The SME conundrum

The logic is unimpeachable: if you should happen to read through a strategic plan, it should at the very least provide a goal and a work plan to achieve that goal. I find no flaw in the Nitpicker's logic. Save for one tiny, inconsequential, little detail: the maker of a strategic plan wants you to know what his goals are and what he intends to do to make sure those goals are achieved. In the public sector, that is sometimes a costly assumption.

The last true truly strategic plan was the Vision 2030 blueprint, on which every public sector institution was to base its plans. Even with the fingerprints of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank all over it, it was quite remarkable. It covered every major base and it did so with sufficient detail to persuade even the most tightfisted banker that this time around, the Government of Kenya was serious about the economy, politics, the education of its children and its workforce, the environment, manufacturing and public sector reforms. Even the European Union was impressed; Free Primary Education was dead in the water without its largesse.

Twenty-four years of KANUism, Nyayoism, Moism, should have taught us better. In Kenya, history tells us, the skinning of cats has led to innovations that would make the Renaissance Period feel like the psychedelic 1960s. Peter Anyang' Nyong'o and the planning boffins who set down our national ambitions in Vision 2030 must look at the past eight years in despair; their ideas have been debased, hijacked by KANUist special interests, leaving the principal makers of policy to flail in confusion in the dark as a generation of experienced boffins flee for the comforts of the private sector.

Take small and medium enterprises, SMEs, for example. Not the exporters or potential manufactures' exporters that the Nitpicker has in mind but the for-the-domestic-market jua kali "artisans" to be found in Kamukunji. These are entrepreneurs of incredible resilience and innovation. That bit of Kamukunji jua kali between City Stadium and the Retail Market at the intersection of Landhies Road and Haile Selassie Avenue is a sight to see. Manufactures from this zone include those mabati sandukus every mono brings to Form 1 come February every year, wheelbarrows, poultry feeders, chips fryers, water tanks, door-frames, roof gutters, and dozens more.

The zone is crowded, dirty, noisy and very, very dangerous. I do not believe that the relationship between the "artisans" and their governments, both national and county, is cordial. It is why I am surprised that the Nitpicker is surprised that there is no information about the kind of information an SME entrepreneur would need in order to export to Uganda or Rwanda. If she remembers those business prayer breakfasts held at the Safari Park every year, she will see the "true" Kenyan manufacturer: Vimal Shah, Manu Chandaria, Chris Kirubi and their polished, IMF-/World Bank-/IFC-friendly ilk. She will never have seen Lawi of Lawi Metal Works who still operates, thirty years after he started, out of somebody's back yard in Buru Buru Phase Three, or Martin, who got shoved out of the NCCK "garage" along Rabai Road, Makadara, to make way for The Point, another real estate development and now repairs cars along the side of Kangundo Road.

Kamukunji is a hotbed of innovation. The workarounds these manufacturers have found for poor sanitation, erratic power supply, irregular water availability, limited interior road networks of notoriously bad quality, a spectacular lack of public hygiene facilities coupled to a hostile City Hall and an indifferent Industrialisation and Enterprise Development Ministry are the stuff of legend. You wouldn't know it because we aand our governent have been mesmerised by the Steve Jobses. Jack Welches, Richard Bransons and Bill Gateses of this world - after they became billionaires, and not the Henry Fordses or Jamsetji Tatas of the past - before they became billionaires.

There is a reason why the SME sector is treated as a red-headed stepchild: not even Adan Mohammed is confident that it has what it takes to take Kenya to the next level. Not like the "billions in pledges" the President secured when he visited New York last month. Not like the "billions pledged" by Barack Obama the month before that. Our national strategy for the moment seems to be to borrow billions of dollars in order to attract billions of dollars from foreigners to extract billions of dollars of our natural resources while paying very little if no tax and exporting the profits overseas while the government sucks out every cent in credit from the market, guaranteeing that Lawi Metal Works remains an SME in perpetuity.