Reminds me of the Southern By-pass, stuck in court coz of a useless strip of land that is to be hived off the Nairobi National Park. Makes me wonder, of what use is that tiny strip, and in any case, Park ni ya wananchi, barabara ni ya wananchi but some activists wont hear none of that.

Notice the strip to be hived on the edge of the Park, no construction activity at all along the fence......wasting so much valuable time over such nonsense surely. With so much of the civil works already done, I foresee the Government bulldozing on this one, regardless of of the outcome in the courts.

The more reason we should let jubiree govt. be.

This is a nice comparison and good debate. Before we throw fists against each other it is important to know that the devil is always in the details. Some MNCs discovered this after flooding there with the 'free land' enticement et. al. They were later to discover that all foreign exchange inflows have to be converted to the local currency-the Birr. Importing stuff is extremely difficult also. Had a friend who was contracted to start a new flower farm there and he termed it as the most difficult work environment he had ever encountered....well save for their beautiful women. His client had a shortage of plastic buckets and wanted to get them from Kenya and the authorities refused. He sourced them locally thereby creating a local shortage. The multinationals not to be beaten at their games have resorted to transfer pricing; remember the recent case of Sher Karuturi here in Kenya.

Read this article for further knowledge

http://www.economist.com...omic-models-doing-it-my

And watch the following videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVb9EZ6Kqs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt22chvx_yQ

It is a typical scramble for Africa. Seems it is their time to be colonised.

This is the kind of nonsense mathematics that flies in the face of logic, @masukuma, do you believe that Tokyo is a larger economy than Africa. Hell you can even throw in the whole of Japan. If you were offered a choice of either Africa or Tokyo/Japan, what would you go for. Think the recent rebasing of the Nigerian economy, think the minerals lying underneath the Congo, think the Congo forest, think the beaches of East Africa, think the oil offshore west and southern Africa, think the Pyramids in Egypt, think the 1 billion man market.

And yes, Ethiopia is damn impressive but as long as development is govt driven, the people will never trully benefit. Offering land to foreigners is nonsense. Having said that, Kenyans need to up their game, especially on governance

Word!

Its working in China, why shouldn't it work elsewhere? GOK ons 30% Telkom 40% Safcom. Incompetence brought down Telkom.

[quote=mibbz]Very interesting debates on economy.Allow me to share a podcast i listened to recently,its titled Emerging Africa by Kingsley Chiedu,the current deputy governor of Central Bank of Nigeria.He delivered it at LSE during a LSE Africa talk.Informative,Incisive & quite enlightening and covers some debates highlighted in the thread

http://www.lse.ac.uk/new...nts/player.aspx?id=2562[/quote]

Boss si you summarize what was on the podcast we all don't have time to listen to chinedu the drug dealer.

Lets avoid the capitalism vs communism theorem for a moment. That debate is usually propagated by the west to kinda glorify capitalism/demoncracy. Anyway. China is still very govt controled all major sectors of the economy be it financial to industrial have a very strong govt participation, infact if you are to look at the companies that have expanded out of china, the (MNCs),they are largely govt controlled. And so is Ethiopia.

Chinas growth was realized when americans went in to take advantage of the cheap resources- labor in particular, and now the Chinese are going to Ethiopia to take advantage of cheap resources - labor and land. Even DJ CK is investing big in ET.

http://www.businessweek....-vanishing-factory-jobs

Africa and Kenya specifically is undermeasured. One Harvard study suggested that the informal economy in poor developing countries is 30-40% of formal GDP -> http://scholar.harvard.e...lity_may27_abstract.pdf

I would add:
1. Extensive corruption is synonymous with a large black market, underground economy and tax evasion. Corruption is a big problem in Kenya.
2. Though there are other factors involved, the growth of bank assets sometimes seems inconsistent with GDP growth. Tanzania GDP grew by 7% last year and bank assets increased by 15%. Kenya grew by 4.7% but in-country bank assets increased by 16%.