Which of our big projects are game changers?

“Game changer” is the new lexicon in town. Thank CNN business journalist Richard Quest for reminding us of this term during the recent inaugural direct Kenya Airways (KQ) flight from Nairobi to New York.

Go back a year and recall that the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) was also launched as a game changer for Kenya. Then think about next week’s launch of the Lake Turkana Wind Project (LTWP) and/or the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) transmission line. It’s all big “game changing” stuff.

No surprises that game changing fits right into the Jubilee administration’s worldview. As its first term began, the buzz-phrase was “mega project”.

SGR, a million acres under irrigation (read, Galana-Kulalu), subsidised fertiliser, youth empowerment (think, National Youth Service), 10,000km in new roads, electricity connections galore, laptops for school-going kids, access to government procurement opportunities (AGPO) for youth, women and marginalised groups ad infinitum.

Sh3 trillion in new public debt later, the only thing that comes to mind for most Kenyans is the SGR – which accounts for around 10 per cent of that new debt. The “game changing” hadn’t happened as expected. Arguably, given ongoing challenges of commercial and financial viability as our friends from China have reportedly also noted, even the idea of the SGR as a game changer is still up for question.

Embarking on its second term, it is clear that the Jubilee administration — facing serious fiscal and economic headwinds — sees “mega project” as yesterday’s language, and “game changer” as today’s. This is not mere semantics. Mega project has a public sector, or government, connotation. Game changer includes stuff private sector is doing (like LTWP) in conjunction with government (Ketraco).

The “Big 4” agenda, which envisages both public and private sector participation, is seen as one of our latest game changers. Yet, on food, our minds are preoccupied by maize and sugar woes. On health, the division of labour between national and county government remains as murky in Jubilee’s second term as it was during its first term, where money was used on

machines, but men were unavailable.

On housing, government looks like a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” with its “Robin Hood” taxes and, reportedly, zero houses available in the next five years. Manufacturing for jobs? First, in which areas do we possess the productivity, and hence, competitiveness to manufacture for export? Second, where’s the local purchasing power to build effective domestic demand? Game changer?

What of the ‘handshake” or Building Bridges Initiative (BBI)? Accepting that BBI helped to cool post-2017 election political tensions across the country, where is the “game change” that the initial communiqué promised? From what I read in the media about the Task Force’s current Kenyan road trip, we are still moaning and groaning about the same issues that the constitution is supposed to have resolved.

Ongoing war on graft and impunity? Well, intelligence-informed, prosecutions-led police investigations are a new angle (notwithstanding the right to privacy), but will this change the game through immediate convictions and future behaviour without an equal adjustment in our national moral compass?

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with the term “game changer”, which the Oxford dictionary defines as “a person, an idea or an event that completely changes the way a situation develops”. This suggests a demand-side to the game changer; something that “completely changes” for the people.

In this way, the SGR becomes a game changer when the cost of transport, as well as transport connectivity, are transformed for public and private good. LTVP is a “green” energy game changer when it translates into reduced power bills (and the KETRACO transmission line isn’t because that’s their job).

Big Data might be a game changer if we applied bottom-up “policy thinking” and not top-down “fiat” and outdated practice to address food security or health care. Task Forces are not game changers. Negative ethnicity and impunity cannot end without game changing ideas and thinking among Kenyans that equate public and private good at a personal level.

I thought that the constitution — an idea to completely change Kenya’s political and socio-economic development trajectory — was our ultimate game changer; from which the rights and freedoms of the people, role of the state and place of markets, flowed.

The big stuff might write the news, but aren’t our true game changers – like the M-Pesa mobile money platform - really about the “little people”?

As we consider what is and isn’t a “game changer’, this could be our “Mind your Language” moment.