Make it friendly to do business in Kenya

The government has been running media advertisements dubbed, “Business Made Easier in Kenya”, outlining the reforms that have been undertaken to make business “better, faster, and easier”.

And at the 2016 African Employers’ Summit in Naivasha in May, President Uhuru Kenyatta decried bureaucratic practices that hinder business, terming them impediments to economic growth and job creation.

This is not the first time that the national leadership has decried bureaucracy as an obstacle to business growth.

Yet, these reforms notwithstanding, doing business in Kenya remains painfully cumbersome.

Why has it become so difficult to simplify business operations?

First, our policy makers are obsessed with large foreign investors, ignoring the local people, especially small-scale businesses, which are the backbone of the economy and contribute enormously to employment creation?

Secondly, and most important, is the failure to focus on the management of urban centres, which host the bulk of business activities.

Urban institutions are the economic nucleus of a country and their status is an indirect index of national life and health.

You can tell a lot about Kenya just by looking at Nairobi and Mombasa.

The garbage on the streets, potholes, and traffic congestion and disorder are just pointers to the wider national culture of inefficiency and maladministration.

Yet urban centres ought to be the epicentres of economic, cultural, and technological vibrancy under which new businesses sprout and existing ones blossom.

The malaise afflicting our urban centres is historical. First are the colonial by-laws that were enacted to punish indigenous small-scale traders, who were then considered to be a nuisance.

Secondly, at the peak of Kanu’s rule in the 1980s, urban authorities were heavily politicised to make them amenable to government control.

This was the genesis of the tribalism, nepotism, and general inefficiency that have overshadowed our urban centres and led to their degradation.

Businesses in Kenya are at the mercy of this operational context.

It is no wonder that our country is hostile to the business activities of ordinary citizens as the urban leadership is more inclined towards control and strangulation than support and facilitation.

Small businesses waste a lot of time, energy, and money trying to cope with an insensitively rigid regulatory framework, leading to waste and low productivity.

It was hoped that devolution would improve the ease of doing business as counties compete for local capital with creative incentives and licensing efficiency.

Unfortunately, even with all the investment fairs across different counties, county governments are only bottling the problem of overregulation as they seek more revenue to support their bloated and incompetent workforces.

And small businesses bear the brunt of this, so much so that doing business in Kenya seems to be a crime!

Every day, you spot county government officials on patrol, preying on businesses to intimidate them over flimsy technicalities in outdated by-laws in order to extort bribes.

These officials never see the contradiction in them leaving their dirty offices and even shamelessly passing by burst sewers and garbage on the streets to ransack eating places and stores looking for flimsy requirements such as hygiene certificates and staff uniforms.

If Kenya genuinely desires to create a vibrant business climate, it must transform the management of urban areas and revise their by-laws to enable them to become citadels of commerce.

At the national level, licensing and regulation must be streamlined to make it easy for ordinary citizens to do business without the constant fear of harassment.

Mr Njaga is a travel consultant. [email protected].