Why Kenya lacks initiative to push through projects

There is this gentleman from Vietnam who’s caused quite a ruckus online with his assessment of Africa and Kenya in particular.

In a short write up titled “Why Asia builds and Africa waits” he lays out what is essentially the problem with Africa: governance, lack of vision and self-interest. Following a meeting he had with President William Ruto and CS Musalia Mudavadi, this gentleman called Doanh Chau summed up what is ailing African leaders – mirroring their continental counterparts – they are all talk - hot air - with zero action.

“They spoke with energy about Kenya’s future – investment, infrastructure, public housing. But behind the polished language was a painful truth: there’s no serious execution culture.” He went on to say that our problem is “lack of vision and dominance of short-term gain.”

“Leaders talk big but systems don’t move. They wait for outsiders to bring business rather than build an environment for it.”. That’s a man after my heart.

Initially, being of a patriotic bent I asked myself: who is this nonentity with the guts to write this negative stuff about my country Kenya? And from Vietnam of all places? The picture we Kenyans have of Vietnam is informed by the Hollywood movies showing a country of short men running around rice paddies while Rambo takes pot shots at them.

Of course, after my initial shock, I regained my senses and realised what Doanh Chau was saying is the same thing that we have been saying for ages. We have a government that thrives on chaos, where our policies are designed around vested interests, not the well-being of the public. Where cronyism and nepotism inform political discourse.

Where semi-illiterates take on an intellectual bent and acquire the guts to take a microphone and spew invectives against their perceived enemies even when they have no idea of basic economic theory. It irritates me when I look at our political landscape.

Look at any large government investment and it is bound to have the soiled fingerprints of some functionary representing interests of some people in high places. I have never had an interest in Vietnam but after what I read from Mr Chau (he didn’t get it all right – he claimed that we build an expressway from Mombasa to Nairobi and that Kenya’s electricity is unstable, both are patently untrue) I decided to dig deeper and compare the two countries.

Vietnam has a GDP per capita of US$4,282 for a population of about 100 million people while Kenya, with a population of about 54 million people has a per capita of US$1,952. Vietnam has invested heavily in manufacturing – and in particular garment manufacturing for the export market. To do that, you must have a grand plan that projects where you want to be in, say, 30 years and plan accordingly.

At one time, we had Vision 2030 that was going well, and which I believe guided some of the heavy public investments during Mwai Kibaki’s presidency, but this seems to have been abandoned mid-stream. This was the kind of planning that would have projected Kenya on a higher development plane but our short sightedness means we can never see through such initiatives. We have many low hanging fruits but I wonder how we never grab them. For instance, provision of water is one of them; why can’t prioritise this? All we have to do is build enough dams across the country to tap the run-off water – such as is currently the case with the heavy rains – and use it during the dry season. Sounds as simple as abc but when it comes to actualising it, to quote Mr Chau, there’s “no real initiative to make it happen”.

-The writer is a communications consultant