Kenya Kwanza's Jekyll-and-Hyde State: Vision bold, execution broken

In a country where leadership is manifested through the glitz of events rather than the grit of process, it is easy to forget that we still have another 469 days, 67 weeks, to go to the 2027 election. Yes, it has been 1,323 long days (189 weeks) since our last one; 672 shorter days, 96 weeks, since June 25, 2024.

As we endure a near-daily barrage of political noise, including official “development tours” across the country, it is not unfair to wonder, as we have done before, if 2027 will be our “r” moment. From evolution to revolution.

That is probably a story for another day, and remember, we have 469 days left. Yet one of many factors that leads to this question is the apparent “Jekyll and Hyde” character of this Kenya Kwanza administration.

Yes, remember that 19th-century novella titled The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? This is the story about the good London doctor who creates a serum to separate his good side, as Dr Jekyll, from his evil alter-ego, Mr Hyde.  In essence, a story as much about the good and bad sides of human nature as it is a story about our dual, or multiple, personalities, the idea being that Dr Jekyll aimed to completely separate the two.  If you are wondering how this strange and dark story ends, let us leave that until the end.

Our story begins with the Kenya Kwanza manifesto, and its great diagnosis of the “perfect storm” they faced when assuming office.  First, global economic uncertainty, which calls on us to build resilience. 

Second, fiscal stress, which demanded that we discipline our fiscus in pursuing fiscal consolidation.  Third, structural economic imbalance, which created the bottom-up promise to overturn our crony capitalism. Call these the first three of the Four Horsemen of our Economic Apocalypse, with corruption as the fourth horseman, we either can’t address because we won’t, or we won’t address because we can’t.

Now, back to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the context of our perfect storm.  Recent happenings in our “oil space” are a useful resilience test.  So, the “nice” Dr Jekyll part is the one where, at last week’s Africa We Build summit, which we jointly hosted with the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), we learnt that super-industrialist Aliko Dangote could build East Africa a 650,000 barrels per day (b/d) oil refinery, as a replica of his Nigerian one, at Tanzania’s Tanga, not Kenya’s Lamu, port, where the massive East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) becomes operational this year. 

If we get it right, this looks like a longer-term crude, then, refining goal that moves Eastern Africa from import dependence to oil independence and, dreamily, export prominence. 

It is an intriguing play in a global economic order hitherto reliant on Africa’s finished goods dependency, despite resource endowments.  This is what policy adventure could look and feel like.

In fact, this is exactly where you want to see more clarity and action, a feasibility-supported regional Master Plan, peppered with scenarios and flavoured with options, that processes all ideas on the table: Uganda’s planned 60,000 b/d refinery at Hoima, Kenya’s envisioned 120,000 b/d Lamu refinery at Bargoni, the old Mombasa refinery cum storage terminal or even the proposed Chinese firm Ruiku Energy-led 60,000 b/d one at our Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone and LPG hub.  A plan that possibly fits Kenya Pipeline’s mega-logistics into the picture, maybe even a multi-nodal Tanga-Mombasa crude-refined-distribution inter-connection. 

And, then of course, answers to the core question: when will we actually have 650,000 b/d to refine?  Of course, it is much more complicated than this, but we need to get to a point one day where ambition finally beats confusion and cartels.  Is this our energy “light bulb” moment?

As the AFC observes in its State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report for 2026, launched at last week’s summit, East Africa, with its 400 million people, is the only African region that lacks a functioning refining facility.  This does not take away from the report’s added point that Africa’s projected refined oil gap by 2040, at 86 million tonnes, requires new capacity equivalent to “three additional Dangote-sized refineries”.

It is easy to see two main objections to this Dr Jekyll moment. The first, and most obvious, is what is in it for Kenya, with added concerns about our testy economic relations with Tanzania. The second is the “fossil fuel” argument, that this initiative distracts from our green agenda. 

Okay, let us debate these issues, without taking away from the decision moment we have.  Nobody said Dr Jekyll was perfect, right?

The less said about the opposing Mr Hyde moment, the better, especially since we have covered this subject before.  Lest we forget, we still have an unresolved oil scandal, which now seems to have entered its “cover-up” phase.  Basically, this is Kenya Kwanza’s primitive accumulation alter-ego.

Let us move to the fiscus.  The best we can think of as a Dr Jekyll moment might sound controversial, but the fact of the matter is this regime’s innovative instrumentation, National Infrastructure Fund, Sovereign Wealth Fund, securitisation of future revenue, and probably assets in the future, even liquidity management operations, are realistic efforts to secure the development agenda given our debt trap.

Except it is easier to contextualise these innovations as attempts to mask the Mr Hyde character of this administration, especially when we cannot see any real attempts to tame wanton spending or to restructure it towards national priorities.  In the recent past, the cost of the current State House and the incumbent presidency at large has been a particular lightning rod for this expenditure problem.  Put it this way: Following the recent Supplementary Budget, we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation where the Presidency, with maybe five State officers, has a larger budget than the Judiciary, with hundreds of them.

This, of course, is the underfunded Judiciary that received Presidential promises but whose budget is already badly outmatched by Parliament, Intelligence, Corrections and Social Protection/Senior Citizens.

For the record, after those Supplementaries, the Presidency now costs us more than 12 other justice and accountability institutions combined: Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, Office of the Auditor-General, Controller of Budget, State Law Office, State Department of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, State Department of Gender and Affirmative Action, Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Witness Protection Agency, Commission on Administrative Justice, National Gender and Equality Commission and the Independent Policing Oversight Authority.  So, we have a Mr Hyde situation where it is not just too much wrong, but not enough right.

Which brings us finally to economic restructuring, or more crudely, eliminating cartels.  Again, we can see the “bottom-up” ideation: in Agriculture, Housing, Healthcare, MSMEs and the Hustler Fund, Digital, is all Dr Jekyll in its intent.  But then there is Mr Hyde practice, where, simply, new crony capitalists have replaced the previous one, which is probably three-quarters of the current beef in our national politics.

A simple conclusion might be that Kenya Kwanza is Dr Jekyll in its ideation, but Mr Hyde in implementation. 

A more nuanced one might reverse the novella’s core premise, and infer that it is actually Kenya Kwanza’s natural Mr Hyde that is fooling us and the world with a Dr Jekyll facade. 

By the way, how did the actual story conclude?  In the end, Dr Jekyll was consumed by his Mr Hyde creation. 

Just saying!