If you are a poor man who wants to be rich, the first thing you must do is study how rich men became rich. Read their tricks, then deploy them.
For nations, that book is Adam Smith's —The Wealth of Nations — (1776). Smith said a simple thing: Capitalism is a market. Think of it as Githurai market on a global scale.
In Githurai, one trader brings a hen worth Sh800. Another brings a cow worth Sh80,000. Both wake up at 4am, both pay cess, both shout. Who goes home with money? The cow trader.
That is the trick of nations. Rich nations take cows to the world market — Germany takes a Mercedes, America takes an iPhone, China takes a battery. Poor nations take hens — Kenya takes raw tea, raw coffee, raw avocado.
Look at any household. Every home has two sides: income and expenditure. Baba's salary is income. Rent, school fees, unga is expenditure. If expenditure exceeds income, that family borrows forever. It never progresses. It is in perpetual debt.
Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) Economic Survey 2025 shows we spent in importing petroleum products in 2024 Sh575.5 billion. This amount is almost equal to the total annual expenditure of the Ministry of Education, which was Sh657 billion in the same year.
Think about that money. It leaves the country to buy fuel that powers our vehicles, moves our goods and runs part of our industries. We then pay again for the transport costs that make Kenyan products expensive. Our income? We export raw; we import finished cars at 35 per cent import duty plus 25 per cent excise duty plus 16 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) plus 2.5 per cent Import Declaration Fee (IDF) plus 2 per cent Railway Development Levy (RDL). A car costing Sh1 million in Japan lands at Sh2 million. We pay for the car, then we pay for the fuel it will burn for 15 years. Double expenditure.
And electricity - the blood of industry. A Kenyan mama mboga pays Sh28.40 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). An Ethiopian mama pays Sh0.78. A Moroccan factory pays Sh14, ours pays Sh22.60. Last week the World Bank Kenya Economic Update number 34 said Kenyan industry pays 50 per cent more than Uganda and double Vietnam. You cannot industrialise when your power is the most expensive in the region.
To balance things, Kenya must do two things: reduce its import bill and increase the value of the goods it takes to the market.
We ban, in a phased manner, fuel powered cars and shift towards Electric vehicles (EVs).
This does not mean confiscating cars Kenyans already own. The ban should apply only to new imports of petrol and diesel vehicles, with a clear seven-year timetable so households, businesses and local assemblers can prepare.
Ethiopia understood it first. In February 2024, it banned new imports of fuel cars - 100 per cent ban on Complete Built Units (CBUs) that run on petrol or diesel. Only electric. Fully built electric cars were cut to 15 per cent tax, and Completely Knocked Down (CKD) kits - parts to assemble locally - were put at zero. What happened? Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA) of Ethiopia data to September 2025 shows EV numbers jumped from 800 in 2023 to over 100,000. Three assembly plants opened, $3 billion pledged.
What Ethiopia did is simple economics. A petrol car has 30,000 parts - engine, gearbox, exhaust - technology we will never master. An EV has 20 moving parts: battery, motor, software. It is a phone on wheels. We already assemble phones. We can assemble EVs, make the seats, wiring, tyres - 35% local content in two years, as Morocco did with Renault.
If Kenya banned new fuel car imports like Ethiopia, three benefits hit immediately.
First, forex stays. Every litre of petrol is dollars leaving to Saudi Arabia. At Sh180 a litre, Sh575.5 billion is over 3 billion litres of fuel value leaving. An EV uses Kenyan electricity. Ten kWh equals one litre, but that money stays here - pays Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen), pays Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC), pays the youth assembler. If half our transport goes electric by 2030, we save over Sh250 billion a year - almost 40 per cent of the education budget.
Second, transport costs for mwananchi collapse. Data by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) Kenya in October 2026 shows a petrol boda boda costs Sh6.45 per kilometre (km) and a petrol car Sh15.38 per km. Electric? Boda boda Sh0.68 per km if charged at the night tariff Sh12 per kWh, car Sh1.75 per km. That is 88 per cent saving. Roam and BasiGo's published pilot data in Nairobi show a boda rider doing 150km a day saves over Sh800 a day. That is school fees.
Third, industrialisation that fits. We will never make a good petrol engine - Germans did that for 100 years. But battery boxes, wiring, body? That is our cow.
Critics will say, where is charging? Ethiopia answers: 90 per cent of charging happens at home overnight, like a phone. Boda bodas swap batteries in two minutes.
Now the second leg: power. Ethiopia's power is the cheapest in the world because it is hydro from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) - 5,150 megawatts (MW). No fuel cost, just rain. They sell to their people at $0.006 per kWh, to us at $0.15 (Sh19.50). Compare our diesel thermal at Sh35 to Sh195 per kWh, or solar Independent Power Producers at Sh25.
This is what the current regime has failed to see. Its idea of industrialization is to increase taxes - fuel levy, housing levy, Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF) - which is like a trader increasing his bus fare to Githurai instead of bringing a bigger cow.
Capitalism is not magic. It is Githurai. Stop taking a hen. Take a cow. The cow today is a battery made in Murang’a, charged by our geothermal and Ethiopian hydro, assembled by Kenyan youth, and sold to Uganda.
Dr Irungu Kangata is the Governor of Murang’a County and holds a PhD in Law. Email: [email protected]
