The population is not the problem.

I think Kwame Owino will have an answer to this. Is Kenya "overpopulated?" I mean, are there more Kenyans than can be fed, employed, kept secure, educated and retained in rude health? Is Kenya's population the reason why the environment is being degraded "at an alarming rate" according to the National Environment Management Authority? I do not have access to the data that I hope Mr Owino does, but I would like to think that because such fatalistic declarations have been discounted in the past, they will be in the case of Kenya.

Before the Green Revolution was a reality, we were warned that the world's population would be unable to feed itself. Before the successful implementation of anti-retroviral therapies, the world waited for HIV/AIDS to bring about the Second Coming. For forty years the world waited with bated breath for the Cold War to turn hot and the collective tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to incinerate the Earth ten times over.

Kenya has a very dynamic population. Some generations possess skills that other generations can only envy. I do not believe that a shift to a knowledge-based economy will wipe out the need for mechanics, plumbers, electricians, welders or carpenters. The success of a knowledge economy will depend largely on an infrastructure built, maintained and serviced by the blue collar economy. One cannot exist without the other.

Ours is a complex political system that is struggling to satisfy all things for all people and succeeding in some while failing in others all the while having to deal with distortions such as corruption, nepotism and insecurity. We have pretended to move away from a planned economy without truly doing so - vestiges of the command era abound like in the pricing mechanism in the energy sector. We are still very much a welfare state, even with the cost sharing legacy of the SAPs of the 1980s/90s, where many goods and services are still supplied by the public sector. We also have an expanding and expansive private sector, though its share of manufacturing is growing smaller and smaller while real estate development, especially housing and hotels, is booming.

The challenge we face can be summed thus, I hope: we need to generate better-paying jobs for the Kenyan population that can afford higher-priced domestically-manufactured goods and services so that they can pay higher taxes in order to support the supply of critical public-sector goods and services while still providing for a more economic balance of trade. The flight of manufacturers from Kenya and the rise of corrupt real-estate development is not a sign that things are headed in the right direction. But, in all this, the demographic changes are not a threat. They never were.