Singa-poor or Singapore? To achieve the dream, you must involve Kenyans

Kenyans head into the Christmas/New Year break with the 2027 drumbeats of “Singapore”, “First World” and “Economic Freedom” blaring in their ears.

You don’t need a crystal ball to see that these calls for higher ambition as a nation could quietly consign the March 2025 10-point UDA/ODM Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to the political dustbin.  That’s “realpolitik”. 

Because, in politics, as in life, timing is everything.  It is not surprising that “third to first world” has been the predominant talk of town since Raila’s passing.  With the opposition united in its cognitive dissonance, the new opposition is no longer an individual, it’s an idea.

So, “first world” is now hawked to everyday Kenyans in “if you are not with us, you are against us” fashion, the same way the disastrous war in Iraq was sold to ordinary Americans at the turn of the century. 

This is not the first time this regime has preferred brawn to brain in its “whether you like it or not” imposition of mostly progressive ideas on Kenyans.  We’ve seen it with universal health care, affordable housing and multiple vaguely understood or badly explained deals with foreigners. 

As said before, smart practice tell us there are four ways to manage change: rational (appeal to our logic – “this change makes sense”); evangelical (appeal to our values and beliefs – “the change is good”); coercive (use power/fiat to force our compliance – “it’s my way or the highway”) and adaptive (invest in our buy-in – “let’s share the pain and gain, as we build a new, together”). 

These methods aren’t mutually exclusive; yet this regime seems adamant on “my way or the highway”.  Clearly, official attitudes towards everyday Kenyans retain the colonial mindset.  Forget modern smart practice around nudge theory or behavioural change, we must do as we are told! 

It is this official “if you are not with us, you are against us” mindset that is super-sensitive to Kenyans’ reactions to their lofty ambitions.  And the greater the sensitivity becomes, the more electric is the Kenyan riposte.  It hasn’t taken very long for Kenyans on X to parody the Singapore dream – as the common reference point for the President’s vision/road map – as “Singa-poor”! 

To be clear, this parody is deliberate.  Do Kenyans want the New Singapore or a New Kenya? 

Whenever our leaders speak about Singapore, the Asian Tigers or the East, they exhibit what has famously been described as a “cargo-cult mentality” – the idea that one can imitate actions or rituals of “successful others” in the belief that these actions will produce the same positive results without first imbibing the underlying principles and values that led to the success of the other.  Like assuming we can be Singapore without paying due attention to integrity and meritocracy. 

This is not about negativity or naysayers.  But, note “their lofty ambitions” - “theirs” not “ours”.  Which Kenyan doesn’t want a better Kenya?  Who doesn’t believe Kenya can be transformed? Truth be told, Kenyans support these lofty ambitions, we just want to be part of the framing. 

Technically, we call this a “shared vision”.  What we have right now is a very long way from this, despite the “first world in our lifetimes” exhortations and “road map” claims.  What we have is a continuous drip-feed of fast-morphing snippets of disjointed data and information, not knowledge or insight, through speeches, dispatches and roadside declarations and exclamations.  

That this first world/economic freedom idea is so raw is evident in the draft 2026 Budget Policy Statement (BPS) released last week.  It gets “cut and paste” mention in the generic, rather than sector-specific, parts of the BPS (the latter are not updated for the new idea), and is nowhere even close to being modelled into the 2026/27-2028/29 macro-economic and fiscal framework. 

Of course, the real question is how this new 7-10 year first world project fits into the current 3-year Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) already guided by a 5-year Medium-Term Plan (MTP IV) and 5-year Ministerial, Departmental and Agency (MDA) Strategic Plans.  Remember, we’re not sure of the project’s start date but “have decided to go to the next step”. 

Guesswork territory

Yet it would be a shame to open the New Year with this noble idea still in guesswork territory.  

Meanwhile, Government “Spox” says “Kenya is deliberately transitioning from a Third World economy defined by exclusion, to a First World economy anchored in economic freedom, productivity and shared opportunity”? In the draft BPS, the Treasury CS says “…Government is transitioning into a more targeted phase of transformation that places greater emphasis on scaling capital, talent, technology, and infrastructure as the key drivers of Kenya’s next growth frontier”. 

Basically, everyone is falling over themselves to explain this incomplete idea which – as the draft BPS clearly missed in sticking with the four national priorities from the State of the Nation Address – is now based on Jamhuri Day’s “three unshakeable national priorities” – transport & logistics; agro-irrigation and energy – and “three critical enablers” – strategic human capital; peace, stability & security; and national interest and integrity.  Where does the logic even begin? 

There is a narrow sense to this visioning that suggests insufficient ambition.  First, as said before, at a visioning level – what is our picture of today and tomorrow?  Cargo cult notwithstanding, the best we get from Kenyans is we are “Singa-poor” today; tomorrow we want to be Singapore. 

Today, we are “lower middle income” per the World Bank, “medium human development” to the UN and “low income developing” to the IMF.  Africa has fifteen countries ahead of us on human development, and we’re not one of the IMF’s African middle income emerging markets.

And even when we’re not overthinking this, we’re now not sure if this is a 30-year “lifetime” project to 2055 or a 10-year “legacy” project to 2035, especially when we are then told that the self-same project will be 50 per cent delivered by the middle of 2026 (in six months’ time)!  

That’s before we get to the National Infrastructure Fund (NIF) and Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF).  Does the Sh5 trillion cover only the NIF, or both NIF and SWF?  Why would the SWF invest in infrastructure if we have the NIF?  I am all for an innovative Public Resource Management (PRM) – not Public Finance Management (PFM) – framework for Kenya, but make it make sense! 

Because, typically, SWFs are stores of surplus, so two further questions arise.  What is the anticipated source of this surplus that is currently not being realized?

More broadly, are we (read, political elites) now ready to exploit and monetize our oil and mineral resources, which have hopefully been fully and transparently mapped for Kenyan benefit?  Answers on a gemstone! 

More interestingly, does the draft BPS provide us with an important hint on our rush to the NIF? 

Before NIF, we were looking at privatization proceeds as budget support.  Now, it seems we are willing to run record fiscal deficits (at least a trillion shillings each in current 2025/26 and forthcoming 2026/27) financed by domestic borrowing while we ring-fence proceeds for new infrastructure.  The Sh350 billion that BPS expects from Safaricom and Kenya Pipeline is a start.  

We also expect inflows from strategic monetization of mature public assets (read, recent GOE Act and idle land and property assets or further securitization of public fees and charges), deployment of national savings (read, your increased contributions to NSSF), attraction of private sector capital (who will only invest in infrastructure at a return; read tolls and other user fees). 

To repeat, more questions than answers with this road map to destination unsettled. Let’s close with an “adaptive change” message - to go fast, go alone; to go far, go together!  Merry Xmas!