Kenya's post-Vision 2030 plan deserves more attention

A group of Kenyan scholars and veteran policymakers recently presented President William Ruto with a document outlining the strategic guidelines for long-term national economic transformation. The document’s brilliance lies in its plain clarity.

It is clear about what we ought to achieve (becoming a socially-cohesive and materially prosperous country) and how to get there (reform the public sector, achieve agricultural transformation, boost manufacturing value addition, and invest in the knowledge economy of the future). The document then outlines eight enabling foundations that ought to enable the achievement of the goals set out within the three pillars.

The authors of the document rightly identify policy incoherence as a major stumbling block to economic transformation. To overcome this challenge, it suggests that we should focus on building consensus on national development priorities. To that I would also add the need to deliberately craft development coalitions that bring together policymakers, all major political parties, the private sector, and the wider society.

We need to cultivate a core national agenda that does not change when governments change, or that does not shift with the rhythms of electoral cycles. While the timing of the document’s release may have been inauspicious (right as electoral fever grips the country), it nonetheless challenges us to step back and think seriously about our collective social, political, and economic future.

One hopes that political parties will take the time to study the document and have it inform their manifestos ahead of next year’s election. At the same time, different policymaking arms of the government should realign their planning with the document as strategic guide.

It would also not be a bad idea for the government to use the document as a launching pad for a post-Vision 2030 conceptualisation of our development agenda. Ideally, this time round the visioning process should involve as much public participation as possible. The idea ought not to be to incorporate everything suggested by the public. Planning does require expertise.

However, robust public participation may generate new ideas and boost the legitimacy of the eventual production. Furthermore, it would advance the process of infusing economistic thinking into our politics.

Too much of our political discourse is dominated by distributive concerns and psychic attachments to ethnicity. This leaves little room for serious public discourse on how to expand output and increase productivity across the board. Therefore, the next visioning process should also include, as part of its stated objectives, an agenda to elevate the quality of public discourse about economic policymaking.

We do not have to be a poor country without policy coherence, and which is perennially obsessed about organising our politics around ethnicity. That is a deliberate choice we have made.

We can also focus on how to craft a well-ordered society of moral and political equals, design and implement economic policies that catalyse broad-based growth, and lift millions of our people out of poverty.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University