This is an abridged version of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech marking Kenya’s 58th Madaraka Day in Kisumu. The speech captures the full spirit and vision of the Big 4 Agenda and Kenya’s Vision 2030 social and economic development blueprint. The choice of Kisumu to host Madaraka Day this year was intertwined with our national heritage, for there cannot be a better place to celebrate our liberation struggle and ponder the future of our self-rule than Kisumu City.
Kisumu is not only the historical hub of East African Co-operation; it is also the intellectual incubator of some of the leading ideas behind our liberation movement. The national motto of “Harambee”, even though an import from India, was, for instance, introduced as a political rallying call in Kisumu City during the 1950s. After independence, our Founding Fathers popularised it as the national mantra of “Pulling Together”. Similarly, and led by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kisumu was the epicenter of the push to release Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and the “Kapenguria Six” from their illegal detention by the colonisers.
Furthermore, during the detention of those liberation heroes at Kapenguria, union leaders from this region joined other Kenyans and quickly stepped into the gap to ensure that the liberation momentum was not lost. It was pre-independence leaders from this region who taught us that attaining self-rule was not a one-man race. Rather, it was a relay in which, if one set of runners fell out, another set was ready to continue the race.
With such a well-appointed history of the struggle, and the history of reconciliation, there is no a better place to commemorate Madaraka Day than Kisumu City.
Let us recall some of the principles of nationhood from the Founding Fathers of this nation.
One, they taught us that a progressive nation is one that is in continuous conversation with itself. This is because nationhood is a negotiated process that needs constant alignments and adjustments in the pursuit of perfection. The architects of Madaraka, however, warned us that in making such adjustments and alignments, we must avoid the ‘paralysis of constitutional rigidity’.
Two, they taught us that self-rule is not an end in itself; it is a means to a greater end. Indeed, as T. J. Mboya once said, “…Only through freedom and human rights could a people cooperate fully with their government”. But for freedom and human rights to be realised, the paradox of choices must be resolved.
Three, they revealed the paradox when they emphasised that self-rule is the granting of opportunities, accompanied by the burden of choice. Every opportunity in the exercise of freedoms and self-rule, must be tempered by the consequences of choice.
Every right granted must have a corresponding responsibility. And those who enjoy opportunities, but neglect the burden of choice, cannot be said to be truly free. This paradox of choices and freedoms applies to both individuals and institutions.
Based on some of these teachings, we have built one of the most robust democracies in Africa. The fields of individual freedoms have expanded and citizen participation has become emboldened. Our independent institutions have also occupied their rightful positions, and all of this is because of the 2010 Constitution. And as I have said in the past, ours is probably the most progressive constitution in the continent of Africa and the world. However, whereas the 2010 Constitution expanded our individual fields of freedom, it also expanded the burden of the choices we make. Even our Founding Fathers urged the liberated patriots to shift from the status of being subjects to that of citizens when their fields of freedom were expanded.
They made it clear that a citizen is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with freedom; while a subject will squander opportunities granted by self-rule and refuse to shoulder the burden of their choices. Similarly, the framers of the 2010 Constitution did not envisage a situation where the expanded fields of rights resulted in diminished responsibility by citizens and institutions. They saw a balance between freedoms and the consequences of choice.
But this balance is probably most challenged by the growth of our independent institutions. Their growth has stretched our democratic boundaries to the limit; but it has not cracked them. It has bent the will of the people; but it has not broken it. In fact, any other African country experiencing the political turns and twists we have experienced in the search for greater perfection in our nationhood would have burst asunder.
What are the consequences of choice?
If the citizens are required to exercise their will and shoulder the burden of their choices, should the independent institutions not do likewise? Shouldn’t their decisions also be accompanied by a burden of choice? These are the questions our national conversation should objectively ponder.
BBI is meant to build bridges, create inclusive politics, and end ethnic majoritarianism. Without BBI, who carries the burden of choice? On whose shoulders will ethnic majoritarianism rest? And who will carry the burden of losing 30 percent of our national budget every five years due to the toxic politics that BBI seeks to resolve?
Can Kenya truly be a democracy if the people are denied the opportunity to express their sovereign and supreme choice at the ballot box, on the basis of elevating technicalities over the overriding objectives of law? Our Constitution is not a yoke around our necks. Rather, it is a mighty sword that can break the chains that limit us.
I wish to remind us of an instruction left behind by the Founding Father of our nation, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. He said: “…Our children, born and unborn, may learn about the heroes of the past. But our present task is to make ourselves the architects of the future”.
This was a call to action. It was a call to predict the future by creating it. And against this background, the national question of the moment must be posed.
If, indeed, freedom is nothing but an opportunity to become better, how have we enriched what the Founding Fathers placed in our custody? Have we made it better than we found it? And has Kenya occupied its rightful place in the society of nations as a result of our improvements?
That is the national question of the day. And in response to this question, I will use the “Four Frames” of our liberation struggle that have informed my administration.
The first frame is economic. This frame is informed by the notion that political freedom in the absence of economic freedom is nothing but an illusion. Given that the Founding Fathers stood for economic inclusion and the administration before mine was about economic recovery; my administration has embraced the maxim of economic acceleration.
Economic acceleration, in my administration, is about increasing the speed of achieving our national goals. We have increased this speed at the national, county, and individual levels.
At the national level, the colonisers left us with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the measure for the national cake — of close to Ksh 6.4 billion in 1963 at the exchange rate of that time. After 74 years of colonial occupation, this is what Kenya was worth every year. Then the combined administrations of Mzee Kenyatta, Mzee Daniel arap Moi and Mzee Mwai Kibaki increased this national cake to Ksh 4.5 trillion. And they did this in a span of 50 years.
But in only eight years, my administration has doubled what the colonisers and the first three administrations did in 128 years. Our national cake, or our annual worth as a country every year, is now at Ksh 10.3 trillion. Even if you factor in inflation, our economic acceleration programme has multiplied what the Founding Fathers left in our custody.
At the county level, we have allocated Ksh 2.3 trillion to counties. This is equivalent to about 16 percent of our current GDP. What this means is that, we have sent to the counties the equivalent of what our national cake was between 1885 when the colonisers came to Kenya and when President Moi retired in 2002. We have achieved this in a mere seven years.
The BBI dream is to send even more resources to the counties to catalyse their accelerated development. That is why we have proposed, under the BBI, to send 35 percent of our national revenue to counties.
At the individual level, our economic acceleration initiative has focused on the allocation of title deeds. I am proud to say that; we have accelerated land adjudication in a way that is unprecedented. The previous administrations issued six million title deeds in 50 years; but my administration has issued 5.1 million title deeds in seven years only. On a pro rata basis, this is seven times what previous administrations had done combined.
I am happy to note that close to 20 percent of the titles we have issued are in the Nyanza region. In fact, most of them are in Kisumu County. The title deed is what our Founding Fathers fought for when they made land ownership a central plank of our independence struggle. And by accelerating land adjudication and settlement, my intention is to give security of tenure to as many Kenyans as possible.
The second frame is what I call, “the Big Push Investments”. Our Founding Fathers laid the foundation for the future they dreamt of. Then they dared us to build that future by doing big things. But on this, they also cautioned us that, to do big things, you cannot be distracted by small things.
The Big Push Investments are about laying the ground for our economic take-off. Many Kenyans have asked why my administration is investing in big infrastructure projects. Why the roads, the rails, and the ports? And my answer to this question is simple. When Cecil Rhodes, the British coloniser, and his brothers dreamt of a road from Cape Town to Cairo, their vision was not the road. The road was not the dream. The dream was what the road would do for them.
In the same vein, our brick-and-mortar investments of roads, rail and ports are NOT the dream. The dream is what the “Big Push Investments” will do for Kenya; and how they will transform our standing in the community of nations. And form the basis of national prosperity and creation of decent and steady jobs for our people.
Take the Lamu Port. It is the first Port to be built in Kenya since the Port of Mombasa in 1896. For 115 years, no government has built a deep-sea port on the East African Coast of the Indian Ocean. Kenya is the first country to do so. Similarly, the history of this port dates back to 1972 when the idea was hatched. It took 49 years for us to conceptualise and mull this port; but it took just eight years to make it a reality.
Once it is operational, Kenya will have claimed its stake in the Indian Ocean real estate. The Port of Lamu will be able to handle ships the size of those that transit through the Suez Canal. And this capacity will not only increase our trans-shipment business, but will also impact over 130 million residents of the Eastern African region.
Another Big Push Investment we have engaged in is the revival of dead capitals. And we have done this because the instructions of our Founding Fathers were to take care of what they had built.
In this regard, we have revived 566km of the dead Metre Gauge Railway. The revived 200km Nairobi-Nanyuki railway will be a game changer. Every trip, the train will transport 1,600 passengers, which is equivalent to a convoy of 120 matatus. And the cost per passenger will be Ksh 200 compared to Ksh 500 by matatu.
Although it takes a little longer by train, the passenger will make a 60 percent saving using the revived train system; all while travelling at greater comfort and assured safety. Further, moving our tea and coffee through this line at greatly reduced costs, will result in more shillings in the pockets of our hard working farmers.
But the most uplifting story of the revived dead capitals is our Big Push Investment in the Port of Kisumu and the reconditioning of the MV Uhuru vessel. I will not talk about the jobs this has created and the business buzz it has evoked in Kisumu. Those are obvious. I will talk about the economics of this decision.
To transport fuel by road from Kisumu to Uganda takes 72 hours because of the long queues at the Malaba border. But to transport fuel from the Port of Kisumu to Port Bell in Uganda by ship takes only 12 hours. This means that by the time a tanker makes one trip to Uganda by road, the MV Uhuru Ship will have made six trips.
Then there is the question of volume. One tanker carries 20,000 litres of fuel; but one wagon aboard MV Uhuru carries 60,000 litres, which is three times the size of a tanker.
If the ship accommodates 22 wagons, each voyage it makes to Port Bell is an equivalent of a convoy of 66 tankers headed to Uganda.
What is more: If it costs US$ 35 to transport 1,000 litres of fuel by road per kilometre, it costs US$ 16 to transport the same through the Port of Kisumu. For every US$2 spent transporting fuel to Uganda by road, you spend only US$1 through the port. Further, the fuel lost by road transport was estimated to be worth Ksh 6 billion per year. Today, by transporting through rail, this amount has been reduced to zero, while fuel adulteration is a thing of the past.
And for those asking why we have made the Big Push Investment in the Port of Kisumu, there is your answer. If it takes one-sixth of the time to transport goods by ship compared with road transport, it is good for traders and also for investors, making our region that much more competitive globally.
If in one trip you carry three times the volume by ship compared with tankers, that is good for commerce. And if it costs you half the price to use the Port of Kisumu compared with road transportation, that is good economics. Indeed, all our Big Push Investments have been conceived to catalyse the economy and to provide the most rational choices for all actors.
The third frame I want us to ponder over this Madaraka Day is that of the restoration of dignity. Our Founding Fathers defined ‘dignity’ as ‘freedom from want’. From the outset, liberation from the ‘poverty of dignity’ was a central motif of our independence struggle. Indeed, our Founding Fathers taught us that self-rule will not be fully attained until self-worth is restored. And the national question we must ask this afternoon is whether we are on track in liberating our people from the poverty of dignity. To what extent have we liberated them from ‘want’?
Article 23 and Article 43 of our Constitution make the restoration of dignity a continuous process rather than a one-off activity. And the question this Madaraka Day is, how well we have rendered this aspect of our freedom.
Some may ask what ‘poverty of dignity’ is and I will explain. Before we started the Big Push Investments in Nairobi under the Nairobi Metropolitan Service, there was only one clinic with 15 beds serving 500,000 residents of Mukuru Informal Settlement. When a mother delivered a baby in Mukuru, she had less than one hour of post-natal care before being asked to leave to make way for the next patient. This is poverty of dignity. We fixed this indignity by building 25 hospitals in the informal settlements of Nairobi in a mere 100 days.
Let me give another example. When a patient suffering from kidney disease had to travel 70 kilometres from Siaya to Kisumu three times a week for dialysis, that was a tragic indignity. But this tragedy of indignity was made worse because this patient needed 10 dialysis sessions a month. If one session costs between Ksh 9,000 and Ksh 16,000, it meant that the patient had to spend between Ksh 90,000 and Ksh 160,000 every month. Such patients had to sell their ancestral inheritance, such as land, in order to get treatment. The net effect of this was that their illness ended up disinheriting their families and indignifying the generations to come. This is what poverty of dignity looks like.
But today, I am happy to note that the patient from Siaya does not have to travel for 70 kilometres to Kisumu for treatment. There are dialysis machines in Siaya at the sub-county level. Similarly, he does not have to pay Ksh 160,000 a month for dialysis or sell his ancestral land. All he needs to do is to spend Ksh 500 a month on a NHIF card. This card gives him free dialysis every month.
If dignity is ‘freedom from want’, then we have restored it using our health interventions; in fact, we have accelerated it. I say so because, between 1963 and 1978, as a country, we had only one renal unit and one dialysis machine. President Moi added one more and President Kibaki added four more renal units. By the time my administration took over, we had only six renal units for the entire country.
Today, and in only six years, we have 54 renal units with 360 state-of-the-art dialysis machines distributed among all 47 counties. Coupled with the NHIF card, this uprated health infrastructure has restored the dignity of families previously condemned to disinherit their children because of disease.
The dignity of families is supported by sustainable livelihoods. It is for this reason that my administration’s agenda continues to focus on creating an enabling environment that offers every Kenyan an opportunity to participate in the economy. Over the years Micro, Small and Medium Business Enterprises have turned to be a breeding ground for indigenous industries. Because of this remarkable expansion, their contribution to national development continues to grow from strength to strength; and they are today the greatest engines of employment creation in our nation.
The development of the 1,000-acre Kisumu Special Economic Zone will provide immense opportunities for value addition of agricultural products, for the entirety of the western region and enhance the Blue Economy activities of the Lake Victoria basin. The dignity we seek to restore through sustainable livelihoods will give every Kenyan an opportunity to participate in economic development. For instance, to address the inequity in tendering for contracts by the Jua Kali artisans and craftsmen, due to their lack of certification and to secure opportunities for them, I am announcing today a new initiative by my administration to provide a framework for recognition of the skills through awards of certificates, based on competence, to better enable them participate in various economic opportunities.
Now I will end very briefly with the fourth frame of our National Question this Madaraka Day. For us to secure what we have achieved in 58 years, we must not make politics the heat and light of our national existence.
Instead, we must endeavour to pursue political stabilisation by any means necessary. I say so because stability is the life-blood of our republic. What we have built for 58 years, can be destroyed in one day of political instability. But we cannot engage in political stabilisation if we live in political denial.
For instance, everyone knows that BBI is good. It is good for our country. It is even good for those unhappy with it.
But too many Kenyans have embraced fear of change over the need to continuously strive for a fairer, just, peaceful, cohesive, and democratic Kenya.
They oppose BBI not because of its substance; which even its harshest critics concede is good, but because, unlike our Founding Fathers, they cannot dare imagine a better Kenya for all.
The spirit of the law is the light that will illuminate the burden of the choices made by independent institutions of government and political stabilisation will be easy to achieve.
As for the political elite, if we remain short-termism and self-serving, the consequences of our choices will become a permanent burden on our people. Let it be clear to all Kenyans, short-termism is not the path to political stabilisation.
Our Founding Fathers encouraged the liberated patriots to upgrade from the status of being subjects to that of being citizens by embracing freedom with responsibility. I want to make a similar invitation to our political class this Madaraka Day. I want to invite them to upgrade their status from being politicians to being leaders. Politicians are obsessed with personal gain; but it is our national pain that should disturb them.
I have illuminated just a fraction of what my administration has done, for that is not what is important. What is important is the recognition of what those who went before us did. We have only built on that foundation with the full recognition that we are still a long way to achieving all the hopes and aspirations of our people.
But, like our forefathers, we live in the hope that future administrations will not seek to live in acrimony and division; not to destroy but to build on our achievements and reach even greater heights, so that we can truly live the vision of Kenya as articulated by our fore fathers. That the task before us is not for today, but for enhanced and proper architecture of the future.
This is why I want to thank the Right Honourable Raila Odinga for embracing our national pain over his personal gain, when we did the Handshake. What is more: he did this without asking or demanding anything from me. That is why, it has been a great pleasure working with him. And whatever the future holds, I look forward to working with him and all Kenyans to build a better, brighter, more united and prosperous Kenya, East Africa and Africa.
Kisumu City will in May 2022, play host to the largest Africities Summit ever hosted in Kenya. That event will be a gathering that will feature ministers, mayors and leaders of local authorities, representatives of civil society, the private sector, academia, national, regional, and international financial institutions, development partners, and other stakeholders.
My administration will extend to the County Government of Kisumu every support to showcase Kenya and Kisumu to Africa and the rest of the world.