Ironically, manufacturing was killed while agricultural labour was exported to Britain

The Royal Museums Greenwich estimates that 12 million Africans were enslaved between 1640 and 1807, mainly to provide cheap labour in Western countries. British ships are believed to have transported around 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic to work on American farms.

We make no judgement about the 350 people who left the UK earlier this week to work on British farms, but we cannot help but note the irony of fate. Unlike the horrific forced labour of the 16th century, we now see the leaders of a sovereign nation willingly sending their young people to work on foreign farms.

This is all part of the government’s official project, Mkulima Majuu. While the project promises some form of skills transfer, surprisingly, some participants have returned for a second, short-term contract. Even more interesting is the growing number of people who want to join the project in a country where the average age of farmers is over 55.

While work on European farms may be more mechanized today than it was in the 18th century, the reality is that today’s workforce is required to perform tasks that cannot be performed by machines or robots. This means that their pay is likely to be comparable to that of locals doing similar work.

If these facts are true, then what is the difference between the fate of our ancestors and our situation today, apart from technological progress and the supposed consent of those who went abroad? More fundamentally, why have we, as a country, found ourselves in this situation sixty years after independence?

Despite the show’s suggestion of low national self-esteem, those who closely follow the country’s economic indicators might have seen it coming. Just last week, I spent a lot of time talking to a friend who is an industry insider in Kenya’s manufacturing sector. His career came to an end a few years ago when the company he worked for, a colonial-era business, had to restructure to stay afloat.

Since then, he has been doing freelance work, supplying manufacturers with industrial equipment and spare parts. According to him, he has not been to any of the industrial estates or parks in the country, from Busia to Mombasa, for the past three years. He confirmed that many streets within these manufacturing zones have become ghost towns as companies that were once economic powerhouses and provided livelihoods for thousands of people have closed their doors permanently.

More alarmingly, he revealed that the few companies still operating are often manufacturers in name only. Many products sold locally as “Made in Kenya” are actually imported and repackaged in the dark or behind heavy steel doors. This includes everything from tissue paper to more complex goods.

As I hear these depressing accounts of the decline of the manufacturing sector, I am reminded of a personal experience I had earlier this year when I went to buy tiles from a local manufacturer in the Embakasi area. While chatting with the two young men who were responsible for loading my purchases onto their truck, they revealed that business had fallen drastically over the past five years. In previous years, they recalled, Saturdays were so busy that they barely had time to catch their breath. But now, they have to work in shifts during the week to avoid mass layoffs.

These observations are strongly supported by manufacturing statistics in the Economic Survey 2024. The sector’s growth rate declines from 2.6% in 2022 to 2.0% in 2023. Its contribution to GDP is only 7.6%, and it employs only 11.69% of the estimated 3.1 million people in the formal sector.

The only sub-sector to show strong growth was agricultural product processing, especially animal feed, dairy products, processed and preserved fruits and vegetables, and meat products, according to the survey. Leather and related products, plastic products, and fabricated metal products (excluding machinery and equipment) sub-sectors showed moderate growth.

In contrast, cement production fell and sugar production dropped sharply. Lafarge’s recent divestment from the Kenyan market highlights this trend, marking yet another major multinational company’s exit from the Kenyan market in what appears to be an ongoing wave of divestments.

A deeper analysis of these indicators shows that most of the country’s manufacturing is limited to domestic food and basic household items – products that are either difficult to transport across borders or are more strictly regulated. Kenya used to be a major exporter of processed or finished goods in East Africa, but those days are gone.

In an opinion piece published on March 15, Anthony Mwangi, CEO of the Kenya Manufacturers Association, lamented how the cancer of corruption has eaten away at the country’s socio-economic fabric, with the manufacturing sector being no exception. In a related article published on February 28, Zippora Kuria detailed how the scourge of unjustified taxation and illegal trade has severely damaged manufacturing investments in the country.

According to the National Baseline Survey on Counterfeit Goods and Other Illegal Trade conducted by the Anti-Counterfeiting Agency, illegal trade was estimated at Sh826 billion in 2018, which is about 9.3% of GDP that year. These illegal trade flows are expected to exceed the Sh1 trillion mark by 2023. Zippora believes that most of the factors undermining the country’s manufacturing capacity are controllable as long as policymakers and political leaders take decisive action.

Unfortunately, the national and county leadership clearly lacks the foresight to take meaningful corrective action. To them, sending young graduates to do temporary work on European farms is seen as the pinnacle of innovation. Freelance online work, which has existed globally for more than two decades, is now being touted as a groundbreaking digital revolution that Kenyan Kwanza has brought to the country’s youth.

Speaking of which, what about the graduates of the free online courses offered by Arizona State University during the Youth Connect Africa Summit on December 9, 2023? Can anyone track their progress and provide objective evidence of their economic success after graduation? It seems that we are back to the default setting of restarting and promising everything after the Gen Z wave.

Frustratingly, the Vision 2030 target of 25% of GDP for manufacturing was abandoned as early as 2013. The Jubilee government halved the sector’s contribution from 13% in 2013 to 7.6% by 2022, despite a target of 15%. Kenya’s Kwanza elite further erased it from its bottom-up transformation agenda, replacing manufacturing with a vaguely defined pillar of micro, small and medium enterprises.

If things continue like this, only divine intervention can save the country’s dwindling economic fortunes!