This essay is a response to Marc Andressen’s essay: It’s Time to Build.

After fighting for our independence in 1963, Kenya’s founding fathers through the first president—President Jomo Kenyatta—envisioned a new Kenya. A Kenya that would serve future generations. The building of this new Kenya was to be inspired by the famous Harambee patronage (loosely translated to ‘let’s pull together’) patronage. While a significant part of the reason for coining Harambee was political, it’s intent over time has been diminished by successive political waves. Harambee is no longer what it was meant to inspire, but there’s a chance to salvage it if we all work together.

Today, Harambee is synonymous with political fundraisers endorsed by religious leaders who ought to be at the forefront calling this rot out. Alas! Harambee also takes a detour for a version of Kenya’s big four agenda (A focus on affordable healthcare, food security, affordable housing and manufacturing). If we’re being blunt, this agenda was more of a campaign manifesto1 more than it was a socio-economic road map. Three years down the line and the problem seems to be running deeper than your favorite political party or politician. The genesis of this downward trend is more societal than it is political.

We see the effects of our failing leadership through how we are handling the coronavirus. While we had some window to better prepare for the virus, we didn’t prepare adequately. As I write this, we are barely testing 0.73 tests per 1,000 people2 which is barely enough to inform our decision-making agencies.

What’s more worrying? Kenya’s testing agency (KEMRI) running broke3 or current political wrangles? The latter which continues to receive more media attention. We are slowly self-sabotaging.

Perhaps a blessing in disguise, it took a pandemic for Kenya to get a glimpse of its talent potential (deadweight loss) trapped in our learning institutions mostly being universities. Should we have to wait for pandemics to have students build Kenyan-bred ventilators for our hospitals?4 Why not incentivize pharma or manufacturing companies to set up incubators in our colleges? Maybe start with one, interpret outcomes and enforce policy on other sectors? Will we learn fast enough from this pandemic and integrate this talent to our manufacturing pillar? In the toughest of times, we have constantly seen ingenious solutions spring up, even from some pretty unconventional scenarios like this one. If this isn’t the ultimate litmus test that our homegrown talent is up to the task then I don’t know what is.

Fun fact: Our political class perfectly understand that for health care or housing (read big four agenda) to be affordable, it needs to be hinged on production. But they choose to let their personal priorities overtake national priorities. We’ve seen companies get hijacked by political forces5 for months, get frustrated and go set up in more welcoming countries like Ethiopia. Manufacturing has over years steadily reduced its contribution to Kenya’s GDP from double digit growth to single-digit growth. Precisely from 13% in 2008 to a staggering 7.7% in 2018. It’s not exactly clear if the architects of the big four agenda will continue to watch this ship go under or salvage it. Whether they do it or not, we need to strongly take charge of this ship —any further wait-and-see and it’ll live to be just a memory. It’s convenient, perhaps rightfully so, to be angry at our leaders. However, they are an overwhelming reflection of who we are. For example, we can’t continue watching them buy our most vulnerable populations’ votes and pretend to be shocked when they don’t deliver.

Credit where due. While we see an attempt by our government to prevent an imminent economic downturn by providing tax relief to small businesses, stimulating the textile industry to make PPEs and a cushion aimed at the art sector, this effit barely scratches the surface. We need to play a longer game and future generations will judge us harshly for today’s decisions. For instance, Kenya still imports awfully more than it produces for export. That trade deficit runs in its billions (USD) and hundreds of billions in Kenya shillings. Over USD 720 million deficit in February compared to January’s USD 1 Billion if you ever got curious. This goes to show how sorry our current situation is. To add insult to the injury, the government just announced it’s lifting a ban on importation of mitumba (second hand clothing) while on the other hand our export volume is severely compromised. Take our agricultural exports, our annualized loss of export revenue is currently projected at a whopping 150 billion Kenya shillings—just about USD 1.5 billion. For a developing economy, this couldn’t be more worrying.

A juxtaposed consequence of the failed Harambee is seen with our talent retention. Kenya has been a consistent exporter of talent. We pretend to be shocked to see our top talent excelling abroad. Well, it’s simple: systems there work and as a result opportunities overflow. Why can’t we make our systems work for us? The captains and stakeholders of our sectors (academia, sports, trade) are either plain ignorant or simply don’t care. The only way we can redeem our talents is if we ‘pull together’ this talent pool (true to Harambee) to build our systems and offer more opportunities for our own.

Our prosperity sits on the efficiency of our institutions. However, our institutional failure is too illuminated to ignore. Our education sector could be our redeeming lever to bridge our pharmaceutical deficit. More than 95%(!) of Kenya’s pharmaceutical products are imported. Even sadder is that these imports compete with counterfeits flooded in our market. You’d be forgiven to think we would at least rally to manufacture its own testing reagents. Instead, we are held hostage by foreign pharmaceuticals for these reagents. We can’t speak of affordable health care if this continues to be the case. Institutions are both our biggest enemies yet biggest allies to redeem our healthcare sector. To move in the right direction, it has to be an ally. Truth is, institutions and the private sector can’t work in isolation.

We romanticize the 4th Industrial revolution thinking we can casually skip the 3rd. It’s a big no. Will we prioritize IoT innovations with expensive electricity? Our manufacturing sector chokes on high energy costs. We have an abundance of cheap computing power to spark this energy revolution. Right now, we have no excuse. As a result, the manufacturing sector is held at ransom. The ransom is in the room. It’s just obscured by our leadership. Mtaka cha mvunguni sharti ainame. 6

Kenyans have the ambition to deliver a new Kenya dreamt by it’s founding fathers. Kenyans want to earn a livelihood, own a house, pursue higher education and pay school fees for their children. 7 It’s up to our leadership to make sure this doesn’t become a pipe dream to most. We can do so by roping in that mama mboga, that juakali worker and enabling that ambitious student’s wild ambitions. Our ambition is the best indicator of an existing imagination.

Our unique Kenyan culture has been the perfect launchpad for some of our greatest inventions. It’s up to us to use this unfair advantage. M-Pesa has flourished on an identifying culture of hardworking Kenyans sending money to our loved ones in the rural areas. M-Pesa has replaced a painstaking experience of sending money via coach for over 100 KM and in the process has also strengthened trust, speed and streamlined merchant payments. This is our proud 0 to 1 8 approach. This is unique to Kenya. M-Pesa failed spectacularly in South Africa, just to show us that you can replicate innovation but you can’t replicate culture. It’s up to us to further utilize more 1 to n 9 approaches. M-Pesa has unlocked truly game-changing innovation platforms like Twiga Foods and Fuliza, solving some fundamental yet broken systems like food distribution chain and financial inclusion respectively. Perhaps incentivize Safaricom to find more use cases for M-Pesa via academia? There’s a great deal of other problems to be solved thanks to M-pesa.

In 2015 we saw an attempt at a PPP (Public Private Partnership) with the government and a financial institution to solve the payment mess in the transport sector. It’s sad that five years later the Kenyan government is still nursing its injuries from a failed attempt at a cashless public transport system. If anything, the government ought to be at the forefront in rapidly learning from such a failure and nudging more players to build from the oversights of the last attempt. With super-powers like M-Pesa, the 4th industrial revolution is our oyster but while at it we must use it to incentivize production for our basic needs first.

We suffer from a moral deficiency in leadership. While most might argue that policies exist, what good do they do if they stifle the same players it was meant to incentivize? The energy sector is a perfect example, with its monopoly inefficiency at the epicenter. We feel the effects of these policies (or lack there-of) through the rising cost of living, reported (and unreported) graft. We need leaders. Leaders who see beyond themselves. We need leaders who don’t take policy leadership for a zero-sum game. This moral deficiency could be solved for from localized scenarios like family and education settings. It could take the practical form of engaging our children with some fair responsibilities. A child who grows up knowing that waking up early enough means the family gets to work early and with less costs is definitely going to turn out different from a child who does the opposite.

These efforts to build this new Kenya aren’t bound to the government. Neither are they to the private sector. Our society is collectively responsible. And other stakeholders ought to be critically held accountable in this sprint to a working Kenya. This starts by demanding more of our leaders. I’m with our Kenyan-bred hero Eliud Kipchoge when he said: “You cannot train alone and expect to run a fast time. There is a formula: 100% of me is nothing compared to 1% of the whole team. And that’s teamwork.” Redefining Harambee is not a one-man army; it’s a community’s responsibility and has to start right from where it matters most—our local communities.

For this new Harambee, my proposition is not for coining another clever manifesto. We ought to scale back and be practical with our Harambee. It calls for us to manifest leadership, ingenuity and a deep desire to think of our communities long term. I propose a bottom-up approach starting from our basic units of life and asking tough questions from ourselves and leaders. Who’s that leader you are nurturing? How am I creating an ideal future with this work? What will the future generation’s ambitions build on? In his essay, Marc Andreessen acknowledges, “There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems.”

Our earliest leaders got the tune so well that in 1968, Singapore led a delegation to Kenya to gain insight on growing its economy. Today, Singapore’s GDP is more than four times that of Kenya. We still have some time but we have to start with low hanging fruits like technology and mobile money to learn from our mistakes and play catch up.

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Appreciation to my editor10 for crossing t’s and dotting i’s.

Footnotes:

  1. https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/ea/Only-one-percent-of-kenya-big-four-agenda-targets-met-so-far/4552908-5423128-c1kcgrz/index.html ↩

  2. https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/blob/master/public/data/testing/covid-testing-all-observations.csv ↩

  3. https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Kemri-lacks-funds-Covid-19-fight/1056-5551012-6m3puz/index.html ↩

  4. http://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20200425-kenyan-students-innovate-to-fill-covid-19-ventilator-shortage-coronavirus-innovation-ghana-uganda ↩

  5. https://www.nation.co.ke/oped/blogs/dot9/ndemo/2274486-2995990-120u333z/index.html ↩

  6. Swahili proverb justifies responsibility for the need. Example: Otieno wants a bike but his parents will only get him one when he achieves x. Because Otieno wants his bike so bad, he will strive to achieve x. ↩

  7. http://www.tifaresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Year_End_Poll_TIFA-Research_December-2019-Powerpoint-Version_30.12.2019.pdf ↩

  8. ‘0 to 1’ assumes building a new system/innovation from scratch. (An original thought of Peter Thiel) ↩

  9. ‘1 to n’ assumes replicating a new system/innovation. Or copying. For example: South Africa’s attempt at trying M-pesa out could be described as a 1 to n approach since they are basically just copying. (An original thought of Peter Thiel) ↩

  10. Editor prefered to stay anonymous. ↩