Mr. President – Please Industrialize Kenya!

Mr. President, with due respect sir, you cannot create 6 million jobs, but you can create an industrial revolution that will supply Kenyans with jobs for a generation. We already have the basic infrastructure in place to ensure that Kenyans can be gainfully employed into the foreseeable future. All we need is a strategy.

Mr. President you are a politician and you need votes to stay in office and so naturally, you make job creation your first priority. I can understand that. But Sir is giving people jobs sustainable? In your letter (The STAR on Monday), you quoted job creation figures that hardly surpassed several thousand. However, as a nation we need millions of Jobs. One version of a Chinese fishing proverb says, "give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, however, if you teach a man to fish and you will feed a family for a lifetime". Give Kenyans jobs and you will feed them for your term in office. However, should you train them to create jobs, they will feed themselves for a generation.

Your Excellency, the government has done a great deal to educate, train and prepare youth for employment. The middle level colleges that used to train youth for enterprise have been turned into universities. Perhaps it is time to review the strategy of preparing the youth for non-existent employment by taking a fresh angle to the challenge. We need a strategy that will embed industrialization into the DNA of the Kenyan economy.  Please allow me to share with you just three strategies that will help create an industrialized nation in just one generation. As you wrote we can learn from others, but our strategy must be unique to our circumstances.

County strategy

We have been gifted with 47 governance zones under a new constitution. These counties can form the basis of industry creation by spreading industries right across the nation. With a "One County, One Product" strategy each county can identify one product they will produce in the county and develop expertise to deliver to the nation and the globe. A national coordination team can be set up to coordinate this initiative so that counties do not engage in destructive competition. Alongside the major county product, each county can select a secondary product with which they can collaborate with another county to develop and market regionally. These industrial zones can reflect kibbutz in Israel. The beauty with this strategy is that each county has a unique profile. In addition industrialization will immediately spread across the whole country and need not be centered in the "industrial areas" of cities. The national office can attach industrial advisors to each county to help steer industrialization initiatives and facilitate global marketing campaigns. The country will have an automatic product portfolio of 47 products.

Turn universities into industries!

There are over 60 universities in our country. Despite the production of high end education graduates, they send out personnel into a non-existent labor market. Instead of sending out unemployable graduates let us turn these universities into industries. Allow me to illustrate my point. The story is told of a chicken thief who did not steal for money or to get rich. He stole because of a craving he had for eating chicken. He engaged in this practice every weekend. On one occasion a friend of his found him eating a chicken and advised the thief to raise his own chicken. The thief told his friend that he had no time to raise chicken, but before his friend let he asked his friend if he knew what the farmers did with those "brown and white" balls that the chicken were always sitting on.

Universities produce employees, but are sitting on huge capacity to produce entrepreneurs. Realizing that potential will require a little creativity, but first we must make sense of the university graduate output. We need to match graduate production to national needs otherwise, we literally aggravate the unemployment situation with every graduation ceremony. Again the national industrialization coordination team can conduct continuous research to advise universities and professional sector graduate production quotas that will drive industrialization.

While universities have proved their competence to produce potential employees, they have been somehow unable to produce research and enterprise value. By attaching each university to a county to aid in productive research for county development and engage both private and public companies to develop products, services, innovations, and provide specialized labor for specific industries universities can become production houses. Unless universities engage with industries, they will remain white elephants. Unfortunately, we have closed down our middle level colleges that used to provide this engagement with industry. Let universities create, invent register and sell patents. Let universities engage industries and actively participate in the  development of this country from developing sidewalks to creating industry software to developing solar panels for energy generation. Nevertheless, to do these things universities may need CEOs who can make money from the knowledge the institutions produce. Just as doctors no longer make the best hospital CEOs.

Kenya School of Industrialization & Enterprise  

The final strategy is a tried and tested approach Kenya has used with to great effect. Open the Kenya Industrialization & Enterprise College. It is no secret that Kenya's achievements in Tourism has been successfully served for a long time by Utalii College. Utalii has provided hands on skills to a generation of hotel industry employees and entrepreneurs.  Graduates leave complete with hotel experience! By opening a college dedicated to Industrialization, we will harness the strategy used by Demming to create an industrial quality revolution in Japan after the second world war that is still serving that country well to date. The school of industrialization will have one mandate - to produce entrepreneurs and  industrialists who will not look for jobs but create jobs! Banks can latch onto this development by developing and availing venture capital products to fund graduating entrepreneurs and found industries.

Allan Bukusi

 

 

 

 

Finding Solutions for Africa

The last few weeks have seen high-powered meetings called to discuss one or other important issue at the national, county and corporate level. One such meeting was called to discuss the funding of Agriculture and attended by the Vice President. These important meetings remind me of a meeting called by the gods.

“Not long ago in the world of spirits, there came about a famine. People were no longer praying to the gods. This caused great consternation to the gods to the extent that they called a meeting to pray about it. At the meeting, each of the gods stood and expressed their concerns over the grave matter. Finally, the great gathering was called to prayer. Suddenly a deep silence settled on the hall as each god considered to whom they should pray. Since they were the normal recipients of prayers, they could not think of anyone to whom they should pray. Eventually since they could not agree to whom they should pray, the meeting ended in disarray. “

This story explains why many meetings called to address pressing issues do not come out with workable resolutions to real problems. Instead of focusing on the solution, meetings are simply called to express the concerns of various parties about the problem. While this may be important, these meetings hardly resolve the issues that require people with the heart to work hard and follow through with a solution. It also begs the question whether the people discussing the problem are competent to resolve the core issue.  Indeed leadership issues are complex, but problems solving cannot take place at a meeting. Steve Jobs, a man who is credited with exceptional leadership ability and resolving major technology challenges in three global industries says, “When you first look at a problem, it seems easy because you don’t know much about it, he said. Then, you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. Most people stop there. But the key is to keep going, he said, until you find the underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works.” (Blumenthal)

Obviously, Jobs was a man of superior intellect, but he has left us a code to get a solution that works. The reason Africa’s problems repeat themselves and become the subject of meeting after meeting is that the issue is forgotten, pushed aside immediately after the meeting or may be provided with a “convoluted” solution that does not work.  Nobody follows through. Most of us stop at the resolutions passed by the meeting and fail to “keep going” to find the underlying principle of the problem.

The discussion of funding for agriculture and genetically modified foods reminded me of President Mutharika’s agriculture miracle in Malawi several years ago. In a few short years, he was able to turn the country into a self-sufficient-surplus producing breadbasket. One would have thought that the solution should have been sustainable – not so. The underlying principle of the problem does not seem to have been resolved. We are unable to create a beautiful, elegant solution that works. Many of our solutions are convoluted answers to ostensibly simple questions.

The gods never solved the problem because they did not address the famine. The fact that the people were experiencing a famine was the issue, not prayers. Problems in Africa may persist because no one goes back to the ground to the root of the problem to research, design and actually create a solution that works.

Our significant weakness in addressing national issues in meeting after meeting, is our lack of commitment and courage to do something about it. This is what Adadevoh calls the, “inward flaw that makes many Africans shy away from taking responsibility for changing their situation”. This may sound like a harsh and unfair judgment of Africa’s leadership situation, but evidently, our problems continue to persist predictably in the same form year after year. Many of these problems do not require dramatic intervention to eradicate. But they do require disciplined, dedicated self-sacrificing men and women to create beautiful, elegant solutions that work on the ground. The reason why Nike and Kenyan athletes work together so well is they just do it! However, creating solutions is far beneath the role of gods.

Allan Bukusi

 

Economics and opportunity do not always walk together

Economics and opportunity do not always walk together.

 

Allan Bukusi

DETERMINED TO FAIL!

I never thought it was practical that anyone should determine to fail. But life has proved me wrong enough times to appreciate that some people just will not win, put in effort or work hard. Not only is that true, but some people actually labor to subvert victory, divert success and refuse to learn from failure. I have no clue as to the motive of this suicidal mission apart from the fact that they perhaps do not like themselves or do not like someone else and so set out on a mission to spite that person. You will find these people everywhere among the poor, the rich, the educated and the illiterate. Among them is a cynical spirit that craves attention but is unwilling to take direction. It afflicts drug addicts as much as it does CEOs. It lives among young people and perhaps more so among mature people too. The situation is hopeless because only one person can stop it - and they know it!

Allan Bukusi

Steve Jobs

I have just finished reading a very readable biography of Steve Jobs (Blumenthal). I never met him, but I have met his machines. My art directors will work with nothing else. It is amazing how one life can touch so many and never know their names.

The man was very spiritual. He fasted and walked a lot, Zen and ate vegetables – carrots. I don't know whether that contributed to his intellect, but it certainly made him stand out – odd. His dress covered his body, but that was just about all. Shorts, bare foot and slippers did not interfere with his passions for perfection. Limited education, but unlimited enterprise. It is hard to describe the feisty character that bore out of those blue eyes. But I have seen that fire in at least one other of may adopted heroes.

What do make of him. That is your score. What do you learn from him? He did not like God very much and may have refused to believe in him, but he did talk about him. I love what he says about focus; saying NO to everything else. In addition, I like what he says about simplicity – it is the ultimate sophistication. I wonder who got more out of life Steve or Woz? I don't want to be like Steve Jobs, but I do want to make difference!

Allan Bukusi

Leadership is the first duty of man.

Leadership is the first duty of man. This is not original an original idea (Genesis 1: 26)

Allan Bukusi

Let us Rebuild the Future!

The good old days entice us to look back to the past for answers. We are so captured by ancient beauty that we miss the opportunity to create grand new meaningful change for the future.

Allan Bukusi