Kenya attained her independence sixty years ago and at that time the issues that the new government was dealing with among others were poverty , health and education . Sixty years later the problems are the same plus a plethora of others the country has picked along the way .
It appears that Kenya has spent over half a century running on the same spot on all development parameters and one begins to sympathize with the political sentiments of the former Kenyan vice president , Jaramogi , who after his political ouster wrote the book ‘ Not yet Uhuru ’.
The fact that Kenyan developmental record seems to mirror that of other African countries that were under colonial rule gives no comfort but does indicate that what we are dealing with in Kenya could be a similar experience that predisposes an African country to fail .
There is an admonition that states that those who ignore history are destined to painfully relive it and if we accept that history is a study of past events , covering a large spectrum of human affairs , it is prudent to interrogate history to see if it holds answers to our current stagnation .
Although history is a study of change in various aspects of a country ’ s development , that is , social , economic , cultural , religious etc , it is in the political and military sphere that we tend to get detailed accounts as conflict is always well recorded .
The big question then becomes if Kenya actually had a dream at all in 1963 and if so , who articulated that dream and how was it going to be achieved . How were Kenyans going to realize that they had achieved their goals , how would Kenyans know they had reached crucial developmental milestones ?
More controversially we need to ask the question if the country called Kenya actually exists and whether when we talk of the Kenyan dream we are talking about the hopes and aspirations of the fifty million Kenyans that are enclosed by the country boundary .
It appears that we need to deep dive into the history of Kenya so that we can best understand and paint a detailed picture of how Kenya got to where she is today and perhaps in the process we can figure out when Kenya lost the plot if it ever had one .
A critical study into Kenyans past events especially in the human aspect of life in the Kenyan region may start to throw light to the real challenges that Kenya faces and what has kept Kenya , a country with great potential , to underperform by global standards .
A developed country is defined as one that is characterized by prosperity and stability , both political and economic . Such a country would have a high literacy level , traditionally democratic country having free enterprise and underpinned by the rule of law .
If this is how a developed country looks like it would be safe to surmise that a Kenyan dream would have the main characteristics incorporated into the national aspiration and the country ’ s vision would be pegged to a program to achieve this type of outcome .
A quick look into Kenya paints a very poor picture . A third of the Kenyan population lives in extreme poverty if we use the United Nation ’ s indices of those living on less than two dollars per day and characterized by social exclusion .
Social exclusion points to many insecurities in a lot of areas of life which include a lack of safe housing better known as informal settlements , insufficient food leading to malnourishment , lack of access to health care and education . This is the same group with low access to sanitation and water .
The rest of the population is characterized by low income and inequality with a high level of youth unemployment . The country , although defined as an agricultural country cannot feed its nationals and the country faces perennial food insecurity and is a net importer of staple food .
Although Kenya regularly features among the fastest growing economies in Africa , this is an economy saddled with a weak private sector investment and bedeviled by a lack of accountability and transparency which makes Kenya a highly corrupt country .
This of course means that the country is very vulnerable to both internal and external shocks like the effects of the pandemic and the of course the country feels the brunt of issues like escalating global fuel prices and the effects of climate change .
But you have to remember that history is a narrative of both real and imagined stories and the objective of the teller of the story may skew the story to reflect his own bias or to drive an agenda that suits his immediate reason for recording a story .
If you were to talk to the expatriate community in Kenya you will soon learn that it is a unique and favorite country to work and live in . There are many expats who came to Kenya , a hardship location , and fell in love with the country and never left the country .
One of the four main UN secretariat duty stations UNON is in Nairobi which services the United Nations Environmental Program and the United Nation Human Settlements Program . The tenth largest US embassy in the world is in Nairobi .
There are very few amenities that a world class city anywhere in the world would provide that Kenyan cities would not match and many of the world ’ s rich and famous have households in Kenya or Kenya is a favorite holiday destination for them .
So depending on whose history you are reading , Kenya is a miserable country in need of international assistance and at the same time this is a destination of choice for those same people who send monthly and quarterly reports about Kenya as a failed nation .
The elites of Kenya live a more glamorous life than many of those in the developed world and this is usually explained as a classic case of inequality and the well-meaning economist will term it as conspicuous consumption and blame corruption as the culprit .
So how do we begin to explain this dual country called Kenya , is this a country of penury or a country of plenty ? Within a five
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When we created the forty seven counties as devolved units we actually created the counties along tribal boundaries making it even more difficult for a national leader to address the self-destructive insular focus that defines ethnicity .