MUGA: What next president must do

At the time of writing, it is not yet clear who the winner will be in the just-concluded presidential election.

And in any case, even if a winner had been declared, with all that last-minute confusion and blundering by the IEBC virtually guaranteeing a rendezvous with the Supreme Court, could we be sure who will eventually end up being sworn in?

Anyway, my topic today applies no matter who wins. And this topic is the two most crucial things that the next administration must do.

First, what must be done if the country is to offer economic opportunity to the many young Kenyans who apparently abstained from voting despite having led the cheering choruses at the campaign rallies? At this point, they have merely expressed their disenchantment with the political class by not voting. In the future they may be tempted to resort to less peaceful means to express their discontent.

The second priority should be the changes in our political infrastructure needed to secure once and for all, the certainty of peaceful elections no matter who may be on the ballot in years to come. We cannot continue to indefinitely carry the reputation of being a country that goes to war with itself every five years.

Now starting with the first priority, one of the criticisms levelled against the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, is that he did not manage to create enough formal sector jobs to offer opportunity to the hundreds of thousands of educated young Kenyans who enter the job market every year.

This criticism is unfair insofar as job creation is a factor of what we may term an “enabling environment” – whether regulatory or infrastructural. And the core requirement when it comes to infrastructure, is that it should be relatively cheap to produce goods and services. And in the case of goods, it should be easy and cheap to transport goods both into the country and within it.

Some of the landmark achievements of the Uhuru Kenyatta administration are in the improvements in transport infrastructure – more and better roads, bigger airports, expansion of the Mombasa port, etc – and these had to be settled before the country satisfied any potential investor’s expectations when it came to infrastructure.

Now with that largely taken care of, what we really need is cheaper electricity. There is no point having cheap labour if your power costs are remarkably high.

I am not going to prescribe here how this cheaper electric power can be obtained. I will just point out that other countries have been able to achieve this, and so should we. What is beyond doubt is that our power costs are far greater than those of our two greatest continental rivals for manufacturing investments, Egypt and South Africa.

As for the political infrastructure needed is a return to the Westminster parliamentary system, with a largely ceremonial president and a Prime Minister who is the nation’s chief executive.

There are many potential benefits in a return to such a system, but the biggest one is that it would finally terminate the suicidal trend in our presidential elections which have – almost from the return to multiparty politics in 1992 – been a life and death struggle for power between two clearly defined tribal-based coalitions.

We do not need any more evidence that the current presidential system is corrosive to our national unity; destructive to economic growth; and generally disruptive of our everyday lives.

The return to the Westminster system may have received some bad press to the extent that it is associated in many Kenyan minds with the failed Building Bridges Initiative.

But what is forgotten in such a judgement is that the BBI was actually exceedingly popular and was passed by an overwhelming majority of County Assemblies. It was at the Supreme Court that this initiative met its Waterloo. Which essentially means that it failed on legal technicalities rather than for lack of popular approval.

At some point we will need to put to rest, the ghosts of the 2008 post-election violence that continues to haunt the country at every election season.

A return to the Westminster parliamentary system offers the clearest path to this goal.