[kictanet] Konza City Developments

[S.M. Muraya]

No disagreements with either Dr. Ndii's or Dr. Ndemo's views...but....

How do we minimize foreign trips/transactions in favor of developing local
talent/firms through Konza? Which public officials well known to favor
(building up) local firms for local contracts are involved in the Konza
City Development?

http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Why-Ndii-Konza-City-misleading/-/440808/2522942/-/i19s20/-/index.html

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014

Why Ndii’s view on Konza City and other projects is misleading

I like reading Dr David Ndii’s column and sometimes I agree with him on a
number of issues.
[image: Former Information Communications and Technology PS Bitange Ndemo,
takes former President Mwai Kibaki through a plan for the Konza Techno City
during a ground-breaking ceremony at Malili on the Machakos-Makueni border
on January 23, 2013. FILE PHOTO | BILLY MUTAI |]

Former Information Communications and Technology PS Bitange Ndemo, takes
former President Mwai Kibaki through a plan for the Konza Techno City
during a ground-breaking ceremony at Malili on the Machakos-Makueni border
on January 23, 2013. FILE PHOTO | BILLY MUTAI |  NATION MEDIA GROUP
In Summary

   - The Konza City project did not drop from the sky, as Dr Ndii suggests.
   It was conceptualised in such a way that it would leverage on existing and
   future infrastructure.
   - The knowledge city was to incubate start-ups, pass the necessary
   skills to recruits and speed up their development into fully fledged
   companies that could provide skills and absorb many of our graduates, who,
   instead of utilising their knowledge, are selling second-hand clothes or
   running errands for politicians.
   - Dr Ndii should focus on a growing body of research that has been
   emerging among development economists since the beginning of this century,
   focusing on interactions between ethnic diversity and economic development,
   particularly at the level of the nation-state.

I like reading Dr David Ndii’s column and sometimes I agree with him on a
number of issues.

But in his November 8 column titled, ‘Human capital, not mega-projects,
will turbo-charge economy’, he was dead wrong. I wish he had done a bit of
research to know the impact of the Vision 2030 flagship projects.

In my view, he should have spent his valuable time thanking former
President Mwai Kibaki for an excellent job he did while he was at the helm
and President Uhuru Kenyatta for showing maturity in continuing with these
transformative projects.

When historians come to write about Kenya, they will certainly recognise
that it was the Kibaki administration that started what may be called
indigenous thinking on how we can chart our economic future.

*MEASURED RISKS*

Against all odds, President Kibaki allowed Cabinet ministers and senior
civil servants to take measured risks to implement some of the most
transformative projects in Kenya’s history. This is how we were able to
implement the ICT infrastructure within a short period, giving rise to
additional needs such as technology park that would help incubate start-ups
and deepen our human capital.

The Konza City project did not drop from the sky, as Dr Ndii suggests. It
was conceptualised in such a way that it would leverage on existing and
future infrastructure. The expansion of the Mombasa highway into a dual
carriage way and the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) were meant to directly
benefit Konza. The government was to spend funds on the infrastructure
within the site and a few buildings to support the incubation of local
start-ups.

Most of the vertical infrastructure were to be built by the private sector.
We took time to study how we could quickly diffuse technology and leverage
on it to transform our economy. We travelled to India and the Silicon
Valley, picked up the best practices and signed contracts with global
technology companies to co-create and share intellectual property. This is
how knowledge is sustainably transferred in modern days.

(READ: Human capital, not mega-projects, will turbo-charge economy
<http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Human-capital-turbo-charge-economy/-/440808/2515184/-/imdg78/-/index.html>
)

(READ: Of bullet trains and delusions of mega techno-cities
<http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/bullet-trains-delusions-mega-techno-cities/-/440808/2450902/-/s9mfcxz/-/index.html>
)

*FACILITATING INDUSTRY*

This was as a result of the fact that our university graduates were
unemployable, and the private sector was stuck with archaic production
systems with little research.

Today, we see more failures in manufacturing than new companies because the
government was not playing its role in facilitating industry and research
institutions. Our aim was to create a development corridor similar to the
Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor — a State-Sponsored Industrial Development
Project of the Government of India. The purchase of 5,000 acres in the Athi
Basin marked the first step in the 1,000-mile project to see our own
corridor that would spur the economy.

The knowledge city was to incubate start-ups, pass the necessary skills to
recruits and speed up their development into fully fledged companies that
could provide skills and absorb many of our graduates, who, instead of
utilising their knowledge, are selling second-hand clothes or running
errands for politicians. Parallel to these efforts we asked the President
to support the Open Data Initiative, which became the lifeblood of the
nascent creative industry in Kenya.

Indeed, he launched the initiative and more than 400 data sets were
uploaded to the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI). We were laying the
foundation stone for building a knowledge economy.

I was, therefore, perplexed by Dr Ndii’s article, which though it had the
correct title, contained misleading content. How else can one develop human
capital without the processes we were putting in place? I least expected Dr
Ndii, a leading economist, to confuse human capital (the skills, knowledge,
and experience possessed by an individual or population) and education (the
process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a
school or university).

*FUTURE WORKERS*

In fact, Korea’s success was as a result of its focus on development of
skills within its several industrial parks and at technical and vocational
education and training, which we have destroyed in favour of a theory-based
education system.

In addition, several other successful countries such as Germany put more
emphasis on three areas — pre-employment skills development to prepare
future workers, in-service training to upgrade the work force’s skills and
active labour market training programmes to reintegrate the unemployed and
disadvantaged.
The ecosystem of Konza was to provide these three critical missing
components in our economic development.

The injection of 5,000 mw into our national electricity grid will be a drop
in the ocean if we persistently pursue skills development as I have stated
above.

With the advent of 3D printing and a motivated youth with computer
literacy, we can change the world.

A liberalised energy sector would be more meaningful than attempting to
protect small and inefficient operations that would never bring down prices
of goods. Such free thinking will enable our economy to leapfrog others and
not just grow in the linear format that Dr Ndii favours.

This linear business model that Nobel laureate Amartya Sen censures in
favour of rationalism, is a Western empiricist mentality that my brother Dr
Ndii buys as wholesome truth. Western economists themselves admit that
their economic modelling does not fully explain our growth patterns. That
is how they created Development Economics, a branch of economics that deals
with the developing countries.

Dr Ndii should focus on a growing body of research that has been emerging
among development economists since the beginning of this century, focusing
on interactions between ethnic diversity and economic development,
particularly at the level of the nation-state. Wikimedia says that while
most research looks at empirical economics at both the macro and the micro
level, this field of study has a particularly heavy sociological approach.

*ETHNIC DIVERSITY*

The more conservative branch of research focuses on tests for causality in
the relationship between different levels of ethnic diversity and economic
performance, while a smaller and more radical branch argues for the role of
neoliberal economics in enhancing or causing ethnic conflict.

This will be more relevant to our situation just like the contribution of
Amartya Sen to welfare economics that highlighted the plight of the poor in
his native India.

Back to Vision 2030 Mega Projects. The Standard Gauge Railway benefits far
exceed the costs. I do not know if Dr Ndii’s modelling factored in
productivity gains to Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Kenya. It takes more than
two weeks to transport goods from Mombasa to Kampala and three to four days
from Mombasa to Nairobi.

It is cheaper to transport a container from Durban to Mombasa than from
Mombasa to Nairobi. Also, the Mombasa-Malaba road is constantly damaged by
heavy vehicles and needs repair all the time. These vehicles are not just
the major causes of accidents, especially when they stall on the highway,
but are also heavy polluters.

It is a shame when Dr Ndii suggests that the Thika Superhighway should
never have been built. The completion of this short distance highway has
attracted more foreign direct investment than the cost of constructing it.
Garden City would never have been built at Ruaraka if the road had not been
expanded.

In fact, three more major private mega-projects are about to come up. These
projects create employment and an opportunity for farmers to supply their
produce.

*Dr Ndemo is a former PS for Information Communications and Technology*
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