Studying much of the world’s history has made me pro-business. I believe that when people can lift their economic circumstances and live better, they become happier and easier to manage in terms of reasoning.
When people can easily meet their economic needs, most tend to behave well as they would want to live in a calm society. In the absence of this, expect anger and resistance. This is the kind of conundrum we find ourselves in Kenya today.
The natural way to make a country succeed is to ensure that all the people are properly economically engaged. The area with unlimited opportunities lies in the ability to do various forms of business as these generate a lot of direct and indirect jobs.
Naturally, there is no way the government can employ everyone. It would even be an unwieldy outfit if it did. However, when opportunities to do business are many, openings for employment increase many times.
This is part of the many reasons the government of Kenya has to make bold moves to build a business environment where everyone thrives. The recent Gen Z uprising is a testimony that all is not well and people want change. People want jobs and they want adequate economic opportunities. It is no longer business as usual.
Luckily for Kenya, despite many years of avoidable challenges we have learnt a lot. We know the many mistakes that have been made by successive governments. We know what has worked and what has not. We can retrace our steps quite easily and change quite rapidly if there is political will. There is a lot of knowledge and information already available.
It is time, for instance, that the government engaged the private sector, civil society and other stakeholders more intensely and meaningfully. There are many trade associations and business membership organisations that can be tapped to learn what ails our private sector and businesses in general.
Apart from a few elite associations, there are many more, some connecting directly to the grassroots. They interact with members and the public a lot and they have practical knowledge of where problems are and can help come up with requisite intelligence to configure some things to the country’s economy.
There is a lot of untapped knowledge everywhere. The problem is just reliance on elite sector business and political organisations. These are useful but there are many more available out there. There is a lot of benefit in tapping into all these. They represent critical groups of our economy. Even those very informal business associations have a lot to offer if grouped together to represent interest groups.
Similarly, civil society, NGOs and other sector/industry organisations come across a lot of useful information. These interact with people and various ecosystems. They are also reservoirs of knowledge. The same can be said of media organisations, religious groups and other social groupings.
People know a lot if you dare tap into their knowledge bases properly and for the right utility. You can’t ignore any group, formation or set of people if you wish to find solutions to the whole.
Social media with its numerous dynamics still has gems of information and knowledge to tap from as there are all kinds of people, including very knowledgeable ones and experts exchanging or posting views and perspectives. These can also be a good resource if scoured or sieved properly.
With all this in mind, it behoves the government to reach out variously in a properly programmed manner and with timelines of the intentionally desired accomplishments.
We are all stakeholders, with goodwill, and we want to fix Kenya for good. Matters such as corruption and wastage of public resources cannot remain poorly attended to. These need to be eliminated immediately.
President William Ruto has shown a willingness to reach out. What he needs to do next is to put a programme in place to ensure there are so many deliverables to be achieved with the strictness required with his direct supervision as he is the one in charge of the country.
He needs to build a legacy. An unforeseen opportunity has been presented to him by the Gen Z revolution to radically change the country for good. This can’t wait as our country sits on a precipice with unemployment, underemployment and limited economic opportunities threatening Armageddon.
Political, economic and social analyst