Last week, in order to illustrate the prerequisites for industrialisation, I gave the example of our neighbour to the west, Uganda, which as far back as the 1960s had most of these prerequisites firmly in place.
These included a reasonably educated populace, which was also hard working; plenty of cheap electricity (a good amount of which it sold to Kenya); and direct railway access to the Port of Mombasa.
I should have added that the Mombasa port back then was considered to be so efficient that even the coffee grown in Eastern DR Congo (then known as Zaire) was exported through Mombasa rather than through Zaire’s own Port of Matadi.
The railway system was also quite efficient, and Ugandan exports, whether raw materials or agricultural produce, could reliably be at the Mombasa port within 48 hours.
So how did the usurper, General Idi Amin manage to demolish any prospect that Uganda had of evolving into a Newly Industrialised Country (NIC) as early as the 1970s?
His biggest mistake was to expel from Uganda almost all members of the Ugandan Asian community, who were the country’s core group of entrepreneurs back then.
And even more astonishing when viewed from this distance, ordinary Ugandans danced in the streets to celebrate the departure of these Asians whom they stigmatised as “foreigners” and “exploiters of the common people”.
If you had told those wildly gyrating Ugandans that what they were actually chasing out of their country was their best hope for establishing a manufacturing-based economy, they would not have believed you.
Indigenous Kenyans were not that far behind in their resentment of the local Asian communities.
Though they were at no point subject to mass expulsion, it was quite common in those days to hear populist MPs denounce the Asian community in Kenya in much the same derogatory terms as those used by Ugandan leaders.
All of which tempts me to speculate that the real barrier to an early ascent to NIC status for us here in East Africa was substantially a matter of psychology: we had not yet learned to value entrepreneurs and to appreciate that it did not matter what their ethnicity was.
There seems to have been little awareness that the only thing that really mattered – if the nation was to prosper – was for us to have as many investors as possible, setting up as many factories as possible, employing as many of our people as possible.
It did not help that the only university we had back then – the University of Nairobi – was permeated with Marxist ideology. And, then as now, university professors were highly influential in shaping the national narrative.
The result of this was that if, for example, the owner of a factory was known to alternate between arriving at his factory in his Mercedes-Benz today and his Range Rover tomorrow, while those who worked in the production lines relied on public transport, then this tycoon was considered to be – by definition – an “oppressor”.
We have learned a lot since then.
Nowadays you often find Kenyan elected officials, and in particular governors, hosting groups of investors whom he or she will claim to have persuaded to open a factory in that county.
Almost always, the “investors” are East Asians. And they are welcomed with open arms.
They are usually reported to be seeking “investment opportunities” in food processing and what is generically referred to as “light industries”.
And if even a fraction of those reported as investors had actually ended up establishing factories, then we would have gone quite far towards solving our youth unemployment problem.
However, look at these supposed investors closely and you will not feel that you are seeing the same quality of persons as the East Asian millionaire investors who have long been in Kenya, and who have already developed magnificent blocks of apartments, elegant shopping malls, or factories.
Because Kenyans have learned to value foreigners who can create jobs, governors desperately seeking re-election will organise photo opportunities with just about any foreigner who can pose as an East Asian investor.
