Kimenyi pursued the American dream without betraying his optimism on the promise of Africa

Despite being aware of the inevitability of death, I have not internalised the untimely death of my great friend and teacher, Prof Mwangi Kimenyi.

Moreover, I am grateful for the special honour accorded to me to write this tribute on behalf of his Kenyan and foreign fraternity.

I am not mourning, though mournful, but I commemorate his unwavering commitment to the gospel of economic freedom. He was supremely two things; a great economist and a Kenyan.

Ordinarily, we see things as they are and ask why? Prof Kimenyi left for the US in 1980, and he dreamt of things that never were and asked why not? His story epitomises an indomitable can-do spirit driven by insatiable intellectual curiosity that set him apart.

Such attributes earned him special honour of having his doctoral studies supervised by two eminent public choice scholars; Prof James Buchanan and Prof Gordon Tullock of the School of Public Choice in George Mason University.

Luckily, his graduation in 1986 coincided with Prof Buchanan’s unexpected Nobel Prize in Economics based on his prior research on public choice.

Public choice theory extends the tools of economics to analyse the behaviour of voters, candidates, legislators, bureaucrats, judges and other political institutions. Such an application was unconventional and thus the theory was viewed contemptuously as invasive and imperialist by political science scholars.

However, the Noble win unexpectedly shot public choice theory to intellectual and academic prominence and started gaining traction of acceptance within the mainstream of economic and political thought. Such traction would further be invigorated by the instant popularity of the theory among the Republicans who were then in charge of the US government.

With such veneration, Prof Kimenyi became part of a small clique of dedicated public choice scholars under the mentorship and stewardship of Buchanan and Tullock. His discipleship at the Centre for the Study of Public Choice earned him recognition as an outstanding scholar.

Shortly thereafter, he was named one of the 10 best young market economists in the US. Such accolades and continued symbiotic relationship with his mentors and public choice fraternity put his professional career on an upward trajectory as evidenced by his 35 years of an outstanding academic career.

Some of his earlier notable achievements include state recognition by the Senate and House of the State of Mississippi for a seminal research on public transit that he co-authored with another public choice devotee, Prof William Shughart.

His career path took him to serve top notch institutions like University of Connecticut (UCONN) and Brookings Institution as faculty member and director, respectively.

It was during his tenure at UCONN that I met Prof Kaimenyi. I was one of his doctoral students in economics. He introduced me to public choice theories through his two graduate courses.

In the Economics department, he was highly respected for his strict work ethic. Through his networks, I got a chance to attend the Outreach Public Choice summer conference at his alma mater, the Centre for Study of Public Choice.

Engagements

Notwithstanding his professional success as an economist of international reputation, Prof Kimenyi was a Kenyan. He never forgot his origins. He remained fully engaged in Kenya’s public policy deliberation because it was fertile ground for research on the application of public choice theories.

Through these engagements, he observed glaringly public policy ineffectiveness because most of the policies were not evidence-based.

Here at home, nothing would exemplify his commitment and love for this country more than his contribution towards the establishment of the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (Kippra) and his subsequent support of the institution.

Prof Kimenyi relished the idea of coming back home to set up Kippra despite the monetary risks of forgoing lucrative international assignments.

But patriotism and the love of country prevailed upon him to take up the assignment, as a civic and moral obligation. He sacrificed monetarily and emotionally to give his county a gift. Such endowment was to be manifested in fulfilling his professional dream of establishing a think tank that would generate evidence based policies, which he did professionally and honourably.

Unexpectedly, several years later in 2008, I retraced Prof Kimenyi’s footsteps at Kippra. I took sabbatical leave from Pennsylvania State University to join Kippra’s mentorship programme.

The strategy behind my sabbatical was to pave the way for my eventual return to Kenya. Retrospectively, I could have chosen a different path to return home than through Kippra. I found an institution with the indelible fingerprints of Prof Kimenyi’s attributes.

High premium was placed on evidenced-based policies that emanated from rigorous research as evidenced by published research papers. In my opinion, he had laid a foundation for development of public choice analysis that would unforeseeably become relevant to the analysis of the then on-going democratisation process.

By the time my engagement ended, I had made my decision to permanently relocate to Kenya. In 2009, I resigned from Pennsylvania State University and joined Kippra.

Prof Kimenyi was a man of the people and a unifier. In the US he and his wife, Irene Kimenyi, were known for their invitations to mark Kenya’s achievements every 4th of July as Americans celebrated their independence. These invitations were a crowd puller as many Kenyans from different states congregated at his house.

At home he also maintained and nurtured diverse networks of friends. At the core of these networks was a small group of his childhood friends. In many countless visits to Kenya, he would always find reason to get together with them to share a meal and get an update on the recent happenings.

During these visits, he would take a day off to visit Githumu – his rural home in Murang’a – to check on his educational community-based initiatives like Hekima Girls Secondary School and Githumu Academy, but more importantly to greet his relatives, his friends’ parents and other community residents.

These social interactions so endeared him to the community that he became the standard measure with which Githumu residents compared the frequency of their children’s visits.

To the chagrin of less frequent visitors, this brought them admonishment from their parents who could not comprehend how a man living 16,000 kilometres away could see them more regularly than their own children living in Nairobi, 58 kilometres away.

As a distinguished economist, Prof Kimenyi lived the American dream without betraying his optimism of the promise of Africa. His untiring engagement with public policy debates internationally and regionally has sustained African issues in the limelight.
Kenya has benefited from his able ambassadorship. As a champion of the private sector debate, he has left us a legacy of the deliberate pursuit of evidence-based policies that take the roles of the private and public sectors into account to ensure policy effectiveness.

He has also left a plethora of relevant publications for scholars and policymakers to use when analysing urgent policy issues surrounding the constitutional implementation.

It for this reason and many more that I pray that his spirit endures. To my good friend and teacher, rest in peace.

Prof Kieyah is the acting programmes coordinator at Kippra.