Majority of the people here are doing exactly that,seeing the tip of their noses. Today's problems are tomorrow's opportunities. But to the pessimists,that means doom and gloom. In ten years, electricity won't be such an issue,internet costs would have come down significantly,with new constitution, rule of law,more ICT graduates both locally and abroad etc etc. Konza city is not going to up and running tomorrow. It will take years, between 4 & 7 yrs before it becomes fully operational. By then most of the current bottlenecks will be minimal.

The South Korea mentioned has not always been like that. To achieve levels of 98%,you got to have the means.South Korea has NOT always had the means, neither the literacy levels of 98%. To understand where they've come from, you need to go beyond 25years ago.To REALLY appreciate South Korea & where it has come from, go back to the years just after the Korean war,in the late 1950's. There came to power, a dictator. A people's dictator who made every South Korean work like a machine,not for themselves,but for the state. There was NO such human capital to write home about,but that DIDN'T stop them from starting factories. Companies like Samsung,Hyundai, Daewoo, Goldstar[now LG after merger] , got all the support from gov't. Gov't allocated them swathes of land to build factories, gave them loans cheaply,they didn't pay taxes. To save the gov't money,people were made to clean up their neighborhoods,make drainage. A working week was 6 days. They were forced to plant trees everywhere. Those days,there were not many learned people. Not every kid went to school. With the whole country disciplined, productivity improved,the companies thru' gov't support grew. Everybody put the country first. By late 1970s, South Korea was well on its feet. They could afford good life,most kids could go to school, their companies continued producing inferior products compared to Japan & the West. But life was better. Sad the era of the People's dictators is ending. In the 1980s & 90s, democracy takes root, but they are already way into the middle economy. Now the gov't can educate the children for free,the big companies have money to dedicate to R&D guys,everybody is happy. Come late 90s, South Korea has arrived to the world stage. Their products are world class. Early 2000s, they are rich enough to co-host the world. Late 2000s and their products are becoming barometers of quality worldwide. Nothing happens in a day. It starts from somewhere. The gov't role is SO significant in an economy like ours [just as it did in Korea's case], for the gov't to take the bulls by its horns. The reason why South Korea is what it is today with Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Daewoo etc, its coz the gov't rolled its sleeves and got dirty. They have done in 50 years,what the West took centuries. Why should Kenya take centuries? You got to look deep in the past, to foresee far into the future.

True, SouthK has not always been like that hence the reason we are saying that it needs to studied further and not give lopesided views during political rallies. Politics held constant, study their strongest industry -electronics. Figure out what makes it a strategic country to produce electronics. You can design a circuit in California and afford to have a low cost lab in Seoul or Beijing or Banglore for implementation and testing. What is the common grip across this cities? Intellectual capital. Offshore production of cars and more sophisticated goods like electronics is largely based on the ability to conduct technology transfer successfully. Otherwise the business costs of doing the transfer outweigh the perceived benefits. On a rather light note, did I hear someone the other day say something in the lines of "we may be building a hawker economy"? that is what you get if you don't have a good transformation plan.

Good questions! Stated in another way, we could also ask these companies another question: "we would like you to increase your R&D operations in our country, what can we do to make that happen?" (*hoping that our engineers will be able to design similar systems in a few years*)

Individual opportunities: Easy to identify One can easily identify where to offer small IT services. Whether this startups have what it takes to scale globally while remaining fully in Kenya, that is another story all together. Government's roadmap: Looks rather OFF or Unrealistic Some fundamentals of the technology driven industries are missing.