What Vision 2030 architects should learn from East Asia

A section of Lang’ata Road under construction. Infrastructure development supports a positive-spiral growth toward a sustainable economy. FILE 

By Andrew K’Kassi

In Summary

• The vibrant economies have developed from extreme poverty within three to five decades.

Kenya has since 2008 relied on the ambitious Vision 2030 blueprint which the Kibaki government launched just after the chaotic 2007 elections.

Designers of the development plan have positioned home grown industrialisation and turning Kenya into a middle income economy by 2030 a key objectives.

The ultimate goal is to improve the living standards of Kenyans by reducing extreme poverty, improving basic health care, as well as reducing the inequality gap presently among the highest in the world.

Conventional knowledge shows that one of the key elements toward realising this vision is the development of a mass-employer manufacturing industry. This must cover the entire value chain, aiming at moving the country from its current position as a raw-material-exporter to a final-product-exporter.

This alone could more than double the much needed employment opportunities, and increase the value of exports by a large margin.

Alongside these benefits is the direct and indirect support infrastructures developed to facilitate the manufacturing industry. These would include improved transport systems and reliable electricity supply, among others.

In all these fields, there will be enormous number of stable and well-paid jobs that will benefit the working generation.

A stable social and economic base affords the working generation the opportunity to re-invest in their children’s education, family health care, better quality food for their families and so forth.

Ultimately, the government collects more taxes and uses the increased income to invest more in basic services and infrastructure that would support a positive-spiral growth toward a sustainable economy.

Can Kenya make it there in time? To answer this question, one needs to look at some of the more recent successful cases from East Asia. Most of the presently vibrant and growing Asian economies, including Japan and South Korea, have developed from extreme poverty to full development within a period of three to five decades.

These two Asian economic-giants offer some very exceptional role models from which Kenya policy makers can learn if they are to deliver the 2008 promise to their people before 2030.

In coming weeks, this series of articles will focus on both general and specific topics of the 2030 Vision, in relation to similar development targets that were set by governments in the two Asian economies.

The articles will review some of the common traits and factors that contributed to the success of similar programmes in Japan and South Korea and pose certain questions to the Kenyan public, policy makers and critics with the aim of stimulating debate that can help make Vision 2030 a reality rather than a mere “political promise”.

In this article, we look at the very important subject of shielding long-term policies from raw politics.

Japan and South Korea have demonstrated the importance of passing on vigorous and continuous pursuit of such long-term visions (government to government, parliament to parliament, generation to generation).