cash-poor and finds us in forced extractive austerity. That’s how to look at the economy beyond “shiny things”.

Given that we now have a Nobel Prize in Economics (Hall and Woodford) that links macro back to micro, we might even call these eras the micro-economics of exclusive equilibrium, fiscal domination, economic empowerment, asset mismatch and today’s coma.  To be fair, the current administration’s shock therapy strategy is a long play, but it feels like an operation that will end successfully even though the patient dies.

Which brings us to a third and final thing that goes back to the first.  How must we envision our future economy?  One view I have offered before is six macro-resource zones – a Coastal Logistics Gateway, Mount Kenya Agrarian Processing Matrix, Great Rift Renewable Powerhouse Axis, Great West Industrial Belt, LAPPSET Northern Corridor Frontier and Metropolitan Node of Nairobi and the Konza Corridor.

The larger point here is that our forward visioning must consider spatial context; we are not one big blob.  Spatial here is three-dimensional – horizontal, vertical and virtual – that’s how we build our GDP density.

A different view, inspired by a look at the academic work and professional knowledge of the leaders of the “beyond Vision 2030” technical team (Profs Nyong’o and Hino), might be a three-gear approach.  The first gear is dual-track structural transformation, with the first track being the agro-industrial engine, and the second being the technological frontier.  This is the gear that drives manufacturing.  The second gear is a clean energy-led developmental state, while the third one is inclusive devolution-centric wealth.  By this vision, the second gear (power) drives the first one (production), which feeds into the third one (pockets).  Today, gear one is jammed by gear two and gear three is spinning in the opposite direction.

Maybe we might hear more about the summit’s outcomes during the Mashujaa Day speeches.  Maybe something with a hint of dreams about our future, like the pictures drawn above.  Because we have too much political noise in Kenya at the moment. So let’s end by paraphrasing a wonderful byline from a great article in the excellent Economic Review magazine of the past: “(even) leaders need time to think”.