Kenya should begin preparing a new long-term development blueprint that draws clear lessons from the successes and failures of Vision 2030, former Nairobi Town Clerk and planner Tom Odongo has said, warning against allowing political interests to dictate the country’s development path.
Odongo said Kenya still needs a national strategy beyond 2030, but argued that the proposed Vision 2060 should not simply be another government plan. He said it should be based on an honest review of the current blueprint and designed to keep national development focused on long-term priorities rather than changing political interests.
Speaking during an interview on Radio Generation on Friday, Odongo said the country needed to move away from development decisions driven by politics and instead follow a clear and consistent strategy.
"For me, we need to replace a situation where development or everything that we do is directed by political expediency. The reason for a vision is that we are putting ourselves on a trajectory where our development is directed by strategy rather than political expediency. To that extent, I feel that we still need a strategy. We still need a Vision 2060. However, I am of the opinion that you need first of all to pick up what the lessons are that we have learned during the implementation of Vision 2030, and that lesson is very, very important for us to move to the next journey," he stated.
He proposed that the process of developing the next national blueprint should start with citizens, saying their views should form the foundation of discussions on the country's future.
Rather than beginning with a top-level national plan, Odongo said the government should first collect the priorities and aspirations of ordinary Kenyans before moving to a wider national conversation.
"I would go for a bottom-up kind of approach, where you just come up with a compendium of aspirations before we go into a national conversation, and that would tell us really what citizens are thinking and what the aspirations are that the citizens are prioritising. From that compendium, now we begin to have a discussion. But fundamentally, we must evaluate Vision 2030."
Vision 2030 was launched in June 2008 under former President Mwai Kibaki as Kenya's long-term development blueprint.
The plan seeks to transform the country into a globally competitive, middle-income economy with a high quality of life by 2030. It is built around economic, social and political pillars and is implemented through five-year Medium-Term Plans.
However, Odongo said the urban sector was not given enough attention as a driver of economic growth under the blueprint.
He said Vision 2030 largely viewed urban development through its social role, with emphasis placed on areas such as housing and slum upgrading, while giving less attention to how cities and towns could support wider economic transformation.
"The Vision 2030 was meant for socio-economic transformation, but it treated the urban sector under the social pillar. It prioritised things like housing, slum upgrading and so forth, basically urban as facilitating social change, and it downplayed the economic role of urbanisation. If you look at all the countries that have succeeded in implementing transformation, you find there is always a tight link between economic and spatial transformation. You cannot do economic transformation without also having spatial transformation," he outlined.
Odongo also pointed to the failure to fully shift development away from Nairobi as another issue that should be addressed in the next national strategy.
He said Vision 2030 had proposed six metropolitan nodes to promote more balanced development across the country, but the approach did not break the strong focus on Nairobi.
"Vision 2030 spoke about six metropolitan nodes where development was supposed to spread geographically across Kenya. But while Vision 2030 was looking at a polycentric framework, the Nairobi-centric model of development remained at the centre of politics. It was never changed," he said.
The planner said Kenya would need stronger spatial governance to make sure infrastructure investment results in well-organised urban growth instead of uncontrolled expansion.
He argued that the country's next development strategy should therefore connect economic planning with spatial planning to ensure growth is spread in a more organised manner across different urban centres.