There is a viral video going around where Dr David Ndii equivocates the Bottom Up model as the transfer of capital from the top of the economic pyramid to the bottom, creating wealth at the bottom. A commonly asked follow-up question was how to transfer capital from the top to the bottom.
The answer came in another video, complete with a proposed monstrosity called the National Hustler Fund earmarked to provide low-interest loans to the bottom, channelled via Saccos. It was not an immediate concern of his to bother to explain how fundamentally or structurally different this model was from the existing Youth Enterprise Development Fund and Women Enterprise Fund.
Unpersuaded, I took the liberty to read the United Democratic Alliance manifesto, which they call The Plan, christened the Bottom Up Economic Transformation Agenda. The Plan prioritises the economy, which is commendable, for it is true that our economy is in crisis. The archers’ eyes are on target, but their aiming is poor, and their arrows take the wrong trajectory.
The Plan over-relies on the Sessional Paper No 1 of 1986 on Economic Management for Renewed Growth, liberally quoting it and leaving no doubt that the recommendations of that 1986 sessional paper are the premise of Bottom Up.
The sessional paper recommended that Kenya should seek to have most of its new jobs created not through industrialisation, but in small-scale agriculture and the informal sector.
The reasoning behind this was that “it takes approximately £16,000 to create one new job in non-agricultural; modern wage-earning activities,” while “To employ people on small farms, in very small-scale industry and services, or in self-employment takes only a fraction of the £16,000 per worker required in the modern sector.”
This is the same argument Bottom Up proponents spit out to date, with nary a change even in the figures quoted, effectively extolling the virtues of underdevelopment.
The irony is that these recommendations for the suppression of mass industrialisation came at a time when Southeast Asia was mainstreaming the same. Here was a policy document that, contrary to the trend taken by the four Asian Tigers and their ASEAN neighbours, was nudging the country backwards, turning our backs on modernisation and falling precipitously into the low-margin informal and unregulated survival-mode arena. The World Bank recommended in Southeast Asia policies that built up the same modern large-scale industrialisation that they pushed Kenya into suppressing.
This sessional paper set in motion the steady slide of Kenya towards deindustrialisation, loss of jobs and acceleration of unemployment; flawed policies for which millions of Kenyans have had to take punishment in the form of unending poverty, starvation, disease, poor education and unfulfilled dreams.
It disturbs this solitary mind that a team looking to govern this country should seek to employ today failed strategies from 1986. By its own reckoning, the paper projected an average GDP growth rate of 5.6 per cent per year from 1984 to 2000, which did not happen as the economy stagnated, only resuming growth from 2002.
Kenya needs mass industrialisation to create millions of jobs to fix our perennial unemployment. This is the strategy implemented by almost every nation that has grown itself from poverty to wealth. It saddens this solitary mind that Kenya chose the reverse, a doggone misadventure that condemned itself to decades of underdevelopment.
In short, the Bottom Up agenda is anti-industrialisation. In the 1980s, western-trained policymakers understood that Africans were only a generation removed from the bush. All policies for Africa were with that in mind: give them small-time solutions that keep them quiet in their villages, not aspiring towards any measure of prosperity. The same western think tanks promoted mass industrialisation and urbanisation for Asia.
Bottom Up is stuck in that 1980s mindset, that Africans should be content with small things. That is why they are against mega infrastructure projects, large-scale industrialisation, and rapid urbanisation. They want Kenyans to remain stuck on trivial things.
The drafters of the Bottom Up economic agenda and the Sessional Paper Number 1 of 1986 upon which it is derived exhibit an acute scarcity mentality, unable to picture Kenya as an orderly prosperous nation where people achieve their dreams and are not in a perpetual struggle to survive.
It is with that scarcity mentality and fixed mindset that Bottom Up suggests for Kenya not to seek to solve our dire unemployment problem through the creation of millions of jobs via large-scale industrialisation in the formal sector but would rather have our citizens dumped into the informal sector, eking out a Hobbesian living in the villages and the slums.
The writer comments on technology and development.
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