KENYA
DIANNA GAMES: Will Uhuru Kenyatta use mandate to polish his patchy legacy?
‘Graft has been more visible in Kenya since Kenyatta came to power’
Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s returning president, has made a lot of promises to an electorate that managed to get him back into power last week in a hotly contested election. As the rhetoric starts to fade and the political dust settles, the really tough work needs to begin — getting the economy back on track after a long period of election-related uncertainty and costly political campaigns. During his campaign, Kenyatta made much of the successes of his first term, including the delivery of a spanking new, and expensive, railway between Mombasa and Nairobi. And he used to his advantage the high growth rates of the economy during his first term, which averaged more than 5% a year. But the reality is that the economic wellbeing of the majority of Kenyans worsened during Kenyatta’s first term. Unemployment has become the highest in the region, says the UN Development Programme. The organisation’s 2017 human development index shows Kenya’s unemployment at 39.1%, which is well above 24% in T...
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