Have positive 2022 outlook despite recent tough times

Kenyans will celebrate the New Year on Saturday with much hope and expectation. Though it seems that the older we get, the less we treat these as life moments, there is no harm in a couple of wishes as we usher in 2022.

My preference is for a “personal-family-work-play” planning frame of possibilities that I hope upon hope to turn into probabilities, likelihoods and then, certainties. It’s a simpler and easier frame than the more traditional view of 6F’s of life – faith, family, fitness, friends, fun and finance.

The experience is not that it could be dead halfway through the year, but a few things, purposively pursued, offer progress. Any positive success on “stretch targets” one sets for self is better than zero.

Of course, this work plan “space” depends on our locus and focus. At an individual level, it’s about a good job or livelihood, healthy and dignified living, and personal safety and security among other things.

At the family or household level, it’s personal but in the collective. At the community level, whatever the mode of affiliation, it’s collective but in the societal. Just above this, it’s either geographical, inter-generational or by some other form of inclusion. At the top, it’s the nation, state or country. In all of this, the government is, in theory, the designated driver/enabler of public good along this hierarchy.

All of this seasonal thinking comes into play if we believe the last two years didn’t happen because Covid-19 did. Let’s take a top-down perspective from the economy, where agriculture delivered and industry and services suffered.

Broad revenue numbers – tax collections nationally; own-source revenue in counties – point to lessons about the link between economic diversity and revenue elasticity and/or volatility.

But here’s added perspective I have covered before from our recent economic rebasing. Agriculture might now only be a fifth of the economy – from the one quarter or more recently one third we thought it was – but it’s still our really big thing; though construction and real estate were big hitters in 2020.

There has been a recovery in 2021, from the negative 2020 base, in industry and services, but Kenya’s a different economy today, and it isn’t just about Covid when transport and real estate combined now equal agriculture’s contribution to economic output. Agro is the big thing; services is our done thing.

Real estate now outguns manufacturing plus tourism, and you would have to throw in ICT to even get close to transport’s contribution.

Here’s a final one to ponder – finance, insurance and ICT contribute about the same as manufacturing and mining, but you need to combine all five to equal real estate plus construction, while you would still fall short of farming crops, animals and fish.

KRA will scream that those five sectors probably contribute half of the tax take from their one-sixth share of the economy.

None of these data are static or fixed, but there’s a quiet lesson herein if, as the World Bank noted in its most recent Kenya Economic Update, we’re running into a jobless recovery even as poverty is rising. Or to ask the old question, why we aren’t feeling the (capital-led) growth numbers in jobs-led growth.

Yet, Covid isn’t our only worry. We also have a pandemic of politics in Kenya. The latest wave started after the most recent 2017 election, or maybe the earlier 2013 one.

There is a possible rationale to the notion that our endless politics (and a population growing faster than available opportunity) is slowly reshaping our economy away from productivity and competitiveness frontiers, not simply in policy design, but in opportunistic zero-sum survival across our private sector, especially at the MSME level.

It doesn’t help that a final worrying factor – the debt treadmill – is firmly in play. A decade long mega-infrastructure investment binge has damaged our fiscus (hence the tax effort in an unrestructured spending regime) as much as it has squelched the economy (there is a limit to lending rate controls by any other name in the face of government’s budget-balancing appetite to borrow).

Yet all of this is a top-down view. Covid hurt us, but it also exposed us to the truism that politics and the economy are the same two-sided coin, including debt. Without getting into a debate about handshakes and hustlers, what would a reverse, bottom-up perspective for the end of 2021 going into 2022 look like? Methinks there is a “Back to Basics” rather than “Building Back Better” mood we need right now.

So if we stepped all the way back into household or personal mode, here’s where 2022 wishes lie. New ways of working. Better ways of living. County, not Big City, life. Smarter political choices. But mostly, a personalised feel to how, first, Kenya is changing, and second, how we are the change in Kenya. Oh, and simply staying safe as my mobile service provider reminds me in these unrelenting Covid times.

In wishing BD readers a thoughtful and fruitful 2022, forget the resolutions, go straight to the work plan. The “top-down” view might be useful technical context but the “bottom-up” is our true field of dreams.