President William Ruto. [File, Standard]
Kenya is once again being asked to imagine the future. As Vision 2030 approaches its end, President William Ruto has announced a new national conversation on what comes next, with consultations expected to begin across the country. Through the commencement of this conversation, it is clear the government understands that there is something seductive about the politics of futurity, particularly in a country where successive governments have built their legitimacy around promises of what Kenya will become. We are repeatedly offered visions of modern cities, a digital economy, industrialisation, infrastructure and global competitiveness. We are ever on the journey of becoming the next Singapore. However, the promise of our arrival is always pushed farther ahead, with little conversation about our various failures to launch.
Beyond imagining the future, there is the present to contend with. There is an uncomfortable contradiction in asking people to imagine Kenya in 2060 when so many are struggling to survive Kenya in 2026, and Vision 2030 remains a pipe dream. This does not mean that Kenya should abandon long-term planning. On the contrary, a country needs to imagine the society it wants to build and work towards achieving the vision. But national visions are far from being politically neutral, and this new envisioning project reflects that clearly by showing us this government’s particular understanding of what constitutes progress.
Kenya does not suffer from a shortage of visions. We have had Vision 2030, the Big Four Agenda, successive medium-term plans, economic blueprints and countless presidential promises of transformation. What we have lacked is not imagination, but a consistent political willingness to redistribute power and resources. The danger of another grand national vision is therefore that it becomes another document full of ambitious targets that ultimately tells us very little about how ordinary people will experience the future. A development plan can promise a trillion-dollar economy while families remain unable to afford basic healthcare. The question is not whether Kenya will grow, but whether growth will actually change the material conditions of the people who make Kenya function.
For decades, Kenya’s development imagination has been dominated by economic growth. Success is frequently measured by GDP, foreign investment, infrastructure, industrial output, technological advancement and the ability to attract capital. These indicators have their place, but they tell us very little about who actually benefits from economic growth and whose labour makes it possible. The question of who benefits becomes particularly important when we consider the way Kenya talks about its young population. Young people are routinely described as the country’s greatest resource, particularly during political campaigns. Yet young people are often treated as resources rather than citizens with political and economic demands of their own. They are celebrated when they are entrepreneurial, technologically innovative or capable of creating employment for themselves, while their demands for decent work, meaningful political participation, social protection and economic security are frequently treated as unreasonable. A country that tells its young people to become entrepreneurs or leave the country entirely because it cannot provide enough jobs, and then celebrates them for their resilience, is lying to its youth about the future that is supposed to be better for them. A genuinely ambitious vision for Kenya would not simply ask how young people can adapt to economic insecurity, but would ask why economic insecurity has become such a defining feature of their lives, and work to resolve this.
This brings us to the democratic question at the heart of the proposed national conversation. If Kenyans are being invited to participate in imagining the country’s future, participation must mean more than being invited to endorse a vision that has already been produced elsewhere. The people most affected by national development plans must have meaningful power to shape them. That means recognising indigenous knowledge and local experience as legitimate forms of expertise rather than treating development as something that can only be designed by economists, consultants, government officials and corporate actors. Most importantly, it means recognising that the future is not something governments simply build for citizens but is instead something citizens should have the power to shape for themselves.
Indeed, then, the most important question for the next national vision is not simply what Kenya wants to become, but who Kenya wants to become for. A properly formulated vision would ask whether development reduces inequality rather than simply increasing the size of the economy, and whether the benefits of transformation are experienced by the majority rather than concentrated among those who already possess wealth and political influence. It would ask whether the promises of development are actually reflected in the everyday lives of Kenyans, rather than assuming that economic growth will automatically translate into improved living conditions.
After all is said and done, we must come to terms with the fact that Kenya is about to begin yet another conversation about its future, and we should participate in it. But we should also be difficult. We should ask who is in the room, whose voices are missing, who benefits, who pays, and who decides. Because before we decide what Kenya should look like in 2060, we need to decide what kind of Kenya we are willing to build today.