The post on African elites’ lack of ambition elicited a lot of reactions and mail (please use the comments section instead!) The piece deserves a follow up focusing on what is to be done about the problem (I’ll get to it at some point in the near future, I have been working on some ideas). But before that, it’s worth concretizing the diagnosis with an example — in this case Kenya.
This post discusses recent comments regarding Kenyan elites by Doanh Chau, a Vietnamese energy executive. It does this for two reasons. First, the problem of lack of collective elite-level ambition across Africa is real and arguably getting worse. Therefore, it must constantly be called out in the clearest manner possible until the situation improves.
Second, that the comment came from a Vietnamese executive is apt precisely because the critique gets to the point about the ingredients needed to move the needle (elite ambition and effective state systems that deliver results irrespective of regime type or overall quality of governance at the start); as opposed to the usual bromide (basically, become a democratic and free market society with Strong Western Institutions like Denmark then you’ll grow and become rich). Stated differently, Kenya stands to benefit a lot more from studying Vietnam’s ongoing economic takeoff (warts and all) than Denmark’s.
WHY AFRICA WAITS WHILE ASIA BUILDS: A Hard Look at Kenya
I met with Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and President William Ruto in Nairobi. They spoke with energy about Kenya’s future— investment, infrastructure, public housing. But behind the polished language was a painful truth: there is no serious execution culture.
Kenya’s real problem is not a lack of money or talent. It’s the absence of long-term vision and the dominance of short-term gain. Leaders talk big, but systems don’t move. They wait for outsiders to bring business, rather than build an environment for it.
The biggest indicator? Electricity. Vietnam: 100 million people, over 70 GW of power. Kenya: 50 million people, only 4 GW.
This is not a side issue—it’s the foundation of economic development. No investor will build a factory where the lights flicker every day. Vietnam knew this. It built power generation before free trade zones, and now it’s a global export hub.
In Kenya, basic energy supply is unstable. And yet, the government built a fancy expressway from Nairobi to Mombasa—without an export industry to support it. Meanwhile, millions live in slums and huts, with no access to reliable utilities.
Tourism is another missed opportunity. Safari bookings require 90-minute check-ins at park gates—even with reservations. After 9:00 PM, everything closes. There’s nothing for visitors to experience or spend on beyond a Masai market that’s essentially a souvenir stand.
President Ruto wants to build public housing, but investors are scared off by petty corruption, and legal instability. There are no credible incentives, no serious risk guarantees. In short, no real initiative to make it happen. Compare this to Vietnam or Singapore: Leaders are up at 5 a.m. working on execution, not speeches. Power supply is constant. Policies are consistent and data-driven. Incentives align with performance.
Africa doesn’t lack potential—it lacks a mindset shift.
Leadership must stop performing for the next donor visit or summit. It must build systems that attract local and global investment, reward builders, and guarantee follow-through. The global window is closing. Asia isn’t waiting. If Kenya and much of Africa want a real economic future, they must turn off the microphone—and turn on the power.
Doanh is spot on about Kenya’s lack of both the capacity to build things and leadership that can execute on complex projects. Overall, Kenya has a decent stock of human capital for its level of development. However, it’s also true that the talent remains thin for a range of mission-critical areas. In engineering or R&D, for example, the country is nowhere near where it should be. Kenya graduates barely 2000 engineers per year, compared to Vietnam’s well over 100,000. Vietnam has almost 5 times more R&D researchers per capita than Kenya. To make matters worse, the last decade has witnessed a systematic erosion of policymaking capacity — including within the all-important Treasury. It’s therefore not surprising that Kenya is in the midst of wrecking its education system in the name of reforms; while Vietnam continues to top the global education tables.
The erosion of capacity is what leads to the all talk and no action posture. The way I see it, President William Ruto’s biggest problem is that he hasn’t cultivated any islands of excellence. Of course everyone focuses on his governance failures. But Vietnam, the comparative case here, is an autocracy with lots of corruption. An important difference is that, unlike in Vietnam, there’s not a single ministry/department whose leadership can be trusted to execute on a complicated project. It’s simply not in the administration’s DNA to conceptualize and effectively execute. The end of policymaking is service to distributive politics. Period.
Ordinarily, someone like Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir (Infrastructure) would be the “doer” in the administration whose word bankable and who is empowered with the capacity to get things done. Notice that this doesn’t obviate standard politics of access, et cetera. The point is that a developing country like Kenya needs clear guarantors of predictability and risk mitigation. Yet due to his equal opportunity style of managing intra-elite distributive politics, the president has failed to effective delegate even to someone like Chirchir — who mind you, doesn’t pose a political threat to the president. This has created too many potential intra-elite veto points in pursuit of rent seeking.
The net result is that even the president lacks the capacity to be a credible guarantor of risk management strategies or overall project success. At a structural level, he’s hostage to the distributive politics he uses to keep fellow elites onside to maintain power and control. To put it bluntly, his coalition is woefully indisciplined on matters policy. Furthermore, even when he can create states of exception in order to get things done for the greater good there’s simply no capacity to back up his political resolve. Staffing in critical positions is hostage to his equal opportunity rent seeking — which is evidenced by high levels of volatility in key positions (cabinet, principal secretaries, and directors). And so absolutely nothing gets done (well).
To be fair, this isn’t a William Ruto problem. From a historical political economy perspective, you can see this in the evolution of Kenya’s politics of visible and attributable development. Senior government officials used to take pride in launching completed projects. That’s what was on the plaques. These days they build shoddy plaques for projects that are barely past the planning stage — many of which get abandoned (but the plaques remain standing!)
Cheap talk in the forms of budget allocation, project designs, and groundbreaking ceremonies have become the currency of politics as opposed finished projects.
Let’s start with electricity. Comparing Kenya and Vietnam, what you see in the data is divergence over time in both total energy supply and consumption, as well as efficiency of converting energy into economic output.
According to the IEA, electricity consumption per capita Kenya is 0.19 MWh/capita (up from 0.13MWh/capita in 1990) compared to Vietnam’s 2.67MWh/Capita (up from 0.099MWh/capita in 1990). Since 2000 electricity consumption in Vietnam has increased by over 800%, compared to Kenya’s more modest 76% increase over the same time period. Interestingly, Kenya appears to be far less efficient in converting energy supply into economic output. Kenya’s total energy supply per unit of GDP (PPP) has actually decreased by 21% since 2000 — from 6322MJ/’000 2015 USD to 5024MJ/’000 2015 USD. The commensurate figures from Vietnam decreased by a more modest 9% — from 4480 MJ/’000 2015 USDto 4061MJ/’000 2015 USD. Notice that carbon intensity decreases with levels of economic development (it turns out growth is good for climate).
Part of the reason Kenya missed the energy train in the 1990s is because it has failed to modernize its economy. As such, demand remains rather muted despite the recent increase in headline figures on electricity access — which raises the cost of access for those connected to the grid. The exit of a number of industrial power consumers who’ve opted to generate their own power, to take care of cost and reliability concerns, has exacerbated the situation. Furthermore, the government inexplicably views the throttling of energy consumption as one of its primary roles. Taxes make up about half of the costs of petroleum fuel. The country also remains saddled with very expensive (and allegedly politically motivated) power purchase agreements from independent power producers (IPPs). According to the office of the Auditor General:
KenGen [state-owned power generator] supplied a total of 8,027 gigawatt hours (GWh) being 60% of the total power purchased while the IPPs supplied the remaining 5,263 GWh (40%). However, the cost of the total power purchased from KENGEN was Kshs.54,215,880,000 equivalent to 35% compared to power purchase…
