Can Kenyan corporates become global giants like the country's athletes?

Runner David Rudisha celebrates on the podium for the men's 800m in the athletics event during the 2016 Summer Olympics at the Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil on August 16, 2016. PHOTO | JOHANNES EISELE | AFP

What you need to know:

  • Political and socio-economic sensitivities of making strategic decisions about which industries, sectors and companies will be grown into billion-dollar giants creating local millionaires and billionaires should be weighed against much greater social and economic gains from the millions of well-paying decent jobs ordinary Kenyans will enjoy when these companies are in place.

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen Kenyan athletes win six gold, six silver and one bronze, which, together, are more than the medals won by the rest of Africa. The women athletes did exceptionally well, and new stars were born such as the 1,500m women’s gold medal winner, and the 3,000m steeplechase men’s gold medal winner – the rise of a new generation of athletes from a seemingly inexhaustible pool of talent.

Kenya was 15th overall and 3rd in track and field, and once again showed that it is a world power when it comes to sports. Kenyan chests swelled with pride each time the national anthem was played at the gold medal award ceremonies, the most poignant one being at the awarding of the marathon gold. The backstory to this exceptional achievement appears to be a sordid tale of mismanagement, mistreatment, and misuse of the athletes, but they overcame this to produce Kenya’s best performance ever at the 2016 Olympics.

Could Kenya dare to produce global champions in other fields beyond athletics that are as good and capable of overcoming all forms of adversity to shine globally? Could it, for instance, produce corporate global champions capable of striding on the global stage as our athletes do? The initial answer, based on conventional thinking, would be to say, it cannot. The reason being, as in the case of athletics we can cite all sorts of barriers – corruption, lack of sufficient infrastructure, lack of skilled labour force, lack of capital, and the list goes on, that mitigate against such possibilities on the corporate front.

But take the case of the silver medallist in javelin at Rio 2016, and world champion in 2016 in the same event. The good gentleman is largely self-taught, and the anecdotal narrative is that he taught himself to the highest technical levels of the discipline using YouTube. That tells you that determined Kenyans will always overachieve, once they set hearts and minds to it.

FREEDOM FIGHTERS

The evidence is plenty: the first freedom fighters to wage armed struggle against colonialism in Africa were from Kenya. Kenya has also produced a Nobel Prize winner, Oscar winner, globally acknowledged writers and intellectuals, and, just as importantly, people of Kenyan extraction throughout the world have also excelled. The list of the latter is illustrious, a Kenyan-American President, a soon to be Kenyan-Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, a Kenyan-British triple winner of the Tour de France, and too many others to be mentioned here.

So the question arises: with such potential to rise above all sorts of adversity shown by individuals, is there any chance our corporates overcome adversity and also rise up from the savannahs to become global giants? After all, South Korea’s rise to a global economic power was based on some tiny homegrown firms such as Daewoo, Hyundai, LG and Samsung, growing from humble beginnings to their highly esteemed places in the corporate pantheon today.

The chaebol, as they are called collectively, got every support from government in terms of policy incentives, infrastructure development, development financing, and aggressive targets. They also formed joint ventures, and manufactured under contract for American and Japanese companies, and exported aggressively helped by most favourable market entry opportunities in the US and Japan. By doing so, they created directly and indirectly, millions of well-paying jobs in South Korea and elsewhere in the world, and of course many millionaires and billionaires across a wide range of industries and sectors. They are still the biggest employers and most important contributors to the South Korean economy to date.

Why, then, should Kenya not consider going down this path? Like South Korea, Kenya has a great and largely untapped opportunity to grow our homegrown global champions, leveraging on the multi-billion-dollar market access in America offered by AGOA. It has begun to invest heavily in energy and transportation infrastructure, passed laws allowing for the establishment of economic zones, created sound business laws, and what is needed now is land, banks and development finance institutions to have the right environment for the creation of Kenyan chaebol.

The political and socio-economic sensitivities of making strategic decisions about which industries, sectors and companies will be grown into billion-dollar giants creating local millionaires and billionaires should be weighed against much greater social and economic gains from the millions of well-paying decent jobs ordinary Kenyans will enjoy when these companies are in place. In doing so, Kenya stands the chance of possibly becoming Africa’s first industrialised country by 2040.