On the trail of capital flight from Africa extends pioneering work begun much earlier. The editors – Leonce Ndikumana and James Boyce – estimate Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has lost more than US$2 trillion to capital flight in the last half century. SSA currently loses US$65 billion annually – more than yearly official development assistance (ODA) inflows. The book’s studies carefully investigate natural resource exploitation – of South African minerals, Ivorian cocoa, and Angolan oil and diamonds.

Such forensic country analyses are crucial to more effectively check capital flight. Outflows since the 1980s from the three countries have been massive: US$103 billion from Angola, US$55 billion from Cote d’Ivoire, and US$329 billion from South Africa in 2018 dollars.

Capital flight has been much more than cumulative external debt. Annual outflows were between 3.3% and 5.3% of national income. Nigeria, South Africa and Angola account for the most capital outflows from SSA, with Cote d’Ivoire seventh.

Resource booms

As governments get more revenue from natural resources, the fiscal ‘social contract’ is eroded. When people pay taxes, they expect state spending to benefit the public. But with more revenue from resources – via state monopolies, royalties and taxes – governments become less accountable to their own citizens.

Gaining and maintaining access to foreign credit has similar effects. Developing country governments then focus on ingratiating themselves with friendly foreign donor governments to get ODA, and on enhancing their credit ratings.

Hence, such regimes have less political need to provide ‘public goods’, including services, let alone accelerate social progress. Thus, erosion of the fiscal ‘social contract’ undermines not only public wellbeing, but also state legitimacy.

To secure power, ruling cliques often rely on ‘clientelism’ – patronage or patron-client relations – typically on regional, ethnic, tribal, religious or sectarian lines. Their regimes inevitably provoke dissent – including oppositional ethno-populism and civil unrest, even armed insurgencies.

Unsurprisingly, such regimes believe their choices are limited. Another option is repression – which typically rises as the status quo is threatened. The resulting sense of insecurity spreads from the public to the elite, worsening capital flight.

Exploiting valuable natural resources not only generates export earnings, but also attracts foreign investments. One result is ‘Dutch disease’ as the national currency rises in value – reducing other exports and jobs, inevitably hurting development prospects.

Thus, vast private fortunes have been made and illicitly transferred abroad. Ruling elites and their allies rarely only rely on either state or market to become richer. The book shows how both state and market strengthen private and personal power and influence.

Plundering Africa

The book’s case studies show how resource extraction has been central to capital flight. In all three countries, the efficacy of fiscal policy tools – especially to foster investments for development – has been undermined.

Outflows have increased with economic liberalization, as unrecorded financial outflows – via the current account – grow with freer trade. Thus, trade-related financial transactions enable corruption and capital flight.

In Côte d’Ivoire – the world’s top cocoa producer – rents initially came from supply chains connecting farmers to consumers. Corrupt partnerships – connecting domestic elites to foreign businesses – have been crucial to such arrangements.

Thus, natural resource primary commodity exports have enabled illicit capital flows. Ivorian cocoa exports have been consistently under-reported – with trade statistics of major importers showing massive under-invoicing by exporters.

Post-colonial political settlements have given a few privileged access to resource rents. With capital flight thus enabled, successive Ivorian regimes have been less obliged to spend more on development or public wellbeing.

Due to the cocoa boom, the post-colonial ‘Ivorian miracle’ ended when prices fell. The bust triggered a political crisis, culminating in civil war. But the crunch also meant the country could no longer service its foreign debt.

In Angola too, natural resources worsened its protracted civil wars. After these ruinous conflicts, oil rents enriched the triumphant nepotistic regime. This enabled the control to gain control of more, even as most Angolans continued to live in destitution.

Angola’s massive oil exports mainly benefited the small elite of cronies around the president. They failed to develop the economy or improve most lives. All this has been enabled by ‘helpful’ professionals who have enriched themselves doing so.

While benefiting its elite and foreign transnationals, Angola’s ‘oil curse’ has blocked balanced and sustainable development of its economy. Despite rapidly depleting its oil reserves, Angola and most Angolans have benefited little.

South Africa – SSA’s second largest economy after Nigeria – seems less reliant on natural resources. Post-apartheid economic liberalization has enabled capital flight as private corporate interests – especially the influential minerals-energy complex – quickly took advantage of the new dispensation.

By under-invoicing their exports, mineral interests have been engaged in massive capital flight and tax evasion. Meanwhile, business cronies have enriched themselves in new ways, e.g., in the state’s electric power sector. Such abuses were exposed by the Gupta family scandal, leading to then President Jacob Zuma’s downfall.

Stemming capital flight

‘State capture’ by politically influential nationals have undermined government regulatory capacities with help from transnational enablers. Ostensible ‘good governance’ reforms have enabled capital flight and tax evasion – by undermining ‘developmental governance’, including prudential regulation.

Institutional environments, mechanisms and enablers facilitate capital flight, tax evasion and wealth accumulation offshore. With often complex, varied and changing facilitation, capital flight has shifted massive wealth abroad for elites.

Transnational financial networks have eased capital outflows – at the expense of productive investments, good jobs and social wellbeing. Capital flight has worsened financing, including budgetary gaps – aggravating related social deprivations.

Wealth creation enhances the economic pie, but distribution depends on who appropriates it. Improved understanding of such varied and ever-changing relations of appropriation is crucial to effectively curb this haemorrhage.

Greater awareness should inspire and inform better measures to check capital flight from the global South. Instead of the Washington Consensus ‘good governance’ mantra, a developmental governance agenda is needed.

Hence, curbing capital flight is crucial for financing sustainable development. Checking capital flight and related abuses – such as trade mis-invoicing, money laundering, tax evasion and public asset acquisition by elites – requires well-coordinated efforts at both national and international levels.

All researchers, policymakers and regulators will gain from the book’s forensic analyses of financial, fiscal and other such abuses. International financial institutions now have little excuse for continuing to enable the capital flight and tax evasion still bleeding the global South.

We have reached a phase in Africa’s post-independence history where we cannot off the top of our head count the number of retired heads of states who are living peacefully at home or have quietly passed on into the great beyond. This is no mean achievement for the continent. Following independence from colonial rule, presidential transition was one of the things we in Africa often did badly; the tradition had long been for leaders to be shot out of power. This has changed. The eulogising through gritted teeth of the 1970s has given way to far more elaborate and socially reassuring mourning processes. We have come a long way.

Last week Kenya and the region laid to rest Mwai Kibaki, the country’s third president since independence. Many have reached out to me for comment or to write an obituary about him. I decided not to until the funeral was over and those essential rituals had been concluded by family and nation. It’s our African way. Others sought not my comments on my time with Kibaki but some sensational attack. I explained to one, “I don’t hate Mwai Kibaki, I never have. He isn’t a man who caused me to hate; he is someone who broke my heart.”

I had the honour of working for Mwai Kibaki from the beginning of 2003 until 2005 — the shortest stint in any job during entire my professional career. Kibaki employed me as his permanent secretary in the Office of the President in charge of Governance and Ethics. I had an office at State House, in part signifying the fulfilment of the campaign promise Kibaki had made to deal with corruption once he took office. At 38, I was truly excited by this honour to serve my country and the head of state. Being based at State House was a huge deal in the Kenyan political context. Random people would walk up to me and narrate long stories of their travails at the hands of, say, the judiciary, which they felt I could resolve simply because I “sat at State House”. We set up a Public Complaints Unit (PCU) to handle this and the rest of what became a flood of requests, entreaties, complaints and narrations of woe that, in particular, were directed to the president by ordinary wananchi at their wits end. The PCU was transformed into the Ombudsman’s office that was originally based at Cooperative Bank Building.

In my exuberance I had forgotten my own previous writings on the intrigues and machinations that took place in that House. Within a year, I realised that what I had considered a perk was no longer a perk at all. As time passed, I was reminded that while much that was good emanated from this seat of power, often too, a darkness also arose from this place that sprung from the most craven of our desires and our base greed. I came to discover that a drought was a business opportunity for some, that the reason the caps of policemen were falling part in the rain was a contract. Even the sausages, mandazis and bottles of mineral water that were served to us so efficiently could often be a racket. Shocked not only by the price the government was paying for mineral water but also by the utter resilience of the racket that was forcing his ministry to buy the water at five-star hotel prices, one minister took to buying his own water from Uchumi Supermarket.

*****

All leaders leave behind them a mixed legacy.

Before working for Kibaki, the most memorable story I had been told about him was of a time he attended a meeting of the Gikuyu Embu Meru Association (GEMA) in the 1970s. At this meeting the proposal was floated that every effort should be made to ensure that the presidency never leaves the Kikuyu community. Kibaki, who I was told was never that great a fan of GEMA, stood up and warned the gathering that they should not become like the monarchist Kabaka Yekka — “King Only” — movement and party in Uganda that had been started by elements of the Baganda elite to exclusively serve the interests of their own community. This had helped fuel anti-Baganda sentiment among the then ruling elite, comprised mainly of leaders from the north of Uganda. Kibaki was a respected leader not known for expressing emotive off-the-cuff sentiments. His “Kabaka Yekka” comment disrupted the entire meeting and it was left to others to recover the ground they felt his sentiments had lost them. This and other such commentaries regarding his political values made a major impression on me; they chimed with his public profile as it already was: laid back, non-confrontational, erudite, not inclined to tribal groupings and too much noise on the political stage.

When I joined his administration, the Kibaki I found myself working with fit the image I had of him. Prior to this, in 2001-2002, I had worked as part of the team that crafted his transition and anti-corruption strategy. He wasn’t a man of too many words and even though the part of his legacy that has been spoken about most glowingly is the economy, Kibaki never gave lectures about economic policy. It was almost as if his understanding and posture in regard to restabilising the economy was implicit and he surrounded himself with people who “got it”, as it were. In truth, within months of taking office and inheriting a stagnated economy, he had not only turned it around, but Kenya was literally open for business again. This aspect of making Kenya a viable local and international investment destination, was his most profound legacy.

They chimed with his public profile as it already was: laid back, non-confrontational, erudite, not inclined to tribal groupings and too much noise on the political stage.

Kenyans laud Kibaki’s economic management in part because of the decline in public finance management that followed his departure. This is especially true now, in this historical moment, because it is “legacy time” in Kenya, with presidential transition elections less than 100 days away. President Uhuru Kenyatta is fighting to save his legacy from the damage wrought on the economy since 2013 by Jubilee’s graft that has been on a scale that it is difficult to qualify, rationalise, synthesise and even begin to coherently explain except as a form of collective delinquency. Add to this a rapidly changing global economic and political environment and a demographic youth bulge that in five short years has apparently been catapulted from being taken with the feel-good celebrity, flashy trappings of Kenyatta’s political “bromance” with his Deputy President, to being enamoured with half of the fractured pair, especially in the urban areas. For a man known as a teetotaller, Deputy President William Ruto has embarked on a hallucinogenic attempt to distance himself from the corruption.

My own sense was that Kibaki’s anti-corruption fight was important to him not only as a political deliverable to Kenyans, as he had promised, but as essential to doing what he had mapped out in his own mind to do for the economy. Kibaki set out to fight corruption recognising that leadership choices informed the behaviour of institutions rather than the other way around. In the entire time I worked with him I never bumped into people visiting him for tax waivers — an endemic problem under the previous regime. Kibaki genuinely wanted to fight corruption, especially at the beginning. In hindsight, I would say now that as politics became more complicated and cantankerous, and as relations with other NARC coalition partners grew more and more tricky to manage, and totally contrasting views vis-à-vis the raging debate around a new constitution kicked in, priorities drastically changed. It did not help that powerful commercial interests now viewed both NARC and the development of the draft constitution as it was unfolding as hostile to their personal interests. At the time, I missed the signals of the gradual transformation. As Anglo-Leasing rolled on, it became that dead rat in the rafters of our government’s hut — it stank, we knew it was there, we pretended to search for it but understood that that dead rat was very much ours.

Kibaki set out to fight corruption recognising that leadership choices informed the behaviour of institutions rather than the other way around.

Mwai Kibaki was a man of few words. Dunderheads bored him unless they were sincerely amusing. He avoided confrontation at all costs; it wasn’t in his DNA. This means that he often spoke in a kind of code even when unhappy with someone or something. And silence was very much one of Kibaki’s languages. “Hiyo maneno tutaangalia” (That matter we shall review) usually meant no to the proposal that was being presented. “Sikia huyu mtu sasa?!” (Listen to this guy now?!) usually meant someone was saying something disagreeable or that he considered dumb. “Bure kabisa!” (Totally useless!) meant just that, whether it was in relation to a person, a group or a proposal. When he said “Huyo wacha tuone vile ataenda.” (Let’s see how that one gets on.), it was code signalling his estimation that someone had embarked on a doomed project or initiative. He had absolutely no interest in sycophants bringing him rumours and tittle-tattle (fununu and porojo) about the minor political scheming of others. That said, in what was both ultimately a strength and a weakness, Kibaki trusted and believed in old friends deeply, including, as one colleague of his from Nyeri described to me, “the mercenaries who don’t care for him”. For me, his dropping the ball on the corruption agenda was devastating.

In retrospect, I can also see clearly now that the seeds of the 2007-8 post-election violence were planted in 2003-4. As Kibaki settled into office, the idea of a group of political and business leaders from the Mount Kenya region — the so-called “Mount Kenya Mafia” — took root fuelled by growing graft, going from myth to reality between 2004 and 2005 when the government dramatically lost the constitutional referendum held in November that year. I found it deeply ironic that the man I knew as having warned GEMA’s leaders in the 1970s about becoming an exclusivist Kabaka Yekka-type organisation, now found himself leading an administration that, between 2005 and the deadly 2007 election, was consumed by the very narrative he had warned against. It culminated in the most devastating part of his legacy: the relatively brief but deadly explosion of violence that irrevocably stained his record even more than losing his grip on graft did.

I wasn’t present in Kenya when the post-election violence broke out, even though I later bore witness to the damage it wrought, first on its immediate victims, and ultimately on the fabric of the nation itself. I will leave it then, to others to comprehensively reflect on that part of his legacy. What I can comprehensively speak to is that which I witnessed up close: the disintegration of the anti-corruption agenda with which he came into office. My own ultimate impression is that, witnessing his frailty, some of Kibaki’s most steadfast allies made up their minds: “Time may be short! Let’s make hay while the sun shines!” And so Kibaki became a commercial vehicle for a range of actors determined to line their pockets. Indeed, the most supreme irony is that he outlived some of the more avaricious of these friends. What they started, especially vis-à-vis the acquisition of commercial debt by the Kenya government, grew from the Anglo Leasing skunk inherited from the previous regime into the behemoth that is today’s public debt load that has forced Kenya back into the hands of the very IMF that Kibaki had seen off by 2005.

The late Mwai Kibaki was impossible to hate at a personal level – he simply didn’t give one cause. He was an easy-going and effortlessly brilliant interlocuter. My most traumatic and saddening moments in public service were when we exchanged loud harsh words. But in truth, all who manage to climb the slippery political pole to the top leave both enthusiastic supporters behind them and damaged ones too. Kibaki, unlike others who have served in the position of president in Kenya and in other countries of the region, may not have been a determined destroyer of men, but he too could be a political heartbreaker and a great disappointment when he moved smoothly on, having suddenly dropped you off unexpectedly at the red lights, leaving you in the hands of some of his less scrupulous handlers.

My most traumatic and saddening moments in public service were when we exchanged loud harsh words.

Mwai Kibaki has shuffled off this mortal coil. May he rest in eternal peace and may his family find succour at this difficult time of the passing of a brilliant, complex man.

–

John Githongo served as Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President of Kenya in charge of Governance and Ethics between January 2003 and mid-2005.

Calls to relocate Kenya’s capital city go as far back as the mid-2000s, taking on a new level of urgency after the 2007/2008 post-election violence. The logistical and security nightmare that could be occasioned by an easy-to-shut-down city with just five major exits underscores a vulnerability with which our organically growing urban spaces present a risk to state agencies, citizens, the diplomatic community, and the wider urban society.

Presciently, in the months leading up to the 2007 clashes, Gideon Mulyungi, the then Architectural Association of Kenya (AAK) chair, had proposed the relocation of the capital as had University of Nairobi lecturer Dr Mumia Osaaji who argued that it was necessary for nation-state building. The proposal did not go far as the political class instead chose to prioritize bypasses as stop-gap solutions to supplement the five major trunk roads that serve this city of roughly four million people.

The AAK anchored their proposal on the fact that the master plan guiding the development of the city had expired, leading to poor and unplanned constructions. Consequently, both the Nairobi Integrated Urban Development Master Plan 2013, and the five-year Nairobi Counter-Integrated Development Plans (CIDP) provided for incremental attempts at updating the initial master plan.

Still, the reality is that a consolidation of political, social and economic assets domiciled within one city, Nairobi, stifles development at the outer edges of the country in terms of income, wealth and opportunity.

The capital has absorbed satellite towns amid the frenzied desire for land and home ownership among the city’s middle and working classes. Places far outside Nairobi like Isinya, Magadi and Kangundo have ended up becoming the central focus based on the belief that they will one day grow into big settlements where the middle and working classes can live as they work in Nairobi.

This claim, however, is one that Martin Tairo of AAK strongly disputes. “Well, not in your lifetime. It may not even in your children’s lifetime. The growth of Kitengela, Ngong, Ruiru, and others had been anticipated in the 1970s. It is only that the information was not in the public domain. This was due to the fact that the city was to grow and nearby metropolis had to come up to support the cities.”

By the mere fact that it controls 21 per cent of the country’s GDP, houses 10 per cent of the national population, and is the place of residence for two-thirds of the country’s millionaires, Nairobi portends a risky and wasteful concentration of national resources within a relatively dense county.

The high cost of land in the city, and the low return on investment for most new real estate projects, discourages further development and expansion within Nairobi. The centralization stifles our national creative imagination, and institutionalizes the exclusion of the rest of the country. Sooner or later the demand for a new administrative capital away from the saturated Nairobi will precipitate the repurposing of Nairobi as a purely trade and transit city.

With regards to sanitation, mobility, security, and effectiveness, Nairobi is creaking under the weight of an over-centralized space that is perpetually strangled by navigation issues. This adds to the persistent problems for the capital such as overpriced property, political centralization, economic inequality, congested roads, a 60 per cent poverty rate, high unemployment, and poor housing.

Sooner or later the demand for a new administrative capital away from the saturated Nairobi will precipitate the repurposing of Nairobi as a purely trade and transit city.

As a capital city, Nairobi occupies a complex and central space for Kenya’s diplomatic missions, political vitality, state agencies and economic activity. Its choice by the government as the central urbanizing locale has led to the city controlling over a fifth of Kenya’s GDP.

Multiple trackers of the overall health of the capital have identified the following challenges:

An aggregated score of the above indices portrays a city barely able to manage its key health, social life and safety, liveability, and ecological pillars.

From a historical and functional perspective, the idea of a capital city as the commercial, legislative and political centre has often been subject to review. Between 1950 and 1990, some 13 countries worldwide moved their capitals. In Africa, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Burundi and Tanzania have moved their capitals, as have Brazil, Indonesia, and Canada.

Scouting for alternatives 

Eminent urban planning scholars give seven parameters that are critical to evaluating the proposal to relocate a capital: the objectives of the relocation; the transferred functions; and the condition of the former capital city after the relocation. Critical weight is also given to the geographical location of the new capital city; the distance between the former and the new capital city; the cost of the relocation; and the type of government at the time of relocation.

It can easily be argued that moving the capital to Isiolo, the preferred alternative, could help spur development in the whole northern corridor. A relocation generally offers better growth prospects nationally, mitigates the risk of widespread disasters, eases pressure on public services, and facilitates growth of otherwise neglected areas. In the immediate, a relocation would ease congestion, given the current capital’s high population density of 4,850 residents per square kilometre.

To evaluate the proposal to relocate the capital to Isiolo, a qualified reliance on an Inclusive Wealth (IW) model that includes human, geographical, natural and manufactured assets will be critical in taking into account the cumulative stock of the relocation, the shift in the national framing of the country’s spatial language, as well as the re-imagining of the nation’s power centres. The model also allows for the integration of non-linear behaviour of complex systems central to the relocation, their relations, emerging dialectics, and derivation of a new cumulative appraisal of the entire project.

Based on the above assessment, relocating the capital to Isiolo County would in all likelihood be a 10 to15-year project requiring wide consultations, and proper planning that might take years to properly frame, account for, and actualize. Thankfully, devolution has accelerated the pace of rural modernization in many parts of Isiolo, Marsabit and Wajir counties. The modernization in these counties provides a crucible for gauging the potential of Isiolo County to absorb the massive urban planning necessary for the establishment of a new capital.

Isiolo, a strategically located, sleepy, dusty town 285 kilometres north of Nairobi in north-central Kenya, is often touted as the gateway to northern Kenya. Kenya’s recent development plans, have effectively placed Isiolo at the heart of Kenya’s Vision 2030 and the northern transport corridor, alongside Lamu and Turkana.

Why northern Kenya?

This central northern corridor around Laikipia, Marsabit, and most vitally Isiolo, offers the best prospects for a new capital. Besides the region’s geographical centrality, the area offers space for expansion, ease of access, prospects of economic boom, and space for real estate development. It is a failsafe chance to facilitate expansion outward and northwards, gut the Nairobi-centric focus of our public policies, and shore up mobility along the new Lapsset corridor.

Establishing the city on the corridor alone taps into the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (Lapsset) Corridor, eastern Africa’s largest infrastructure project. However, concerns  remain regarding the ecological impact and human-wildlife conflicts in the event of such a relocation to Isiolo.

Devolution has accelerated the pace of rural modernization in many parts of Isiolo, Marsabit and Wajir counties.

A case in point is the request by the Friends of Isiolo Game Reserves (FIGARE) who have proposed the relocation of the proposed Isiolo Resort City from Kipsing Gap in Isiolo North to Kulamawe in Isiolo South.

The lobby group says that the current location could restrict the movement of wild animals between Buffalo Springs and Shaba, the two main game reserves, concerns that are echoed elsewhere with regard to wildlife migratory corridors.

The generational dimension

The on-going Lapsset Corridor mega-projects, and the possible relocation of the capital, will have a critical role to play in how the country manages income, wealth, and opportunity across generations. The 1999-2014 boom not only fixed the economic fortunes of those born in 1960s and 70s after the stifling 90s, but it also provided critical socio-economic mobility for those born in the early 80s as they reached adulthood and entered the workforce.

A marginally lower rate of economic growth of 3 per cent from (2-5 per cent in the 2000s) precipitated a disproportionately higher drop in unemployment by 6 per cent from (15 per cent to 9 per cent), as the growth was focused on inclusive, people-centred economic sectors such as agriculture and hospitality. Available data shows that the economy increased steadily then plateaued after the 2005 referendum fallout, but continued to increase at a decreasing rate until 2014. In particular, the PEV debacle and the 2008 global recession slowed the economy, mainly for the lowest economic classes with a mini-recession in 2008, after which inflation averaged 40 per cent for the upper clusters and a staggering 70 per cent for the lowest economic classes.

These prospects, combined with a shifting focus from high jobs multiplier sectors such as hospitality and agriculture, and a refocus towards low jobs multiplier sectors such as construction, doomed the job prospects for those who graduated after 2012.

Despite a diversion of attention, cash, and policy focus from job creating and poverty reducing sectors such as education, agriculture and hospitality, the education sector stayed fairly steady and continued to churn out more trainees into the workforce.

The result has been a surge in unemployment rates, and a 15 per cent increase in poverty rates since 2014, to the current national average of 63 per cent, despite the cumulative KSh7 trillion debt created by the Jubilee regime. Kenya is staring at a massive gap in the absorption of a significant chunk of trained Kenyans who graduated between 2012 and 2021.

The urgency of a northward expansion through the relocation of the capital cannot be understated. Research on the economic prospects of those leaving school and entering the job market during an economic downturn, as we have experienced since 2014, is fairly depressing.

Research findings show that graduating and transitioning into adulthood under such a tough economic climate has negative consequences later in life with regards to social status, income, health, and mortality rates.

In particular, death rates are higher among those who graduate during a recession as this cohort is more likely to adopt an unhealthy lifestyle. This group is also at higher risk of dying from drug overdoses and other so-called “deaths of despair”. Dropouts and those graduating from high school under the current conservative economic policies face lower starting incomes and higher income losses which stunts their overall pay progression for up to 10-15 years.

A new capital along the Lapsset corridor would provide a critical rejig for our political-economy, a shift in economic fortunes for a sizable pool who have sunk into poverty, and those dented by the high cost of living in current urban set-ups. It will likely shore up job growth for those who have been affected by the mismatch between the education economy and the labour market returns between 2007 and 2016.

Kenya is staring at a massive gap in the absorption of a significant chunk of trained Kenyans who graduated between 2012 and 2021.

Of even more critical importance, the move will situate the capital within the pastoralist zone which has the highest job creating potential in the agricultural sector, specifically cattle and goat rearing.

But as natural resource and conflict expert Guyo Haro explains, a move towards the north along the ongoing mega-projects risks exacerbating latent ethnic, resource, and historical tensions.

Still, given the fact that six of the ten counties around Isiolo, fall into the bottom fourth of Kenya’s GDP per capita rankings, an integration of the next capital in the area will provide a lifeline for local populations, regional dynamics, and greater flexibility in national priorities for this century.

Alternatively Isiolo could become the commercial capital and Kisumu the logistical hub for the expanded East Africa (a role that it played until 1986), maintaining Nairobi as a political capital and transferring and building Mombasa as the cultural capital.

Such a diversification of the functions central to the designation of a capital, will spread income, wealth and opportunity across the country. Additionally, a multiplicity of capitals each taking up a decentralised function makes the country much more politically agile, economically steadier, and minimizes the pressure and focus on the centre. These variables will be critical as Kenya’s population increases, and resource demands rise steadily through this century.