Agenda 2022: Kenya needs serious village thinking

With the 2022 general election a little over a year away, the National Treasury this week launched the transition by bringing forward budget preparation timelines for the 2022/23 fiscal year, with the Budget Statement set to be read in March, rather than June, 2022 (because Parliament will be out of office).

Simply, the outgoing Jubilee administration will pass that budget; the incoming one will implement it.

If you’re looking for drama, though, it’s in our noisy political arena where most news headlines are focused on the battle for the presidency.

There is more “shape shifting” among our Kenyan politicos than any other known creature, so there’s no point sweating the stuff around political coalitions, running mates, two- or three-horse race or any of that personality stuff, even though it makes for great entertainment.

Admittedly though, as with our past three elections, the growing animus of the political rivalry and the palpable unpreparedness of IEBC are early warning causes for 2022 concern.

MEGA PROJECTS

In these early, officially illegal, campaign moments, the economy is the one area where the prospective and putative candidates seem to agree. It isn’t yet the 2007-like “Rest of Us vs Mount Kenya” language, which became the “41 vs 1” oratory that presaged the post-election violence.

We’re also not yet at 2017’s “development vs corruption/debt”, but emphasising the economy after a near decade of mega projects will be a tough slap for the outgoing administration to take, BBI/Handshake notwithstanding.

From what we observe, the original “hustler vs dynasty” narrative from one side of our Kenyan river is being fine-tuned into a bottom-up economic model (let’s skip middle out for now).

Now, the other side is speaking to rural transformation to build on the outgoing administration’s apparent urban regeneration, with Made-in-Kenya (isn’t this ‘Buy Kenya, Build Kenya’?) as the latest brainwave.

Beyond surprise that the bottom-up rhetoric is from Kenya’s Official Number Two (picture, above) ; and the alternative from the Opposition Leader; funnier might be that the unconfirmed latter candidate is now busy issuing written press briefs in at least partial response to a confirmed candidate who is yet to put pen to paper. As always, the devil is in the detail, and we don’t yet know enough to evaluate one way or the other.

But village thinking might help. Readers may recall that question from the 1990s about what the world would look like if it was (proportionately) reduced to a village of 100 people.

GENDER PARITY

A current picture depends on data quality, but a good indicative one for our world of eight billion people looks something like this.

The world is at gender parity: 50 men and 50 women. Of the 45 men and 41 women who can read and write; respectively 39 and 38 will have at least a primary education.

Seventeen men and 19 women will not have completed highsecondary school, while seven have a college education (a decade or so ago, this number was 1 in 100). 60 live in Asia and 17, 13 and 10 in Africa, the Americas and Europe.

Of these 100 people, 40 would be under the age of 25, 51 would be 25 to 64 and nine are 65 and over.

Fifty-six would be urbanites; 87 would have safe drinking water; 82 electricity; 74 a bank account; 68 have proper sanitation; more than 60 a cell phone (of which 44 would be smart phones) and 47 net access.

One person would be starving and 11 would be undernourished while 22 are overweight. Twenty-seven would be food-insecure while 48 live on less than $2 a day. That’s a rough average view of our global village.

Let’s try a similar one for the Kenyan village of 100 of 49 men and 51 women. In this village, 60 would be under the age of 25, 37 would be 25 to 64 and four are 65 and over; 31 people are urbanites.

FORMAL SCHOOLING

Excluding nine people accounting for children under the age of three and other non-responses from the 2019 population census, 38 are in school or learning; 23 have completed; 15 dropped out of formal school before completion while another 15 never went.

On highest educational attainment at the time of the census, including students and excluding those who never went (that is, a net of 76 Kenyans out of the 100 in the village), 39 peaked at primary school (19 male, 20 female), 20 at secondary and six at middle-level/TVET (both split equally between male and female) and three at university level (two male, one female).

More data would get us to socio-economics; from clean water, sanitation and electricity to financial inclusion, internet access and asset ownership. It gives us the average view for Kenya’s village chief (President).

Then there are counties, with their diverse “averages” for their own chiefs (governors).

Once we have these baselines; strategies can be formulated, targets set, and finally, promises made. So, before we swallow every economic agenda thrown at us, shouldn’t we start with village thinking?