Maybe you have noticed a certain ambiguity and restraint in the otherwise wild promises that the leading presidential contenders are making as they go into the final phase of their campaigns.
Specifically, I have yet to hear anyone say, “Kenya is at present a poor country. I will make Kenya rich.”
I am talking here of truly massive national prosperity in one generation, like Singapore and South Korea. Not just improved earnings for tea or coffee (or even miraa) growers. Not generous supplies of subsidized fertiliser, or interest-free loans. But real First World prosperity.
And the reason why this promise is not made, it seems to me, is that few will believe it. And yet, there is nothing that we desire more.
Like so many others who are citizens of poor countries, we want “what others have”. And these “others” are most conspicuously to be found in the West where such things as clean and safe streets, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, and adequate food and shelter are more or less taken for granted.
So why have we not seen any firm and binding promise of such prosperity?
The fact behind all this is simple: there is no easy and direct path to national prosperity, and many who have set out to create such a path have failed.
The prescriptions that we usually get for this kind of thing are mostly generic, with an emphasis on “an educated workforce” and “modern infrastructure”.
But under Presidents Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta we have greatly improved our public infrastructure. And as for an educated workforce, we had that as far back as the reign of President Daniel Moi.
And all we have seen come from this is more and more unemployed university graduates. Not the direct and swift path to national prosperity that was implicitly promised to those countries that successfully carried out these two supposed prerequisites.
One reason frequently given for this failure to prosper, is corruption. There have even been specific figures given by senior government officials who claim that Kenya loses Sh2 billion every single day through corruption.
Personally, I find that number suspect.
If it is possible to come up with such a specific figure for public funds lost through corruption, then surely this same process of calculating that figure would also yield some details of who specifically stole how much, and from where.
There are 365 days in a year. So, if we lose Sh2 billion every day, then that adds up to roughly Sh730 billion a year.
Can that kind of money really be stolen from our annual budget, and yet leave no trace as to who stole it; by what means; and from what official Treasury allocation?
At all events, countries that are undoubtedly prosperous are not all free of corruption. For example, in Kenya we had the notorious “Covid billionaires” who took advantage of the need for rapid procurement of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies in the early panicked days of the Covid-19 pandemic, to make an illicit fortune.
But then much the same applies to the UK and the US: both countries also have plenty of examples of reckless profiteering through dodgy procurement of desperately needed Covid-19-related supplies.
Back to the dream of prosperity, I would point out that so long as we basically continue with the agrarian economy we inherited at Independence, we cannot hope to get very far. That economy was all very well for a nation of a few thousand large-scale white farmers and about 7 million Indigenous Kenyans who were almost all subsistence farmers, herders, or fishermen.
In all these decades of Independence, the only addition we have successfully made to this agrarian economy is tourism. And one might add horticulture, but that too is simply a more advanced form of the old agrarian economy.
What the leading presidential candidates owe us is a coherent path to industrialisation. But so far all we hear is the large sums that will be “allocated” to one (mostly informal) sector or another.
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