A look at Kenya’s tax incidence shows that the heavy tax burden is carried by an identifiable group of Kenyans that carries the dependency burden.

So, a small government will be a stimulus policy substantially targeting this cohort of income earners with less effect on transforming the targeted income of people living in poverty. Coming to my argument, it is simply that small government is just a stimulus but to lift half of people living in poverty means Kenya must structurally transform from an agrarian economy into an industrial economy.

The sad fact is that Kenya is a peasant society. According to the World Bank, Kenya’s rural population is 73 percent or three-quarters of the population. Out of this, 70 percent are employed in agriculture, meaning Kenya is an agrarian economy.

Hence for Kenya to lift eight million individuals out of poverty, it has to make a tectonic shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. Unfortunately, industrialisation in this case seem to be ignorantly understood as merely working on ease of doing business and attract industrial investment.

These are not paper tiger games we are talking about. Industrialisation here means extraordinarily mobilising resources (capital, labour and infrastructure) more than just the conventional strategy whose output is not only to transform the economy to a sustainably high growth era, but also substantially raise per capita income by driving masses out of rural farms to formal employment in an urbanisation transformation.

Glad to see the gospel is spreading. Kenyan economy had deep structural issues that need radical adjustment. Uhuru had a good chance to start on it but he blew it massively. Wasted resources building infrastructure with a rural focus and after all that the economy has remained a peasant subsistence economy.

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