This article was written by Higgins Mbugua;opinions expressed may not necessarily be in line with that of BIZNA’s. 
Higgins is a pro URP activist, to read more of his posts visit thekenyanoline.

Unlike most of sub-Saharan Africa countries that depend mostly on commodities or AID; Kenya’s well diversified liberalized economy is set to grow at 6% and possibly 7-8% as SGR kicks in.

If only we could sort out manufacturing.

We need to find out why our manufacturing has been stuck at 9-10% of the GDP since time and memorial. The British left us with a decent manufacturing base and we haven’t grown it at all. It still mostly dominated by Asians and our majority indigenous Kenyans just can’t seem to hack it. Manufacturing is a great employer and that can quickly alleviate poverty (which now stand at 40% plus).

What we need to sort is to reduce the overall “dimensions” cost and time of doing business plus the cost of doing business (raw materials, energy, labour) and time (SGR will sort that out). After we have done that, then we should be able to attract big Chinese or American manufacturing.

Sadly nobody in GOVERNMENT is even thinking about that. We are doing Konza (for ICT) and Galana but nothing on Manufacturing. Meanwhile Ethiopia is busy establishing a shoe city that will in few years dominate the global market.

Bottom-line is, the two really sick sectors in our economy is Agriculture & mining (extractive) and manufacturing. We are doing extremely well in financial and intermediation, ICT, Tourism and name them.

If check we check the data, out of 10 or so sector, agriculture which account for 23-25% is an employer of 70% of our people. The ideal situation for our size of economy I dare say would be for about half the guys digging around should be doing low level manufacturing jobs.

Some sectors can bring in the big bucks but they aren’t great employer and we all know employment is one of surest way out of poverty.

ICT is and has been doing well and we can do better if we can get low level manufacturing and assembling of computers and smart phone. Ethiopia (again) now assembles techno phones.