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All Kenyans must undergo a digital shift; they must view skill acquisition as a lifelong, daily exercise.
Vision 2030, which has since been dumped, targeted an ambitious annual GDP growth rate of 10 per cent. I can tell you from experience that nothing comes from flashes of genius, revelations from the Lord, or whispered magic investment ideas. It comes from boring, hard, consistent, disciplined slog of execution. We have been all over the map from debt-funded infrastructure to welfare projects, centralised command-type thinking and God knows what else. It feels as if Kenya’s entire development strategy consists of an incoherent, kickback-driven, 1990s Sololo Outlets-type frenzy.
However, the TNA idea of providing every child with a laptop in 2013 was a truly revolutionary idea. It recognised that the key to leapfrogging development is to rewire the software of the population, to transform the youth from merely accumulators of facts to managers of digital systems. But the Kanu jokers did not have the discipline to close the deal. And they did it for the wrong reasons—political visibility as opposed to technological utility.
The irreducible minimum of economic planning in Kenya, this second day of January 2026, is that every school must have a computer lab, every student from grade one to PhD must have a laptop and a free data connection as part of their education. Period. It’s not expensive. Use the money wasted in bursaries for those who don’t really need it. That way, we transform our youth dividend to an intelligence dividend, as I read somewhere.
And then we can move rapidly to being not just consumers of technology, but to its primary producers and integrators.
Vision 2030 trajectory
And if we are completely desperate, then we should break into those warehouses where I saw in social media money is allegedly being stored in billions, take it and used it for this project. And no church should be built anywhere before this is done.
I was this week listening to Jeffrey Sachs (professor of economics at Columbia and controversial thinker) talking about how Africa can develop, and the first condition is that, just like India and China, all of it must grow together, at the same pace because of the importance of scale in development. This means we must become one country, something the world is sworn to prevent, even if it means wiping out every black African in existence.
It gave me an idea; what are the five things Kenya can do in 2026 to take us back to that Vision 2030 trajectory of 10 per cent annual GDP growth? The first is that digital pivot referred to above, the second is Prof Sachs’ idea of a pan-African concept.
Third, is getting rid of this debt-based infrastructure binge beloved of the political elite to a growth model based on productivity. Stop doing things so that politicians can be seen to be working, to doing things that transform lives by improving our capacity to do more things.
Fourth, a revolutionary flip is required to turn government from an oppressor, misleader and impoverisher of the people, into an enabler of development, guardian of all the people and defender of the rights of every citizen: a new social contract. Make smart, strategic investments not just in traditional infrastructure, but multiplier infrastructure: localised data centres that allow our clever kids, rather than importing generic models, to build solutions tailored to our specific conditions – climate, genes, soils and so on.
Venture capital and equity
Pivot to precision agricultural infrastructure to increase yields —automated irrigation systems, drone hubs for hire to do soil analysis and precision spraying, use our abundant green energy to supply cheap power to special economic zones specifically for energy-hungry manufacturing such as green steel and electric vehicle assembly.
Fifth, oil out market frictions: attack the high cost of doing business; smooth the competitive ground so that startups and small business can compete with parastatals for capital; force parastatals to be efficient if need be by partially privatising them through the securities exchange. I read about eliminating trade friction through the full implementation of the African free trade area through blockchain-based customs clearing to reduce clearance time from days to minutes. Stabilise the informal economy, which employs 85 per cent of us, by providing a sensible social security and healthcare system that is delinked from formal employment contracts.
Government should be disciplined in the use of public funds, it must prioritise return on investment over political visibility in spending. All Kenyans must undergo a digital shift; they must view skill acquisition as a lifelong, daily exercise. Artificial intelligence will automate most things, there will be no need to know and store facts in your head, yours is to learn to manage systems all around you.
Kenyan businesses, especially startups, must shift from debt to venture capital and equity—requiring higher standards of honesty from small business owners; use agri-tech to move from subsistence to commercial farming; use Fin-Tech 2.0 to jump from mere mobile payments to programmable credit (Google this for yourself, big concept) and micro-insurance using smart contracts; deploy Ed-Tec (AI tutors) to bridge the teacher-student ratio gap, think, stop dreaming of mansions in Monaco. Gen Z can do all this with their eyes closed.
Happy New Year friends. It will be tough, but so are we.
Mr Mathiu is NMG’s former Editorial Director. [email protected]
