If you follow international news at all, you will know that US President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party recently managed to pass legislation known generically as The Infrastructure Bill.
The Bill basically provides money for improvement of infrastructure. The specific objective is to create jobs both during the construction phase, but even more, from the investments in new industries. So it is really about a transformational infrastructure upgrade
In this development, we see a clue as to the limits of some of the job-creating proposals that are currently being put forward by leading presidential candidates here in Kenya.
For governments do not really create jobs in any but the most minimal sense. What they can do is to facilitate new and better investments – which will then create jobs.
You would think this was obvious. After all, consider the only two economic sectors that have been successfully initiated since independence—tourism and horticulture.
Well, the government does not own any tourist hotels – at least not directly. And the Ministry of Tourism does not grow any fruits, vegetables, or flowers for export to the European markets. All this is done by private investors, big or small.
But both sectors require superior quality public infrastructure, and in particular clean and efficient international airports.
And Kenyan tourism would not have grown as it has over the decades if the government had not established Utalii College, which provided training of world-class hotel staff, and thus made possible the rapid increase in the number of tourism facilities in the country.
No private investor could have been able to establish a hotel school like Utalii, which for many years provided free training for all who qualified. That had to be a government project and a reflection of government priorities.
You will notice that so far, the leading presidential candidates – while admitting that job creation must be a top national priority – have not given too many details of how exactly they will create these jobs. And I think I know why.
To illustrate my point, I would refer the reader to the construction of the Thika Superhighway under retired president Mwai Kibaki. At the time of construction, this upgrade was basically understood to be a means of tackling the incredible rush hour traffic jams that greatly inconvenienced all those who used Thika road.
But within a few years of its completion, it led to an immense property boom in all the peri-urban areas between Nairobi and Thika. Families who had long defined themselves as smallholder coffee farmers, suddenly found that their farm of five acres or so, was actually prime real estate and worth a small fortune.
Think of how many jobs were created in the construction of the warehouses, factories, and academic institutions set up by those who owned bigger parcels of land in such areas.
All this may have begun during President Kibaki’s tenure, but it only became highly visible when his successor, President Uhuru Kenyatta, took over – and continues to this day.
Now in much the same way, Uhuru, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, has dedicated a great deal of government resources to the creation of new and better public infrastructure. But at the present time, we cannot really “feel” the benefits of all this infrastructure. We can only see it take shape.
In another two or three years it will be perfectly obvious where it was all heading, and what benefits it will have brought in terms of attracting new investments and creating employment opportunities.
However, by then we will have a new president. And although everything I know about politicians tells me that this new president will then invite us all to behold the work of his hands, the fact is that those new jobs and investment opportunities will not be the result of anything this new president will have done beginning in late 2022.
It will be due to the accelerated infrastructure development that we see going on right now.
