Compare and contrast the economic development of kenya during Moi regime and Kibaki regime
Answers
While there is now broad consensus that innovation is a key driver of productivity growth, debates about the state’s role in promoting innovation remain polarised between two competing analytical and ideological paradigms. The first is neoliberalism, which confines the state to correcting market failures, ensuring competition and supporting the innovative force of the private-sector. Drawing on the developmental state phenomenon, the second calls for a strong and visionary state to drive innovation by targeting industries for investment and protecting firms until they are ready to face competition. The literature broadly falls within these camps, identifying innovation as a market- or state-driven process. This paper challenges both, arguing that there are multiple pathways to innovation, many of which represent a messier middle ground. The case of Kenya, which has become a hotbed for mobile money innovation since launching its pioneering M-Pesa service in 2007, is used to make this argument. Neoliberal and statist accounts fail to explain this story, which needs to be framed in relation to underlying power relations that span this divide. The M-Pesa success has played out within a highly-particularistic and patronage-based political context, whereby the interests of key groups within Kenya’s political settlement have crystallised to shield M-Pesa's parent company Safaricom, whose ownership structure and strategic partnerships draw in elites from across the political spectrum, from competition. This has afforded Safaricom space to innovate with M-Pesa, engendering a form of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ within which it has become a vehicle for rents to be centralised and deployed within strategic industries according to a long-term vision, with profits parcelled back to elites through generous dividend pay-outs. Concluding, the paper calls for more nuanced political economy understandings of the drivers of innovation, and mobile money adoption in particular.
Moi’s rule
Misgivings about what would happen with the departure of such a dominant figure as Kenyatta were soon dispelled. The transfer of power took place smoothly, owing mainly to the skillful leadership of Njonjo and Kibaki, but the transition was also helped by a boom in coffee prices that eased the country’s economic problems to a considerable extent. At first, Moi followed Kenyatta’s policy of distributing offices among as many different ethnic groups as possible, but over the years members of his own Kalenjin group acquired a disproportionate number of appointments. Odinga was still critical of the government, and university students supported him on idealistic grounds—and also because they saw little prospect in the near future of being able to supplant those holding the limited number of lucrative offices.
The enthusiastic euphoria that attended the assumption of power by Mwai Kibaki of the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC) in Kenya in 2002 has been replaced by disappointment and despair over the performance of the new regime. Within two years it has lost both national popularity and goodwill. A critical look at the political biographies of the new power elite, the nature of Kenyan political culture coupled with the institutional context of governance, the class linkages between the new elite and those they replaced, as well as rational self-interest on the part of politicians, demonstrates why the new regime was predisposed to reproduce the kleptocracy and corruption of the defeated Moi regime rather than engage in State reform and efficient economic management. The case of the Kibaki regime reveals an overall tension exhibited by most pro-democracy activists between the consistent fight for a radical transformation of the State and the expedient use of this fight for personal gain through access to State power. The transition from Moi to Kibaki in Kenya demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on regime change as the first step toward greater democratization. The implications of the NARC politics of continuity are threefold: the NARC regime is set to self-destruct; this may portend a return to political repression; and the critical moment for change has been lost, with the propertied class now dominant in Kenya reluctant to restructure the State to serve the wider interests of society.