To reach Singapore, Kenya must avoid the political path that leads to Haiti

Going by the increasing violence, physical and verbal, in our current political space, it seems that our journey to Singapore, or Canaan, needs us to first pass through Haiti.  And it is impossible not to suspect the State’s hidden hand in, especially, our fast-growing goon infestation as the opening salvo of pre-election intimidation leading to a “worse than 2007” post-election moment.

What we don’t see, read in Haiti, is that once their work is done, these goons will morph into gangs.  Remember too that once we see the State also sitting back as hired thugs run riot, then “goonery” becomes a tool of trade for leaders across the political divide.  Simply, if we sustain our current goon momentum, the genie will be out of the bottle and it won’t matter who wins what in 2027.

To paraphrase ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, are we willing to burn down the country to rule over its ashes? Yes, we’ve pulled ourselves back from the brink before, but there are only so many times we can do this before we tip over the edge, like our neighbours.

You get the feeling that, without the international community, we wouldn’t be an anchor state in the region. In other words, left to our own devices, we are not the exception to “Africa is a country”.

Not only can we do better, but we must. “We” is everyone from top leadership to the people.

Of course, as we do our local political tomfoolery, using tribal calculators and ethnic abacuses, the world is running mitigation and adaptation scenarios to respond to happenings in West Asia (Middle East).  I have seen one extreme worst-case scenario suggesting a global economic impact worse than the two oil crises of the 1970s and Covid 2019-2021 combined.  But here we ALL are, running around Kenya promising heaven to unemployed crowds as if we live on Planet Mars.

Don’t be surprised if we are soon hit with massive fuel price increases.  If not in today’s monthly adjustment, in the coming months.  And the national fury this will add onto existing public anger owing to the current non-G to G, but still contracted, oil import matter, which, with at least a hundred more questions than answers, is clearly not going anywhere on accountability or justice.

Even as this is happening, our Treasury people have dashed to America for this week’s Annual World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, where, as happens in your typical doctor’s surgery, we will stand in line with our begging bowl seeking fresh Bretton Woods succour to sustain our politics, sorry, economy. 

In these meetings, we will explain, mainly to Daktari IMF, that we are committed to fiscal consolidation (look, we are reorganising the Kenya Revenue Authority!), fiscal credibility (look, we now have a National Infrastructure Fund to attract private capital!), and economic resilience (look, we might not yet have a plan to adjust to global events, but can you help anyway?).

I still do not get why we mostly refuse to see that for a long while, even before Covid-19 or Trump, we were already in a world of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity); a reversal of circumstances from our pre-liberalisation ancien regime of stability, certainty, simplicity, clarity. In a world that’s busy running scenarios, we are busy budgeting corruption to eat and stall projects.

If there is anything this war in the Middle East loudly tells us, it’s that we need a mindset shift.

Ironically, one way to begin thinking about this comes from the first Trump administration.  At the time, there was a strong conservative push to address the view that much of America’s aid to developing countries had veered away from its strategic objectives. 

Of course, this was also a side-swipe at the previous Obama administration’s “misdirected” aid focus, arguing that “(we) found that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) lacked a clear mission or definition of success”.

Of course, Trump II has since closed down the USAID, but the controversial idea they proposed at the time – even bad ideas can be good ideas – was that American aid would henceforth be premised on a country road map titled the “Journey to Self Reliance (J2SR)”. 

The data is gone, but every USAID country recipient was mapped across seven J2SR dimensions as a baseline for support, the idea being that countries would be gradually weaned off aid using this template.

J2SR is now water under the bridge, but as we sit here today, it is worth considering if, on our own initiative, this is our moment to start thinking about our own self-reliance road map.  To be clear, self-reliance does not mean an insular or inward-looking stance, but to illustrate, let’s consider the seven J2SR dimensions that the Trump I administration used to mark us up, accepting that these dimensions were defined from an American, not Kenyan, or developing country lens.

J2SR as a marking scheme was split into two sets of metrics: commitment and capacity.  There were three dimensions under commitment, open and accountable governance, inclusive development and economic policy, and four under capacity – government capacity, civil society capacity, citizen capacity and capacity of the economy. 

In addition, J2SR provided for a debt distress risk assessment.  Now, instead of thinking about this as a donor checklist, consider how we turn it around into a sort of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) template for our Singapore trip.

Let us break these dimensions down further. J2SR relied on international indices to rate countries across multiple sub-dimensions. Under open and accountable governance, indices measured the state of liberal democracy and open government.

Inclusive development tracked social group equality and the gender economic gap, while economic policy assessed the business and investment environment, trade freedom and environmental policy.

How do we turn these into self-commitments on governance, development and economic policy?

On the capacity side, under government capacity, three indices mattered: government effectiveness, tax system effectiveness and safety and security, with civil society capacity measured through its own effectiveness index.

Citizen capacity was gauged by the poverty rate, education quality and child health, while economic capacity was tracked through GDP per capita, ICT adoption and export sophistication. Again, can we turn these into self-capacity goals for Kenya?

Of course, these are indices, so they would only lead us to a baseline (our picture of today) and targets (pictures of tomorrow). Granted, there may be other metrics, dimensions and factors that we might add to this list, even as we remove those we may not find appropriate.

More importantly, it is actual policies, strategies, plans and actions that will matter in getting our own version of J2SR going.

Here is a closing thought. We may not like being judged against international, even Western, benchmarks, but I can think of at least two countries that have used them to drive, if not necessarily determine, their development trajectories. The first is Rwanda in its remarkable rebirth from the 1994 genocide. The second is Singapore, as Lee Kuan Yew admitted in a Harvard speech titled Third World Leaders — Hope or Despair?

So imagine a home-grown version of Trump’s J2SR that charts our path to Singapore, or Canaan, without passing through Haiti or, as some say, remaining trapped in Babylon rather than Egypt.

Food for thought.