How to keep Kenya’s entrepreneurship spirit alive without compromising quality

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

A trader arranges his wares at the Kamukuji kua kali sheds in Nairobi. Kenya must take steps to nurture enterprise. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU 

By SPINDEL LJUNGMARK

As an outsider visiting Kenya, I’m constantly amazed by the informal entrepreneurship of the many people I came across. Whether it is born out of necessity or brilliance, it’s a good and positive feature which has some downsides.

Faltering infrastructure.

Sadly, one of the things that really struck me was the state of infrastructure, and how a majority of people live in a society where the infrastructure is either missing, haphazard, available only for the rich, or simply constantly failing.

The social and economic differences only make this worse.

The poor do not expect things to function, and many have grown so cynical about the situation that they will actively hamper efforts to improve infrastructure.

They believe it cannot ever work, and see only the opportunity to improve their immediate situation by tearing down efforts to build a better infrastructure.

Here are two examples I’ve seen: No-one will care if you take the stones from the cobbled road to build your wall when the road is already falling to pieces, the power blacks out constantly, and there is no faith in government, local or national, to fix anything.

In order to hawk their wares, merchants need people to slow down. Their solution is to place speed bumps in the highway. It fixes their immediate need— to get money to survive. But it does so at the cost of breaking the infrastructure for everybody.

Just as how the poor become cynical about how things won’t work, the rich become cynical about how the poor are ruining possibilities. This means that the rich, the people in power, will only “fix” things locally.

The roads where the governor lives will be paved and working, while the road next over will languish and be barely functional for vehicles.

In the absence of a formal infrastructure, another kind of infrastructure has taken root. Informal, meshed and somewhat disorganised, little clusters of infrastructure are built by people to make things work for them.

The prime examples would be the boda bodas and matatus. These are informally grown infrastructure, without much of either organisation or regulation because people have the need to get to places.

The general shoddiness: When people are badly paid, or exploited there is an expectation of shoddiness. There is no interest to take pride in a job when you are getting exploited, and this mentality is wide spread.

This expectation is then preyed on by outside forces and markets, because there’s no need to deliver quality, as everyone in the “target market” are expecting shoddy things, and won’t be complaining about lacking quality.

In this capitalist mindset, quality is downgraded to fit the African markets expectations. You get relatively expensive products that are designed to be difficult to maintain and repair.