Good argument but perhaps the problem with Kenya is we don't harness our strengths. I don't see us out-manufacturing Asia in electronics but they shouldn't hold a candle to us when it comes to...

1. coffee and tea
2. horticulture
3. fruits
4. cement
5. pyrethrum
6. soda ash, fluorspar

and I wish even

7. zoo animals
8. meat, dairy products, leather
9. beer

Get serious!!!

Except for cement & beer... everything else is coz of Mother Nature (yaani, it was a gift not brains)...

Africa lucked into having wildlife. Lakini give Africans a few guns & we kill the animals off!!!

In Congo/Rwanda/Uganda, the great apes have been decimated. In Kenya, lions, rhinos & elephants.

I can pick apart your list while sleeping!!!

BTW, the clear beer we drink is from Europe... & the cement technology is also European...

Asia leads Africa in cement & in total beer production but lags in consumption!

There is nothing 'great' or commendable about being a large beer consumer!

@muganda and vituvingi..what the asians did is reverse engineering, buy from a mzungu, open up and then assemble your own and give it a name e.g. samsung then sell to the africans who are considered consumers.
If muganda made phone batteries, vituvingi made their covers and other kenyans made other parts....in the long run, each of you has advanced financially when we assemble the final product.

On the issue of standards....someone has to start from somewhere...Africa can set it's standards and improve. Even Asians started somewhere. It is a matter of setting your own, and letting the wold know, then improving on it. If we are to stick to the mzungu standards, i doubt we'll ever match them, because they wont let you...then where will they sell their products?

Have you noted, a mzungu wants to donate 1,000,000 mosquito nets to, say nyanza, instead of buying from a local company, he/she buys from his/her own country, thereby strengthening his own economy. What we need to do is look within, work with all the raw materials we have, and sort out our on problems...the model for reverse engineering is irreproachable (i think)

muganda , what you pointed out are features of an agrarian economy -very basic economy where there is little, if any, processing, meaning there is little value-addition and so both the prices and market share of your exports on the global market will continue to be low and your role peripheral. This way you end up a net consumer, thus exporting country's jobs abroad. Therein now lies your problem because others will use the same primary commodity you grow, add value and sell it several times what they bought it for in the first place!
Take a Machakos farmer, for instance. He harvests coffee, it is exported and processed abroad and then comes back in gaudy cans calling itself NESCAFE retailing at prices that are so scary the same Machakos farmer dares not even look at it on the shelves of his supermarket in Machakos town! But isnt he the one who grew it?

The Nyayo car was a failure, but only to an extent. Certainly naming it the way it was was a failure. But it should have been a wake up call. We should have built on this car so that the cars we have here can have spare parts that are locally made and thus cheaper. Even the Asians giants with wide manufacturing bases currently had humble beginnings and this was the one for us. Numerical Machining Complex (jeez, what name) still has the physical infrastructure to be used for manufacturing but is under-utilised although attempts are being made to revive it.
But with the Nyayo car debacle, we seem to have thrown out the baby with the dirty bath water.