Episode 46: A Look At Kenya’s Economy
NOTE: The Isiolo International Airport has since been completed and is operational.
We are now 25 days away from the general election, scheduled for 8th August 2017. This week, we talk about Kenya’s economy with Kwame Owino, the CEO of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Has the Jubilee Coalition delivered on the promises in its 2013 manifesto? Is our approach to infrastructure such as roads and rail the correct one? Have we managed to make Kenya a manufacturing hub as we envisioned? Do Kenyans have access to decent and affordable housing? If not, why is that? Why don’t we have food security, and does our approach to agriculture make sense? Press play to find out!
Resources
5 thoughts on “Episode 46: A Look At Kenya’s Economy”
GDP has long fallen out of favour as a measure for progress, growth, development etc. You can poison all the rivers, cut down all the trees and still grow your GDP. In addition, the hoarding of wealth by a few can make the GDP look high, while in actual fact it is not.
I think I will follow Gloria’s thread and add the gaps for me:
1. Philosophy/ideology. The fact that our economic policy thinking, by Owino’s admission, is focused more foreigners than local people, and on international rankings that on what wananchi need.
2. Justice and equality. The politics of port appointments, for example, is also about regional and necessarily ethnic economic inequalities. And was there a suggestion in there that unions are bad for business?
3. Corruption: we lose a lot of money from corruption, especially in the infrastructure projects.
4. Land: Our logic on land belongs to the medieval age and is skewing the market because people who get credit from banks, based on title deeds, inherited land through cronyism. And where does environmental integrity come in? We now have a cholera outbreak due to poor environmental management.
5. PPPs: As we saw with health, PPPs are being used to make up for government failure instead of us fixing it. Yet in the US, private sector interventions have made the cost of health and education so ridiculously high.
Great points Wandia, thanks for sharing! 🙂 Re: unions, not at all. At least that is not my view.
I like the long podcasts. Learning a lot.
Glad to hear that Kip, thank you! Stay tuned!