What Kenya can learn from rise of Poland

Opinion and Analysis

Workers prepare the Poland Pavillion for the Universal Exposition Milano, 2015. Poland has managed to attract foreign investment. PHOTO | AFP 

By CAROLE MUSYOKA

A few weeks ago, I was the guest of the Government of Poland at the European Economic Congress held in the southeastern Polish industrial city of Katowice. I arrived on a cold and blustery spring mid morning into Warsaw’s Chopin International Airport.

Surprise number one: The world-renowned composer and piano virtuoso Francois Frédéric François Chopin was actually born in 1810 as Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin in Warsaw and became a musical child prodigy before moving to Paris at the age of 18.

Poland, his country of birth, never forgot him and has awarded him the national honour of naming its gateway into the country after him. (Eleven years after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, there is no visible memorial that Wangari Maathai originated in Kenya. None whatsoever).

I must say that I was ecstatic when I bumped into a former colleague who had undertaken his university studies in Poland and was also part of the entourage.

It meant that I had a familiar guide who, I erroneously thought, would help me navigate 100 per cent Polish-speaking territory. Surprise number two: I didn’t need a Kenyan Polish-speaking guide to move around.

All the signs in the airport were in both Polish and English. Now, in this part of the sun-kissed African world, mention Poland and it immediately conjures up images of a grey, undisputed card-carrying member of the former Soviet-driven Eastern bloc.

But Poland’s long and tortuous road to becoming a jewel in Europe’s crown began over 40 years ago. And it is this journey that convinced me that many African countries have hope for economic transformation within a single generation.

In the 1970s, Edward Gierek, the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party racked up an unsustainable debt to the West. Coupled with an unproductive and centrally planned economy, the country was unable to handle the debt payments leading to an economic crisis.

Basic goods started disappearing from store shelves. As one fairly young speaker at the Congress stated when he heard an African contributor lamenting about poor economic policies in his country.

“In Poland in the 80s, if one found people standing in a line, one would join the queue and only find out what was being sold at the end of the queue. We have now transformed into the sixth largest GDP in the European Union. You can do it as Africans too!” The African contributor slunk back into his seat quietly.

Anyway, back to Poland’s interesting history. By the 1980s, the economic crisis had grown spurring multiple protests.

An independent trade union known as Solidarno (or Solidarity in English) became the main force behind the protests with many workers as well as intellectuals joining it.

At its height the trade union had well over 10 million members. In the face of social opposition and a deepening economic crisis, the troubled communists began the famous round-table talks that resulted in the first democratic elections in the Eastern Bloc taking place in 1989 in Poland.

If you are a purveyor of conspiracy theories, you would greatly enjoy a book by Gordon Thomas called Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.

In the fairly well written book, the writer reveals a number of Mossad operations and discoveries, a key one of which is who ordered the miraculously bungled assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II, himself of Polish descent.