Kenya can Dream that Big again.

I have been thinking about how wildly big the 2000s felt.

They were big.

Everything around us seemed larger than life. Titus Naikuni. Martin Oduor-Otieno. George Magoha. Olive Mugenda. People whose names became entangled with the institutions they ran. You could disagree with them and still recognise the scale of their ambition.

The media was big. As a student, I remember a published column in the Nation fetching me Sh8,000. That was money you could plan around. Columnists were institutions unto themselves. You bought a newspaper for forty bob and felt you had received something worth carrying home.

And television. Louis Otieno. Julie Gichuru. Ephy Hunja. People who could hold a room from inside a screen. Louis, especially, had a presence.

Tusker Project Fame made an East African audience feel like a single household. We followed contestants across borders and admired Juliana Kanyomozi on the judging panel. She already had a music career. The programme gave more of us a regular appointment with her grace. By its fourth season in 2010, the contest drew participants from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and what was then Southern Sudan. EABL's annual report records a regional audience exceeding 15 million adults.

Then there was Celtel Africa Challenge, later Zain Africa Challenge, with John Sibi-Okumu. University students on television, winning through knowledge. The 2009–10 competition involved universities from eight African countries. A sponsor thought intelligence could attract an audience. A broadcaster gave it airtime. Young people had something to aspire to beyond being famous for being famous.

Nairobi was a city of ideas. Binyavanga Wainaina and Kwani? helped create a home for writing that sounded like the people around us. Literary gatherings brought readers and writers into the same rooms. That energy continued into the next decade through Storymoja. Kofi Awoonor came for its 2013 festival and was killed in the Westgate attack. Wole Soyinka delivered its Wangari Maathai memorial lecture in 2014. Those encounters belonged to a Nairobi willing to host the continent's imagination.

Even the advertisements seemed to believe in us. Safaricom's landscapes, the tea plantations, the sense of a country large enough to belong to everyone. Equity's "Na mimi ni member". A bank account had become something an ordinary Kenyan could announce with pride.

Banks opened branches and looked beyond the border. Universities filled city buildings with evening students. A person could leave work, attend a lecture and imagine qualifying for a better job. The expansion had weaknesses, but the appetite for education was real.

Remember Nakumatt Mega. The shelves. The space. The feeling that we had arrived somewhere. Its later collapse belongs in the same history. Size offered no immunity from financial failure, and the people supplying an expanding business still needed to be paid.

In 2009, SEACOM and TEAMS connected Kenya to international fibre networks. We had used the internet before, through far more constrained connections. The cables enlarged what a Kenyan business could attempt online. The government advanced TEAMS alongside private investment and competing cable projects.

Then came Thika Road, opened in November 2012. The mood I remember from the 2000s had carried into the following years.

I remember being in a taxi climbing Museum Hill after the new overpass had changed the old junction. The driver looked at what had been built and asked me,

"Moi akipita hapa, yeye hufeel aje?"

How did Moi feel when he passed here?

The driver had found his own way of measuring a presidency. A road he used had changed. His city could do something it had previously seemed unable to do.

Kibaki made us imagine and think big.

The violence after the 2007 election killed more than a thousand people and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. The Waki commission recorded 1,133 deaths. Families lost relatives, property and the security of belonging where they lived. Some were rebuilding from those losses while others were celebrating the country's new opportunities.

The Anglo Leasing contracts straddled the Moi and Kibaki administrations, using secrecy, inflated prices and opaque companies to expose taxpayers to enormous obligations. Claims of national security helped that procurement escape ordinary scrutiny.

Kenya deserves the economic confidence we remember alongside stronger protection from the abuses that survived it. We should be able to demand both.

Kibaki's most useful economic inheritance was a willingness to make room for enterprise. M-PESA emerged from the work of Vodafone, Safaricom, their partners, agents and customers. The Central Bank allowed it to launch in 2007, issuing a letter of no objection after examining the risks and setting conditions for safeguarding funds, preventing money laundering and keeping records. Its approach allowed a new service to operate while oversight developed around it.

A regulator had to understand something unfamiliar. Officials had to take responsibility for a decision. A company had to invest. Shopkeepers had to become agents. Customers had to trust the service with money they could not afford to lose.

That is how a national ambition enters ordinary life. Several institutions do their jobs well enough for millions of people to do something new.

Economist Ephraim Njega argues that development depends on policy as well as physical infrastructure. A road earns its economic return through the journeys it makes cheaper, the goods it gets to market and the productive hours it saves. A hospital building requires clinicians, medicines, maintenance and a payment system that keeps treatment available. A university tower requires teachers, laboratories, credible qualifications and employers willing to hire its graduates.

The country pays for the structure and for the system that makes it useful. When the second is neglected, the first becomes an expensive promise.

Technology disrupted the advertising model that sustained newspapers. University expansion created obligations that tuition growth could not indefinitely finance. Management failures, weak oversight and political decisions compounded those pressures. A minister's pen alone cannot explain every closure or unpaid salary. Nor can technological change excuse an institution that expanded without protecting its finances or its standards.

And the ability to govern well does not belong to a birth decade. Older leaders have wasted opportunities. Younger leaders can inherit the same patronage habits. A public appointment should turn on whether someone can do the work and be held accountable for it.

By September 2026, Kenya has a larger economy and more tools than it possessed when those ambitions took hold. It also has too many people whose effort buys little security. The 2026 Economic Survey reports growth of 4.6 percent in 2025. Its employment tables put informal employment at 18.1 million, or 83.8 percent of recorded employment outside small-scale farming and pastoralism.

The trader opening every morning is working. The graduate delivering parcels is working. Their effort can leave them without predictable earnings, paid leave or money for a medical emergency. An economy worthy of that effort must make it easier to build enterprises that can pay better wages and survive beyond the owner's daily exhaustion.

Tax policy enters that calculation before a business hires its next employee. Public services need revenue. The employer also needs to estimate next year's labour costs, the importer needs to price stock before it arrives, and the household needs to know how much of its salary will remain. Repeated changes to deductions, charges and administrative demands make those decisions harder.

Government should publish a credible tax path over several years, cost new obligations before imposing them and explain how revenue will improve services. When it buys goods or commissions work, it should pay verified invoices on a published schedule. A supplier cannot pay staff with an approved invoice that remains unpaid. Charging that business penalties for late taxes while withholding its payment makes the state a source of the cash shortage it then punishes.

Corruption adds a payment for which no public service is improved. The EACC's 2025 gender and corruption survey, released in April 2026, reported that 98.6 per cent of respondents who paid bribes had not reported them. Some cited inaction or discouragement from the authorities. In May 2026, an EACC review of the Public Service Commission identified weaknesses in recruitment, internal controls and corruption prevention.

An appointment influenced by connections can put an unqualified person in charge of a service thousands depend on. A contract awarded through favouritism can deprive a better business of the opportunity to grow. Publishing selection criteria, contract ownership and delivery records makes those decisions easier to challenge. Acting on the findings, including when a political ally is involved, gives publication a purpose.

In its 27 June 2025 update on that month's demonstrations, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented 19 fatalities, 531 injuries and 15 enforced disappearances. The commission called for accountability from those responsible. Each case requires investigation and responsibility established through the law.

A country asking young people to invest their talent at home must protect their right to question how it is governed. A family searching for a missing child is owed an answer, an investigation and justice. Economic growth cannot settle that debt.

The university expansion revealed how many Kenyans would sacrifice income and evenings for a qualification. A stronger next phase would fund teaching and research reliably, protect academic standards and connect programmes to work that employers actually need done. Regional students would need dependable admission decisions, accommodation, immigration services and recognised qualifications. Recruiting them into underfunded institutions would export the problem to their families.

Health offers a related opportunity. Kenya can develop specialist services, train more clinicians and attract patients from the region while improving care for residents. The foundation is a functioning referral system, dependable payment to providers, available medicines and clinical results patients can examine. A hospital cannot sustain a reputation abroad while its local patients are organising emergency collections for basic treatment.

The same practical ambition belongs on the farm and in the factory. Kenya already has an established geothermal industry. EPRA reports that geothermal supplied about 39.5 per cent of electricity generation in 2024/25. Businesses need that resource translated into reliable, competitively priced power at their premises. Generation must be connected to usable networks, maintained equipment and contracts that reward efficiency.

For a horticultural grower, the useful investment may be irrigation, a collection centre, refrigeration and a dependable route to a buyer. Together, these can let her sell more of what she grows and lose less between harvest and payment. Processing can then support packaging firms, transporters, technicians and exporters. Small enterprises gain room to grow when the businesses around them are buying, paying and hiring.

Finance should make those connections easier. Kenya's next payments achievement could give a merchant affordable access to customers across networks, let a sound borrower use her repayment history to seek competing offers, and allow a new provider to connect on fair terms. Licensing must protect customers while leaving a practical path for capable newcomers. The institutions that benefited from regulatory openness should face competition themselves.

The World Bank's November 2025 analysis estimated that reforms promoting competition in key sectors could raise annual growth by up to 1.35 percentage points. That is a modelled opportunity dependent on implementation. Its proposals include fairer treatment of private and state enterprises and fewer barriers in electricity, telecommunications and fertiliser. Kenya has economic gains available through changing the rules under which existing assets and businesses operate.

With limited public money, a government must finish useful projects, maintain what already exists and reject proposals whose benefits cannot justify their full cost. Borrowing requires a credible repayment plan. A privately financed project still needs scrutiny of the tariffs, guarantees or future public payments promised in exchange.

Visionary leadership includes telling a well-connected promoter that the country cannot afford his project. It includes appointing someone qualified whom the president does not personally know. It includes accepting a court decision that frustrates the executive and allowing a journalist to investigate how public money was spent.

The general election is scheduled for 10 August 2027. President William Ruto and the rest of the political leadership have less than a year to demonstrate what they believe government is for. The work is available every morning, in unpaid bills, stalled decisions, failing services and enterprises ready to expand if the obstacles are removed.

I still think about that driver at Museum Hill. His question came from encountering an improvement in the course of an ordinary journey. He needed no briefing to experience it.

I want a student to feel that way about a public university again. A manufacturer about a power bill. A farmer about the payment for her produce. A young applicant about a job awarded through a process he can trust. A parent about the certainty that a child who goes out to protest will return home safely.

Kibaki made many of us imagine that tomorrow could be bigger. Those governing now have more technology, more accumulated knowledge and a generation impatient to put both to work. They can give that generation dependable institutions and room to build.

The next taxi driver should be asking how Kenya managed to come this far. The people in office still have time to earn that question.