I remember some years back being surprised to learn from a British expatriate then working in Kenya, that he had a holiday home in Spain.
This news was particularly surprising because given his profession, I had not imagined him to be a rich man.
Later I was to learn that he was merely one of almost a million British citizens who owned property in Spain, mostly as holiday homes. And that not only are such holiday homes in Spain affordable for the British middle class, but the Spanish government makes it quite easy for foreigners to invest in real estate. So, plenty of Germans, Scandinavians, and French families also own holiday homes in Spain.
Bearing in mind that Spain has a smaller population than Kenya (roughly 47 million currently, to our approximately 56 million) the fact that a million foreigners had bought property in Spain and routinely spent a good part of any calendar year there, seemed to me amazing.
It is true that pre-Covid-19, Kenya routinely hosted over a million tourists annually. But that is a vastly different thing from having a million foreign property owners in a country.
So, what has this got to do with Kenya?
It all provides a frame of reference for the prospects of East African integration – an idea that our President William Ruto and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni seem determined to push forward as a logical extension of the existing East African Community.
At their recent meeting there was talk of political integration too; but I think what would most benefit the people of this region is more economic integration, especially in the form of increased cross-border trade and investment. The free movement of persons, goods and capital within any geographical region is the holy grail of just about any regional economic bloc.
Well, what I have just outlined as applying to Spain and Britain shows what is possible when there is effective economic integration between sovereign states. Of course, this integration, as concerns Britain and the European Union, has since been blighted by the Brexit referendum of 2016.
But there is plenty to be learned from the pre-Brexit period, when all those British citizens buying holiday homes or retirement homes in Spain represented a massive inflow of new investment into Spain.
So, will we ever see an economic boom in any East African country, fuelled by the middle class of a neighbouring country investing in property there?
I see some powerful psychological barriers to any such possibility in our region.
Consider the two biggest economies in East Africa, Kenya and Tanzania:
First, although there are many acres of undeveloped seafront parcels of land in Tanzania, for example, would Kenyans really be eager to take up these parcels of land for holiday homes??
I believe that most indigenous Kenyans would be more interested in tracts of farmland than in beachfront property – many Kenyans who are outwardly middle-class technocrats, are often land-hungry peasant farmers at heart.
And Tanzania has the least population density of all East African nations and hence the most arable land available for potential purchase.
Such farmland is likely to appeal most to those Kenyans who hold the possession of a title deed to be a sacred aspiration, irrespective of where that parcel of land may be located.
But if I am to believe what I have heard from Tanzanian friends over the years, we Kenyans are not as popular with ordinary Tanzanians as we might imagine.
Tanzania’s founding President, Julius Nyerere often mocked Kenya as “a man-eat-man society”. At that point in time, it seemed that he was basically opposed to the capitalistic model of economic development adopted from Kenya’s early years of independence – in contrast to Tanzania’s socialist model. And so, you might imagine that with Tanzania now having embraced capitalism for at least two decades, such mockery would have long ended.
But apparently, that is not the case.
And I have been assured that if there is one thing which would lose any Tanzanian presidential candidate millions of votes, it would be a declaration that the candidate intended to open up the Tanzanian rural hinterland for Kenyan investors in their hundreds of thousands to buy up parcels of farmland.
