Any realistic assessment of Kenya’s economic history reveals one major trend: This is that all fundamental progress in our country (as indeed for all developing countries) is a factor of effective imitation, rather than innovation as such.
This may not be welcome news to the hundreds (maybe even thousands) of young Kenyans who labour day and night at one or another of the various ‘innovation hubs’ to be found around Nairobi. But the facts in this matter are uncompromising and undeniable.
Consider for example, the Kenyan cooperative movement, around which most of the successful farming initiatives at various times — coffee, tea, sugarcane, cashew nuts, etc — have been built. You don’t hear them get much credit for it these days, but the foundation of Kenya’s cooperative movement was built with the help of Nordic countries.
These are nations where “the transformation of semi-feudal agrarian societies into affluent welfare states”, as one scholar expressed it, was made possible in large part because the peasant farmers were effectively organised into cooperative societies. And indeed these Nordic countries were generous enough to build for us the Cooperative College of Kenya (now a full-fledged university) to help Kenya to more effectively follow in their very successful footsteps.
Then consider tourism. At Independence, Kenya’s tourism was more of a cottage industry, employing just a few thousands, if not less than that. What made possible the current industrial scale of operation with multiple chartered flights landing daily at the Coast during the peak season, and hundreds of thousands employed, was the establishment of the Kenya Utalii College — this time supported by the Swiss government, which went out of its way to encourage Kenya to adopt its own highly successful model for tourism.
Finally, we have to acknowledge the role of the Dutch and the Israelis in setting up the horticulture sector. In some ways those two nations could hardly be more different. The Netherlands has a large part of its land mass either at sea level or below sea level. If not for an elaborate system of dykes which keep the water out, The Netherlands would lose much of the valuable farmland that has been painstakingly reclaimed over centuries. And when it comes to farming, there are countries more technically advanced than The Netherlands.
Israel’s problem is that of too little water. And yet this desert nation was founded by people who — above all else — wanted to ‘work the land of their ancestors’, as one writer put it. In the early years of its independence, the basic social unit in Israel was the kibbutz, a communally owned farm.
But with time, the Israeli economy grew beyond its original agrarian roots — while also abandoning its old socialist principles and embracing a more globalist capitalism — hence, compelling Israeli agrarian entrepreneurs to look for politically stable countries with low-cost labour. This is how Kenya’s rise in horticultural production started. Even though by now many of these farms are locally owned, the most successful large-scale horticulture farms still have either Israeli or Dutch technical experts.
So for all the popular talk of Kenya being ‘an African innovation hub’ and references to the ‘Silicon Savannah, when you look closely at what has created jobs and improved livelihoods what you find is not some locally generated ‘innovation’ but rather the effective imitation of what has already proved effective elsewhere.
There is but one exception: The telecommunications sector. And specifically, the M-Pesa money transfer platform. Not only has mobile telephony proved to be a transformational technology in every way, but we also see Safaricom — which created M-Pesa — having grown in barely two decades to become the country’s most valuable company, with a value exceeding that of the biggest banks and insurance companies.
Next week I will continue this analysis and outline the even greater transformations that could follow on Kenya’s embrace of the latest advanced agricultural technologies.