We need a national developmentalist coalition urgently

Queues stretching around filling stations, stranded matatus, and a government scrambling to manage public anger: Kenya's periodic fuel crises have a familiar shape. What they also have, and what commentary tends to skip past, is a diagnostic function. They reveal exactly how much of the country's economic stability rests on supply chains it does not control and institutions it has not built.

Kenya currently refines a fraction of its petroleum needs domestically. The Mombasa refinery, once a modest but functional piece of national infrastructure, has been idle since 2023. Importation is managed through a consortium arrangement that has periodically produced allegations of cartelisation, opaque pricing and inadequate strategic reserves. When a shortage hits — whether from foreign exchange constraints, shipping delays or procurement failures — there is no domestic buffer.

This is not simply a fuel-sector problem. It is the visible edge of a broader absence: Kenya has no coherent developmentalist industrial policy that links energy security to manufacturing, agriculture-processing to export capacity, or skills development to the sectors the economy actually needs to grow. The Vision 2030 framework provided aspirational targets. It did not produce the institutional coalitions — linking state agencies, domestic capital, organised labour and technical expertise — that would be required to pursue them consistently across political cycles.

Countries that industrialised successfully, from South Korea in the 1970s to Rwanda in the current decade, did so through sustained state-coordinated investment strategies, not through market liberalisation alone. Kenya has the regional weight, the educated workforce and the port infrastructure to anchor an East African industrial agenda.

What it lacks is the political coalition willing to treat that agenda as a governing priority rather than a campaign talking point.