# Ken Opalo on Unleashing African Economic Growth

An episode of [The Africa Urban Lab Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1886680160), 7 Oct 2026, 1 h 30 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2604291/episodes/19900225-ken-opalo-on-unleashing-african-economic-growth.mp3

Our guest is Ken Opalo — Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a leading voice on African political economy and development. We discuss what it will take to unleash African economic growth, exploring in particular the institutions, political choices, and state capacity needed to turn Africa’s demographic and urban transition into broad-based prosperity.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 2: Welcome to the Africa Urban Lab Podcast.
[0:02] Speaker 2: I'm your host, Kurtis Lockhart.
[0:04] Speaker 2: On today's episode, I speak with Ken Opolo.
[0:07] Speaker 2: Ken is an associate professor at the School of Foreign at Georgetown University.
[0:12] Speaker 2: His research covers African legislative development.
[0:15] Speaker 2: It covers the politics of service provision under government.
[0:20] Speaker 2: It covers education reforms, among many, many other Ken also writes a popular Substack called An Africanist which I highly, highly recommend.
[0:30] Speaker 2: And we actually chat about some of those blogs or today.
[0:35] Speaker 2: On the Substack, he writes broadly about African and about policies to help spur economic growth and transformation.
[0:44] Speaker 2: Hope you enjoyed the show.
[0:46] Speaker 2: Ken Opollo, welcome to the podcast.
[0:48] Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
[0:50] Speaker 2: Okay, diving straight in.
[0:53] Speaker 2: You were born and raised in Kenya.
[0:56] Speaker 2: I'm recording this podcast with you here in Zanzibar, where the Africa Urban Lab is based, Kenya's neighbor.
[1:04] Speaker 2: You've done a lot of research in both places, in both and Tanzania.
[1:07] Speaker 2: So very easy first question for you to set the stage free to bring in all of the stuff you typically write about around elites and state capacity and policy autonomy and all this stuff.
[1:20] Speaker 2: I want you to tell me which country will grow faster over course of the next 25 to 40 years, uh, Tanzania or Kenya, and why.
[1:32] Speaker: Yeah.
[1:32] Speaker: Tanzania, hands down.
[1:35] Speaker: Um Tanzania has been uh growing at 6% or thereabouts.
[1:39] Speaker: Uh Kenya is doing 4%.
[1:41] Speaker: And Tanzania has a uh a much more ripe potential uh compared Kenya.
[1:47] Speaker: Uh they have uh more land, more people, more natural resources in terms of minerals, uh the gas, gold, tanzanite, graphite, lots of arable land.
[1:58] Speaker: Um and while Kenya, you know, is also growing from a uh higher base in per capita income terms, and is not as with natural resources.
[2:08] Speaker: Uh furthermore, I think Tanzania, uh, because of its party uh, has the capacity to execute once they decide, uh, as we under Mogafuli, uh, all of the problems aside.
[2:20] Speaker: Uh, while Kenya has a more sort of chaotic democratic process, uh, which sucks the life out of uh any sort of uh strategic execution on big ideas.
[2:30] Speaker: So, you know, I think I think Tanzania will win out on the to uh be East Africa's uh biggest economy.
[2:38] Speaker: Uh which I guess you know will be uh, you know, Nera and and wherever they are, right, uh uh would love to see them sort of you know take stock of uh of of the future uh once Tanzania a big economy than Kenya.
[2:55] Speaker 2: Okay.
[2:55] Speaker 2: So with that with that uh nice beginning of of uh the two in which both you and I reside at the moment, um you started your research career examining legislatures.
[3:05] Speaker 2: So, some questions here at the start when it comes to and and parliaments.
[3:11] Speaker 2: Um to me, one of the best bios I've ever read is Robert uh Master of the Senate about Lyndon B.
[3:19] Speaker 2: Johnson.
[3:19] Speaker 2: Um and my favorite part of that book is in the first sort of hundred pages or so, uh, Carrow goes over this you know history of the United States Senate, right?
[3:29] Speaker 2: You start out with this kind of triumvirate of Henry Clay, Webster, and uh John Calhoun, um, and then the sort of of the Senate post-U.S.
[3:38] Speaker 2: Civil War, and then it's uh in essence being eclipsed by the U.S.
[3:43] Speaker 2: presidency, uh, and then you know, basically the Senate's lethargic years in the early decades of the 1900s until of interstage right, um, Lyndon B.
[3:52] Speaker 2: Johnson becomes majority leader, and he like reanimates this otherwise you know creaky, uh, you know, old and senile and makes the U.S.
[4:01] Speaker 2: Senate work.
[4:02] Speaker 2: Um, he sort of uses the rules to uh achieve his ends, bends those rules to achieve his ends, sometimes bends uh men of the of the Senate to achieve his ends.
[4:13] Speaker 2: Um, and he got, you know, he got stuff done and he got laws passed.
[4:16] Speaker 2: So uh this is a great book about one particular Uh my question for you is in your research on legislatures Africa, across the continent, uh, was there an LBJ type you came across?
[4:30] Speaker 2: And if so, who is that and and how were they so effective?
[4:34] Speaker 2: Um, if not, what does that say about African legislatures legislatures elsewhere in the world?
[4:43] Speaker: Uh yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the simple answer is that there's there's no LBJ type figure in any of my uh sort of cases that I looked at, uh, which speaks to you know uh African being relatively weaker compared to the US Congress, which has always been a powerful institution, even when you know its own members haven't fully utilized its powers.
[5:06] Speaker: And then LBJ himself was a unique figure uh uh in that sense.
[5:11] Speaker: Uh now that said, I think within the Kenyan context in uh the first Speaker of Parliament, Humphrey Slade, uh from the colonial era, British guy who became Kenyan, uh, very good at steering the institution, uh uh sort of it from executive overreach and allowing the first few Kenyan parliaments until he retires in the early 70s to be, you uh uh forums for debate.
[5:39] Speaker: Uh, and it helped that the party, the ruling party at the time, Kanu, was relatively weak.
[5:44] Speaker: And so parliament basically uh served as a debating institution because the party system the party itself was weak.
[5:51] Speaker: Uh the next sort of figure that approximates that is in the early 90s, uh, but in the very narrow sense of uh Peter uh trying to institute or institutionalize legislative in Kenya.
[6:07] Speaker: So he's not, you know, he doesn't achieve much, certainly not uh anywhere near what LBJ does.
[6:13] Speaker: But I think he was very pivotal in making sure that the of the Kenyan legislature was enshrined in the Constitution.
[6:21] Speaker: I think more broadly what you see is that, you know, strong create incentives for individuals to invest in becoming figures, right?
[6:32] Speaker: If the laws you passed actually have meaning, if if process the institution actually has meaning, then it makes sense to in mastering both, uh uh sort of the institutional politics the constitutional processes uh and succeeding within of the rules uh of the game, as it were.
[6:52] Speaker: But if there's quite a bit of arbitrariness, if the institution itself doesn't have power, if it's subordinate to the executive branch, then you know you play a completely different game.
[7:01] Speaker: Uh and if anything, you don't you never want to be an LBJ figure because that may attract the attention of the
[7:09] Speaker 2: Interesting.
[7:09] Speaker 2: Um so sort of related to the this this parliament's question, and and this is a more uh hand-wavy notion that I got it.
[7:16] Speaker 2: I was reading uh preparing for this podcast.
[7:18] Speaker 2: So feel free to push back.
[7:20] Speaker 2: Um before I read your legislature's book for preparation, I was reading this new book by Molker, uh Avnergrief, and uh called Two Paths to Prosperity.
[7:32] Speaker 2: Um, and and it looks like you've read it, but for listeners about uh it's about European and Chinese economic explaining the divergence, the economic growth those two regions.
[7:45] Speaker 2: And I was struck in reading that book how similar their is to the one in your legislature's book.
[7:54] Speaker 2: Basically, right, their thesis is that uh the form of social organization that's dominant at a particular time, uh, is back in Chinese and European histories, uh, will shape condition the kinds of formal institutions that emerge on.
[8:11] Speaker 2: Um, more specifically, because that's really vague in China, more kin-based clans is how most places across historically solved their collective action problems.
[8:21] Speaker 2: Uh, whereas in Europe, by their story, um, these more uh corporations came to dominate.
[8:30] Speaker 2: So things like universities, corporations like cities, uh, religious orders or fraternities.
[8:37] Speaker 2: Um, and then sort of your thesis in your legislature's book, uh, very crudely put is basically that the way African under autocracy organized themselves earlier on in their to pass laws, um, that eventually shaped the parliamentary that emerged after multipartyism in the 1990s.
[8:59] Speaker 2: Um, so right, this this similarity struck me.
[9:02] Speaker 2: And then I found out later on prepping for this podcast you were actually a student of Abner Grief at um at Um so my two, I have two questions.
[9:12] Speaker 2: One is, is it fair for me to make this Abner Grief connection with your legislature's book?
[9:18] Speaker 2: And then number two, um, you know, if we grant the premise uh earlier forms of social organization shape you know, what to your uh best knowledge are are some of the best books on African economic history that get at this
[9:35] Speaker: Uh yes.
[9:35] Speaker: So um uh there's there's you know, uh I haven't I haven't of the connection as directly as you put it, but I did class with Avna on economic history, uh which, you know, if if if you ever see any hints of economic history uh uh in in any of my writing, you know, blame up Avna.
[9:54] Speaker: Uh and I think if I did it, if if if I if I could redo my PhD, it would probably be in economic history.
[10:00] Speaker: Uh because I think it's it's it provides such a uh a understanding of the process of economic development.
[10:08] Speaker: Uh uh both deep economic history and contemporary economic Uh so I I think the the the most sort of important influence I'm consciously aware of from of now was sort of this notion you know the social origins of elite hegemony.
[10:26] Speaker: Sort of like, you know, at the time he was trying to put a project on how the fusion of uh uh political power and a state religion facilitated the process of state building and Uh so you controlled people through coercion, but you also you know, how they thought of themselves in the world.
[10:45] Speaker: Uh, that allowed you to consolidate power and direct traffic ways that places where you had, at least in the early stages of state building, uh sort of a separation of the two powers, you didn't have as much coherence uh because the religious could always undercut the political powers, etc.
[11:03] Speaker: And so when I look at the African context, what I see, you this map map mapped onto the context nicely, you know, you don't get much in terms of sort of this fusion, except in a few places, right?
[11:18] Speaker: So Ethiopia, uh early on, uh Egypt uh to some extent, uh, but in in most of West Africa, I guess outside of uh uh uh sort of Dahomey or bits of it, you don't get this sort of consolidation uh in a way that would look legible to us today.
[11:39] Speaker: Uh and so I think that dispersal of power meant that building wasn't as coherent as it could have been.
[11:47] Speaker: Uh, and perhaps even explains why you know even under state systems uh in the context.
[11:54] Speaker: The states were just never as strong.
[11:56] Speaker: Uh now, you know, it would be interesting to test this thesis out there.
[11:59] Speaker: I uh Abna hasn't done the book yet.
[12:02] Speaker: Now, um, but the point the point you make, which is that, you know, the there's a social origin to formal is definitely valid, right?
[12:12] Speaker: Uh and in my own work I see it.
[12:15] Speaker: Um I think in the book I try try to make the case that uh sort of inhibits consolidation of power in profound then means that executive bargaining with the legislature has to sort of understand that, you know, to get coherence within the legislature, you have to buy off people uh through processes.
[12:37] Speaker: And you can't always trust on the formal institutions Um But then I think more broadly, right, uh uh uh if if you have a sense pre-institutions about what you want of an uh some overlapping consensus on what that should then institutionalization can't solve for that, right?
[13:00] Speaker: That has to be solved prior to institutionalization, which systems uh tend to do.
[13:05] Speaker: And then social systems can also provide the mechanisms of uh, especially intrinsic motivation among individuals in the to do what's right, right?
[13:15] Speaker: I think uh, you know, one challenge that uh, you know, a that I have of economists' view of institutions is that it to be very cartoonish.
[13:25] Speaker: It's like, you know, something great happened, we set up voila, you know, uh, everything was happy ever after, as to thinking about, you know, uh, yeah, you know, so why was so motivated to do what he was doing, right?
[13:42] Speaker: Uh, because even in his own sort of madness and excesses, right, he had an intrinsic motivation to do specific things.
[13:50] Speaker: And it's hard to write that into, you know, the standing orders of a parliament or into the constitution.
[13:56] Speaker: Those are extra institutional variables that uh sort the uh formal institutions that we are familiar with.
[14:04] Speaker: So we need a more sort of expansive understanding of Uh uh.
[14:10] Speaker: And I think the social systems, as you that you allude to, a good place to start.
[14:15] Speaker 2: Are there any economists in in your reading that are that are sort of good at this or at least better than the the typical economists at getting at these deeper intrinsic motivations, especially when talking about intrinsic motivations within bureaucracies?
[14:30] Speaker 2: Or is it just bad across the board?
[14:35] Speaker: I mean, I'd I'd have to think about this.
[14:38] Speaker: I mean, and this is you know mostly a function of the fact the nature of the literature has focused on specific that are cross-cutting as opposed to nice detailed case which economists don't do.
[14:55] Speaker: Because this type of analysis would only come up if you of deep dives uh into specific cases.
[15:02] Speaker: That said, you know, a good friend of mine, political scientist, Dan Honig, has a great book on bureaucrats, right?
[15:08] Speaker: Uh uh navigating by judgment, but also mission-based bureaucrats.
[15:14] Speaker: Uh, both books, I think, you know, talk about this idea that lots of people in public bureaucracies have intrinsic that uh if if sort of tapped into can actually achieve outcomes.
[15:28] Speaker: Uh uh rather than assuming that you know the incentive has to just have lots and lots of sticks as opposed to carrots and often you know very low-cost carrots at that to get to do the right thing.
[15:43] Speaker: Um and then, you know, in his first book, he talks quite a bit about autonomy, you know, uh instead of obsessing about beans, right, giving people the leeway to get stuff done again incentivizes them to figure out how to get stuff done.
[15:58] Speaker: And there's a lot of value in that process.
[16:03] Speaker 2: Sorry, yeah, finish.
[16:05] Speaker: Yeah.
[16:05] Speaker: And and in in terms of books on African economic history, I blanking out.
[16:10] Speaker: I I haven't seen anyone that uh that comes this close uh uh in terms of you know thinking about the social systems.
[16:20] Speaker 2: And well, there we go.
[16:21] Speaker 2: If we have any up-and-coming uh researchers uh that and want to fill avoid um African economic history, it's uh there we have it.
[16:30] Speaker 2: And then yeah, on your on your um Dan Honig book, another one to his that I loved, although she's not an economist, but Aaron McDonald's um patchwork leviathon had a similar uh message, and it was fantastic.
[16:43] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[16:45] Speaker: Absolutely.
[16:45] Speaker: Yeah.
[16:47] Speaker 2: Um so uh just moving on a bit.
[16:49] Speaker 2: You've Ken, you've written some great essays recently topic of African elites.
[16:55] Speaker 2: Um, I think the most popular essay on your Substack is uh What Explains the Ambition Gap Among Africa's elites?
[17:02] Speaker 2: Uh so you know, please answer your own question.
[17:05] Speaker 2: What explains the ambition gap among Africa's elites?
[17:08] Speaker 2: And and maybe if Ken, you want to use uh like Kenya as a example, because I know you've written a lot on the big in Kenya two years ago, and uh you've written on Ruto since then, uh, or or feel free to use any other example you want to.
[17:24] Speaker: Yeah, so so you know, I I think uh just if we can zoom out a bit, right?
[17:29] Speaker: Ambition uh is sort of a a combination of what people think is possible and their ability to execute on the same, right?
[17:41] Speaker: So to to not, you know, the lack of ambition can be a function of, you know, people are just not used to getting stuff done.
[17:49] Speaker: And so they stop believing that they can get stuff done, or you're selecting for a particular type of people uh who know uh internally are not and uh they don't think that they get things done.
[18:03] Speaker: And I think when you when you sort of project this onto the scene, uh uh uh the lack of ambition can be explained by a few factors.
[18:12] Speaker: You know, first, uh the quality of leadership has declined a bit because sort of the motivations that drove people like you know, Kenyatta and Boya here in Kenya, you know, Kenneth um, people who you know who had very little in terms of uh, but did quite a bit for their countries, right?
[18:34] Speaker: They had their own flaws, but they were pretty ambitious uh right?
[18:37] Speaker: And Kruma in Ghana uh being another prominent example.
[18:41] Speaker: They they knew where where they wanted to be, they quite well understood the strategic uh uh sort of challenges that they in part because they were dealing with uh a very powerful system, uh uh and therefore they stepped up to the plate.
[18:56] Speaker: And and they kind of understood the historical moment, Decolonization was a pretty big historical moment.
[19:03] Speaker: When you fast forward, right, the second, third generation leaders, most of them were not as exposed as the independence generation, right?
[19:11] Speaker: So if you take William Ruter in Kenya as an example, right, Ruther goes to university in Kenya, right, hasn't studied Uh, you know, Kenyatta spent 15 years in Europe before back, right?
[19:25] Speaker: So, you know, in a weird way, some of these younger leaders less exposed.
[19:30] Speaker: Uh uh and I think exposure kind of ignites some strategic in you, in understanding your place in history and in the in ways that you know some of these later leaders uh uh uh were not exposed.
[19:47] Speaker: And so what you get is you know leaders who who eternally not strategically or historically aware uh as a And I think if I can be soft on them or empathetic uh for a here, I think the other big challenge African elites face is they absolutely lack hegemony in the sense that, you there's a there's a great paper by uh Peter Ecker from the which I think is the best paper ever written on African science, uh, which makes the case that, you know, African elites struggle with controlling their own people they derive their legitimacy from uh the colonial not their relationship with their with their own people.
[20:36] Speaker: And to the extent that you know they have some rootedness in own people, it's circumscribed by ethnicity.
[20:41] Speaker: And so it becomes very hard to get sort of nationwide hegemonic elite dominance, except in a few cases.
[20:50] Speaker: Uh you know, in Zambia, I could argue under UNIP mirror in does a good job.
[20:56] Speaker: Uh in Ethiopia, we saw flashes of this uh here and there Meles.
[21:00] Speaker: And so this lack of hegemony also means that you can't people to follow you along to the promised land, as it were, which then you know also tempers your ambition, right?
[21:13] Speaker: Because you know you can't do it, right?
[21:15] Speaker: Uh and then, you know, states are weak, right?
[21:18] Speaker: And if if you have weak states, it also means that you can't as much as you would like, uh, which also then you know your ambition.
[21:26] Speaker: And then finally, I think, you know, the there's the ideas which I pin on the international development community, for a long time has convinced uh sort of these elites know, Washington, DC, Brussels, London, Paris, you know, recently Beijing or Dubai, right?
[21:46] Speaker: Those are the places where good ideas come from.
[21:49] Speaker: Uh and so you know, you should just become good implementers international best practices.
[21:54] Speaker: And so you get a lot of policy extroversion on the Uh Which again tempers ambition, right?
[22:02] Speaker: An example that I like to use is the SDGs, right?
[22:06] Speaker: If you listen to African ministers speaking, they always talk about the SDGs as this ambitious goal, right?
[22:16] Speaker: But the SDGs, as Land Pritchett, likes to remind us, These are lowest common denominator sort of targets.
[22:23] Speaker: No one ambitious enough would hope to achieve the SDGs as of like the pinnacle of their developmental trajectory, And so the fact that that's where they are signals that, you one, ideas matter and they've got the wrong ideas.
[22:41] Speaker: And two, that they've completely outsourced their own and ambition to the international development community, were.
[22:55] Speaker 2: And I guess related to this topic, we had we had Stefan on on the podcast in earlier episodes to talk about elite to drive growth.
[23:04] Speaker 2: You're a principal advisor at the Economic Policy with Stefan, with Pascal and others.
[23:11] Speaker 2: Can you talk about the work you'll be doing with EPN?
[23:14] Speaker 2: And it helps if you want to use specific examples, that'd be great.
[23:19] Speaker 2: And in particular, you know, how this work relates to you just talked about about elites.
[23:28] Speaker: Yeah, so so you know, I think Stefan's book uh hits the nail the head in terms of elite bargains being a crucial first step at getting everyone on the same page regarding, you know, where are we going and what sacrifices and bargains do we need to get there.
[23:47] Speaker: Um and so within APN, you know, uh the philosophy is that uh you know, we don't have the prescriptions uh because it's best when we help governments try to achieve what they set out to Now, you know, sometimes governments have have wrong ends and you know we try to redirect them uh with some evidence.
[24:10] Speaker: But ideally, you know, you want to be partners with a that says we want to do X, and X happens to be a good thing.
[24:17] Speaker: Uh and then two, you know, we then advise them on the but also on, you know, pay attention to the need to craft uh coalitions.
[24:30] Speaker: So we pay close attention to politics uh and and politically uh sort of considerations that should go into the policy process, right?
[24:42] Speaker: So we don't just brush over or assume that there will be consensus.
[24:48] Speaker: We try to have the politics baked into uh sort of the policy process.
[24:54] Speaker: Um now, you know, because because of the nature of the work, there's no template, right?
[25:00] Speaker: The overall template template is that governments must to do something that's pro-growth.
[25:07] Speaker: Uh, and two, that you know, our sort of journey with them is to uh the idea of bringing politics back in and making some of the necessary leaked bargains more explicit.
[25:19] Speaker: And I think a third pillar is that you know we don't, you know, we don't do PowerPoints and leave, right?
[25:26] Speaker: Uh EPN is structured to be more like you know, uh uh a fellow traveler with policymakers.
[25:33] Speaker: So, you know, we have very long-term engagements built in.
[25:38] Speaker: And when governments are not willing to engage with us in ways, we step back because they're not paying us, so we don't have to keep working with them or telling them things that want to hear, uh uh, which I think gives us some autonomy uh to work with governments that are willing uh on specific things, you know, problem solving, troubleshooting uh as we go along.
[26:03] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[26:03] Speaker 2: I'm I'm struck as you're going through uh uh EPN's various and and I didn't ask Stefan this, and I sh I should have, I guess it it's less relevant to him because uh you know, had been working on policy stuff as chief economist at and stuff um uh for a while.
[26:22] Speaker 2: But for for you know younger folks earlier in their it's often not the incentives for um, you know, younger to be doing this type of uh policy work.
[26:35] Speaker 2: You know, it's great.
[26:37] Speaker 2: And I love that you're you're diving into the policy world and not kind of sort of just focusing on the Ivory Tower and publications, but that often means, you know, either or uh yeah, ignoring the the incentives that um your and academia puts on you.
[26:54] Speaker 2: Would you agree with that characterization?
[26:56] Speaker 2: And and you know, what what can be done, especially in the development world, for universities to have some more in place for people with the type of knowledge you have to more in the policy work and not just be stuck trying to people, uh publish articles in journals that really I hope I'm not offending too many people by by saying that.
[27:21] Speaker: Well, you know, uh in academia, you know, if we convince people that our papers are great, that's that's all I mean I yeah, I I think you're right that um right there are involved, right?
[27:34] Speaker: And I think I think, you know, um uh young academics, uh and getting less constrained these days, right?
[27:44] Speaker: Uh although there's still schools where as a as a sort of a professor you shouldn't blog or be on Twitter or whatever.
[27:50] Speaker: But we're we're evolving to be more public-facing as a Uh and I think I think for me personally, you know, the journey was that uh given that I could I couldn't pretend that I come from a low-income country with lots of development that I thought needed addressing, right?
[28:12] Speaker: And so uh the sort of policy work and public engagement a way of staying sane, right?
[28:20] Speaker: So, you know, as you try to convince the three reviewers to your paper, right, uh you also get to, you know, talk to and and bureaucrats and and share your knowledge and and try and influence things in a particular direction.
[28:37] Speaker: Uh uh and I I think doing both is necessary in the sense that you know the it may seem daunting in international mostly because the gap between publication knowledge and knowledge remains wide.
[28:57] Speaker: Right.
[28:58] Speaker: Uh because if I compare sort of the domains I operate in and American colleagues, right, that gap for them is almost Because one, the American economy is overstudied, so there's a saturation of knowledge.
[29:15] Speaker: Uh and so so for them, the everyday is the has real relevance, right?
[29:21] Speaker: They have the data and they're doing the research on very policy-relevant things, including descriptive data, right?
[29:29] Speaker: While, you know, I think in international development you see the gap because there is a gap between academic development and policy-oriented development work.
[29:39] Speaker: And I would challenge us as a profession to narrow that gap so that the costs are not as high for young scholars who want to do both.
[29:49] Speaker: Uh uh because, you know, because then you know it becomes a matter of collecting the admin data and doing the work and extra time talking to policymakers, uh, as it were.
[30:04] Speaker: But there is a real cost, and and and yeah, uh, you know some of us have had to take hits.
[30:12] Speaker: Uh I'm lucky that it worked out in the sense that I was able to publish enough to get tenure while also cultivating uh knowledge.
[30:21] Speaker: Um and I think, you know, now moving forward, right?
[30:24] Speaker: I think that you know my publications moving forward will be richer for it.
[30:29] Speaker: Right.
[30:29] Speaker: Uh uh so my book on education in Tanzania has benefited from the access and and personal friendships that are built Tanzanian policymakers.
[30:41] Speaker: Uh that wouldn't have been possible if all I did was, you know, run surveys and and publish immediately, right?
[30:49] Speaker: As opposed to walking the journey with with the policymakers.
[30:54] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[30:54] Speaker 2: No, makes sense.
[30:55] Speaker 2: And yeah, I think by no means am I saying uh every academic should be engaged in in uh policy-facing work because some be terrible at it.
[31:05] Speaker 2: But I think more, I think relatively more uh definitely especially in the in the international development world.
[31:11] Speaker 2: So um that's great.
[31:13] Speaker 2: So a question here about growth.
[31:15] Speaker 2: So um in debates, I guess, about different ways to spur growth, uh, export manufacturing led growth has been um of the key ways.
[31:27] Speaker 2: Some would someone call it like the default kind of championed by uh, let's say, most economists.
[31:32] Speaker 2: Um and this is kind of set by uh recent episodes of growth like in East Asia.
[31:38] Speaker 2: Um today, various economists thinkers in this area, sort of muddying the the waters a bit, right?
[31:46] Speaker 2: Danny Roderick just came out with this op-ed in in Project um, expressing doubts about the viability of export for Africa, which was a shock because he's like the guy.
[31:58] Speaker 2: Um others, uh more recently, like for example, Joe Joe recent book, How Africa Works, which I know you just review, reviewed, um, seems to continue to be very optimistic about the viability of export manufacturing-led growth on the What um where do your views lie when it comes to export on the continent today?
[32:21] Speaker: Uh I mean, I think I think I think I think it's still it's a viable path uh uh for you know three or four reasons.
[32:28] Speaker: One is that, you know, and I think Arvid subramarian sort of some math on this.
[32:36] Speaker: There's still tens of millions of jobs to be created in uh, even accounting for China if demand grows in in many of lower income countries still out there, right?
[32:49] Speaker: South Asia, a good chunk of Africa, bits of Latin America, Um and so because we often just would think of manufacturing as you know, doing China to Europe, right?
[33:01] Speaker: But you know, there's Kenya to Tanzania or Uganda, right?
[33:06] Speaker: Uh which if policy is done right, you can uh sort of do the market stage of industrialization on a continental lots and lots of jobs.
[33:18] Speaker: Related to that is the fact that if you look at Africa in right, intra-Africa trade as a proportion of total African uh is still less than 20%.
[33:30] Speaker: Uh African share of global manufacturing exports uh is at about 2%.
[33:37] Speaker: But intra-African exports, right, uh plurality of the sectoral dominance is in the manufacturing sector, right?
[33:45] Speaker: So African, intra-African exports, you know, tend to have a proportion in the manufacturing sector.
[33:52] Speaker: It speaks to this idea that, you know, deepening trade will unlock demand for manufacturers from within And so you can create jobs that way.
[34:01] Speaker: So a third factor is that, you know, going to Danny's own sort of work is that manufacturing is not just about the It's about the sort of organizational changes that society the workforce makes and businesses make, right?
[34:19] Speaker: Uh and so you know, the manufacturing-specific forms and styles that economies need to become more Uh, so if you give up on manufacturing, you're giving up on of future innovation, ability to sort of absorb new and all that, uh, which I think would be a mistake for or regions uh to not prepare for.
[34:44] Speaker: Uh and then finally, I think for national security reasons, you need a manufacturing sector uh to not to be able to at reorient some productive capacity uh during emergencies uh things that you may not necessarily be able to import.
[35:01] Speaker: Uh so I I I mean I get where he's coming from in the sense yes, now with automation, the fact that you know uh countries are peaking on manufacturing at much lower sort of figures.
[35:18] Speaker: Right.
[35:19] Speaker: Uh and the East Asian sort of continuous climbing of the ladder hasn't happened in places like Bangladesh.
[35:25] Speaker: But you know, that that wasn't pre-ordained, right?
[35:28] Speaker: Bangladesh is is is a policy failure in the sense that uh, know, there wasn't a concerted effort to convert some of from garments into uh sort of newer sectors.
[35:41] Speaker: And so countries that have continuously grown up the food if you will, of manufacturing, right, have capital into higher productivity sectors.
[35:54] Speaker: Uh but if if you if if if you're stuck at garments and you that that's the sum total of your manufacturing potential, sure, you're gonna be stuck at garments.
[36:04] Speaker: Um and take that as your position uh sort of on the on the uh uh uh value value chain uh sort of system.
[36:14] Speaker: So I'm I'm for those four reasons, I'm I'm I I still think uh manufacturing is a viable path.
[36:23] Speaker: Um and you know, I think also if if you're trying to develop with ag, which African countries should, uh, you know, land relatively abundant in the region, uh, some agro processing hurt, right?
[36:39] Speaker: And that would be, you know, super high tech.
[36:42] Speaker: Some places can't get as high tech as the Netherlands.
[36:45] Speaker: You know, the dairy sector in Kenya is pushing the frontiers on that.
[36:49] Speaker: Um but others, you know, some value addition.
[36:53] Speaker: Uh in Tanzania, I was looking at figures, you know, the uh of horticulture and fruit sector, uh less than 5% of output processed, which is crazy, right?
[37:06] Speaker: Uh so there's a lot more, you know, rural manufacturing uh that's just going unmet.
[37:12] Speaker: Uh so we shouldn't we shouldn't think of you know Taiwan, There's there's a lot more than can happen before Taiwan uh in this m in the manufacturing story.
[37:24] Speaker 2: I I think it was on your Substack.
[37:26] Speaker 2: Uh you I think you wrote relatively recently you were nerding out on manufacturing stats across the continent.
[37:32] Speaker 2: That was that was you, right?
[37:34] Speaker 2: I'm not making that up, I believe.
[37:35] Speaker 2: Uh yes.
[37:37] Speaker: Yes.
[37:38] Speaker 2: Okay.
[37:38] Speaker 2: And I I wanna, and you're nerding out on manufacturing stats across the continent, Ken.
[37:43] Speaker 2: What was the most surprising, sort of shocking than that horror horticulture one in Tanzania you What was one that kind of has lingered in your mind as just a bit of a shocker?
[37:54] Speaker: No, I mean I I think the let me try and think if there was one.
[38:00] Speaker: I think the the biggest sort of challenge, uh uh sort of was the fact that uh Africa as a region and some individual dominated South Asia, including India, for a long time on Uh productivity and value add as a share of the economy, Uh and then you know just fell off post uh around the 20 Um and so, you know, I think, you know, as India powers right, uh people perhaps will forget that uh and the numbers bear this out, right?
[38:42] Speaker: India isn't that far ahead of many African countries, right?
[38:46] Speaker: Uh uh but but India, I think, has uh over the years capacity to uh start running, right?
[38:56] Speaker: While you know, uh with its uh human capital investments through the IIT's uh promotion of big business, which is helped by its own scale.
[39:06] Speaker: And you know, its own human capital is still a drag.
[39:11] Speaker: Uh and I think many African countries are still ahead of India in terms of human capital in the aggregate.
[39:16] Speaker: But you know, you don't need super high quality human once you get the organizational elements uh of growth going.
[39:25] Speaker: Uh so that that was that was an interesting finding.
[39:29] Speaker: Uh but yeah, I think I think you know, this may not be like surprise.
[39:34] Speaker: The big sort of point was that too many African countries just leave money on the table uh because no one is actively trying to mine that money uh with you know processing value addition before exports and so on.
[39:52] Speaker 2: Um on the uh your your point about India's investment in capital and the IIT system, uh I'm sure some listeners know, but in here in Zanzibar, the IIT Madras just opened their first ever uh non-Indian campus here in Zanzibar, we're very happy to have as a neighbor here.
[40:10] Speaker 2: So I think that that's an interesting avenue, is like um, I don't know, south south educational exchange or or something of the like, especially because there's a there's a sort of long history of of um Indian expats in in East Africa, at that that could be interesting.
[40:27] Speaker: Yeah.
[40:27] Speaker: And and Africans uh studying in India.
[40:30] Speaker: Um lots and lots of Africans uh, you know, uh went to
[40:35] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[40:35] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[40:36] Speaker 2: Um so we've talked a bit about uh legislatures, we've talked a bit about uh elites, uh, we've talked a bit about uh and and sort of export-led manufacturing.
[40:47] Speaker 2: Um I want to talk a few questions about uh state capacity.
[40:52] Speaker 2: Uh so you you've written on this topic quite a bit.
[40:56] Speaker 2: Um and one thing you wrote about under this broad state capacity is the need for greater fiscal capacity and public finance management across Africa.
[41:07] Speaker 2: Um, right, the main point basically being that if the state has no money, it almost definitionally cannot do anything, Um, and and one of your points I've seen now a few times is that, you know, in Africa, rarely are the business creditors from whom the government either borrows or raises revenues from, rarely are they given representation, either in legislatures or on the boards of central banks.
[41:36] Speaker 2: So first, maybe can you explain how you think that this type of arrangement might help build fiscal capacity?
[41:43] Speaker 2: And then, yeah, if there are any examples of this that that you can go over, that would be great.
[41:50] Speaker: Yeah.
[41:50] Speaker: So um uh so this is uh this thinking, I should credit uh David Stasavage, uh NYE political scientist, who has a great book on uh, you know, the canonical story about institutions helping interest rates in the UK uh post the Glorious Revolution, right?
[42:08] Speaker: The standard story is that the deals happened and credit cost of credit gradually went down.
[42:16] Speaker: What David does is that he actually finds that the mechanism, right, uh was that the people who who are lending money represented in parliament, right?
[42:26] Speaker: Right.
[42:27] Speaker: So that they could enforce their rights, the property rights.
[42:30] Speaker: So it's not enough that there's a constitution, a written whatever about the property rights.
[42:35] Speaker: Uh it matters that you can actually enforce those rights.
[42:38] Speaker: Right.
[42:39] Speaker: And so, you know, if you look at the African context, you uh one of the earlier sort of essays I wrote on this was on question of, you know, after the HIPAA debt relief African governments had enough fiscal space, uh, interest were low, so they could go on private markets to borrow money.
[43:01] Speaker: So the puzzle for me was that, you know, why is it that if borrowing from the private sector, why would a private lender, you know, give money like Glencoe?
[43:10] Speaker: This is public information, right?
[43:12] Speaker: Glencoe lent money to the government of Chad, right?
[43:16] Speaker: Almost a billion dollars.
[43:17] Speaker: Now you have to be pretty brave to lend the government of just Debbie money, right?
[43:24] Speaker: That amount of money, uh, right, uh, without any sort of uh, know, uh mechanism to enforce it.
[43:31] Speaker: Except that there was a mechanism to enforce it, and maybe I have done more in the essay to get to this.
[43:37] Speaker: And so what you have in in the African context is that the right?
[43:41] Speaker: The enforcement mechanism doesn't look normal in the sense of direct representation in institutions that manage debt, it's you know central banks uh that can help governments inflate out of debt or legislatures that can enforce uh uh you know spending.
[43:59] Speaker: Limits.
[44:00] Speaker: The sort of accountability mechanism gets outsourced to home of the creditors.
[44:08] Speaker: So mostly European governments.
[44:10] Speaker: The same European governments via the IMF and the of can discipline the debtor countries.
[44:20] Speaker: So the Glencoe case, right?
[44:22] Speaker: Glencoe got paid via an IMF bailout.
[44:25] Speaker: Right.
[44:27] Speaker: So you can immediately see perverse incentives everywhere, Chad can get free money that it doesn't intend to spend Especially if at the time, you know, it's friendly with France and maybe a private privateer thinks that, oh yeah, if friendly with France and the EU, maybe they'll honor their Privateer also knows that, well, if even if they don't honor commitment, uh, the IMF process can always ensure that I get of my money back and I don't get such a big haircut, right?
[45:00] Speaker: So that you get this uh perverse outcome whereby, you know, credit isn't disciplining public PFM practices uh as you would expect in under normal conditions.
[45:12] Speaker: So ideally you would want a system whereby you know the private sector is strong enough, either via representation on key institutions, uh, or you know by the fact that they can they a strong political voice and the public would respond if they said the deficit was too much, or that you know they could to lend to the government, right?
[45:39] Speaker: Um uh that's not the case uh uh in much of the continent.
[45:44] Speaker: So that private credit isn't disciplining public spending way that it ought to.
[45:52] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[45:52] Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, you you mentioned uh David's Desavage.
[45:56] Speaker 2: So um I'll refer and we'll link to this in the show yeah, his book Um States of Credit was really good.
[46:04] Speaker 2: I I talked to him on a podcast uh several years ago.
[46:07] Speaker 2: Um and he actually so one of the findings was in sort of early modern Europe, because parliaments kind of began first in sort of an urban institution, a city or a city-state Um, a bunch of the city-states, uh, I think for like significantly lower interest rates than these nascent, more early nation states, uh, just because for this very you said, Ken, on the parliaments in these city-states or these free cities uh were represented the sort of merchants and and the creditors that that were was lending the government um uh money.
[46:45] Speaker 2: And then on this point, the other the other research that to mind, and he's actually at Stanford, you might have there with him, but um Sumitra Ja, he he had this paper.
[46:55] Speaker 2: Yeah, where right the those um MP members of the UK who like owned stock in these overseas companies, they were more likely to support mercantilist or like market building reforms in in Parliament.
[47:13] Speaker 2: Because basically, right, they had this ownership stake in in commercial growth in building markets, and so they they were more likely to favor it.
[47:21] Speaker 2: Um did you yeah, did you cross over with them or or has that influenced thought?
[47:26] Speaker: Yes, yeah.
[47:26] Speaker: So he well, he graduated um several years before I joined, but he he was then at the business school.
[47:33] Speaker: So uh I know Jazzwork very well.
[47:35] Speaker: Um and I think, you know, so this is this is the story of right?
[47:40] Speaker: That I think economists often miss the politics, the politics, which is where institutional enforcement happens, So there's a story about the UK Parliament that is just you know, the revolution pact between legislature and the End of story.
[48:00] Speaker: 1688, and then all the things happen.
[48:02] Speaker: 1688 and then everything is is great after, you know.
[48:05] Speaker: Forget all the fights about, you know, the reforms about, know, who should vote, you know, extending the suffrage and and whatnot.
[48:12] Speaker: Right.
[48:13] Speaker: But if you if you if you know open the lid and start looking then you see this amazing uh sort of the amazing array of about how institutions actually enforce uh contracts and and all and all this.
[48:29] Speaker: And so I think that's that's a much better way of institutions uh rather than you know this cartoonish, you know, have strong Western institutions and everything will be uh, kind of rendering.
[48:41] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[48:41] Speaker 2: Okay.
[48:42] Speaker 2: So we're gonna do one of these unpackings uh live.
[48:46] Speaker 2: And I want I want your thoughts on it, right?
[48:48] Speaker 2: Because this this conversation kind of relates to the point that I've seen come up in a few of your writings on the importance of um being able to share.
[48:58] Speaker 2: You often call it like quote unquote the governance rents order to sort of build a pro-growth coalition that's you know supportive of needed economic reforms.
[49:07] Speaker 2: And um, yeah, on this point, I was looking at ways to get this concretely and some examples and stuff.
[49:13] Speaker 2: And so I just want to read uh for you one of uh it's a post of yours from uh way back in in 2014.
[49:20] Speaker 2: So this is pre-Substack.
[49:21] Speaker 2: And the blog post is called uh The Virtues of Tammany Uh, and there's a question mark at the end.
[49:28] Speaker 2: Um and I want to make clear to everyone this uh this is a direct quote from Ken, but Ken is making an excerpt from a book on Tammany Hall written by somebody else.
[49:38] Speaker 2: Um so the expert excerpt in your blog post, it says, and this is, you know, settle in, folks, this is a couple paragraphs here.
[49:45] Speaker 2: Um uh the expert said, and I quote, uh Tammany Hall, uh for the faction that controlled Manhattan's Democratic for almost 150 years, uh, has a well-deserved place in the of urban misgovernment in the United States.
[50:00] Speaker 2: Uh, it stole elections, it intimidated political it shook down contractors and vendors, it produced the very face of political corruption, William Tweed.
[50:09] Speaker 2: But uh, there is more to the story.
[50:12] Speaker 2: Tammany Hall's leaders delivered social services at a time City Hall and Albany did not.
[50:20] Speaker 2: They massaged uh justice at a time when the poor did not have access to public defenders, and they found jobs for when the alternative was hunger and illness.
[50:32] Speaker 2: Uh, Tammany Hall certainly was guilty of many of the arraigned against it, but those flaws should not overshadow Tammany's undoubted virtues.
[50:41] Speaker 2: Uh, the machine succeeded not simply because it could round up votes, it succeeded because it was unafraid of the grunt work of retail politics and because it rarely lost touch its voters.
[50:52] Speaker 2: So, so end quote.
[50:54] Speaker 2: Um, with that, Ken, my question to you is you know, to your point that you just kind of went over, why why aren't there more, I guess, Tammany Hall-esque structures that we can across the continent?
[51:06] Speaker 2: Uh, you know, admittedly, uh somewhat shady or slightly bodies, but nonetheless they figure out a way to sort of quote unquote governance rents amongst the necessary coalitions in order to deliver like relatively better and and public goods to broader segments of of the people.
[51:26] Speaker: Yeah.
[51:26] Speaker: Yeah, I know.
[51:27] Speaker: I mean, that's that's a good question, right?
[51:29] Speaker: So, so, you know, um uh for for your listeners, right?
[51:33] Speaker: Uh the way to understand this question is not is not, you I I don't think coaches is asking, you know, why aren't there more corrupt people on the continent, right?
[51:41] Speaker: The question is on the service delivery side, which is, I uh, which is why I was I was I've always been intrigued by of this example, right?
[51:49] Speaker: That um uh there is corruption and there's corruption, So in a world where there was corruption, but governments also delivered, right?
[51:59] Speaker: Uh that's that's a a better world than a world where there's and no service delivery.
[52:05] Speaker: Uh and so I think uh the and and this is a blast from the I believe.
[52:11] Speaker: You know, what what year was this post from, if you can
[52:14] Speaker 2: I think it's it's one of my 2014, yeah.
[52:17] Speaker: 2014, yes, yes, yes.
[52:19] Speaker: I was still in grad school long time ago.
[52:22] Speaker: So, you know, uh what I was trying to get at there was, you the question of we obsess too much with, you know, trying to perfect systems and processes as opposed to focusing on systems and processes are supposed to do.
[52:38] Speaker: Um and so, you know, looking to end corruption or have onerous campaign finance laws in uh in Burundi, right, will get us anywhere, right?
[52:51] Speaker: I think we would be better off spending a lot more of that on uh getting the Burundi public uh sort of service system to getting stuff done.
[53:03] Speaker: Um uh and I say this uh you know with reference to Tammany Hall because then you know we get to do two things.
[53:10] Speaker: One, uh we get the systems uh capable, right?
[53:15] Speaker: The administrative systems, the political systems, right, of getting stuff done.
[53:20] Speaker: Uh, and two, we then create opportunities for demand side for cleanup, right?
[53:27] Speaker: So imagine a world where we end corruption but do not sort of uh sharpen the demand side for service delivery, then it's just money that's on the table, right?
[53:37] Speaker: Uh uh and part of the reason why there's a lot of it's not the only reason, but part of the reason why there's is that you know absorption capacity in many African countries is sorely lacking.
[53:48] Speaker: Right.
[53:49] Speaker: So uh even when there's high demand, like in education and right, in Nigeria, the last time I looked, uh barely half of the health budget was absorbed uh at the end of the fiscal year.
[54:02] Speaker: Right.
[54:02] Speaker: So if net of corruption, you're not spending all your money healthcare in Nigeria, uh that's crazy, right?
[54:11] Speaker: And so it it shows us that get the getting stuff done side uh should be a core priority.
[54:17] Speaker: And then lastly, I think it also uh is a reminder that, you uh good things do not always go together, right?
[54:26] Speaker: So you could have corrupt people who can get stuff done, uh the system used to getting stuff done, which then creates for future cleanup, right?
[54:38] Speaker: Uh so I see I see the end of corruption or the reduction of in in public administration systems as development itself, It's not a prerequisite, right?
[54:52] Speaker: It comes from being able to get stuff done and then creating of systemic demands for more efficiency.
[54:59] Speaker: And that's the channel through which you reduce corruption, You don't reduce corruption by having perfect leaders in perfect systems.
[55:06] Speaker: Because getting to perfect leaders in perfect systems, well, you never get to perfect leaders, but approximating perfect right, is itself development.
[55:14] Speaker: And so you can't put that as a precondition for development.
[55:18] Speaker: Uh all this to say that you know, I firmly believe that on service delivery and demand for service delivery is without first-ending corruption.
[55:29] Speaker: Are there examples of this on the continent?
[55:31] Speaker: Uh I would say, you know, there have been examples of this in previous times, right?
[55:36] Speaker: So Kenya is a case I'm most familiar with.
[55:39] Speaker: Uh, you know, the Kenyan state in the late 60s, early 70s was pretty efficient in service delivery, right?
[55:46] Speaker: And part of the bargain was that, you know, there was a big about whether public officials could do business with as part of the development process, right?
[55:55] Speaker: Uh there's a camp that argued that no, no, no, no, no, you you should have a clear separation.
[55:59] Speaker: And another camp basically made the argument that, well, number one, we don't have that many sort of Kenyans with the right and access to do business.
[56:10] Speaker: So if you go down this path, basically you'll have made the for only foreigners doing business with government.
[56:16] Speaker: Uh uh, most of them, you know, either colonials who became or foreign companies.
[56:21] Speaker: Um and so, you know, there was uh an argument among uh Kenyan elite at the time that, hey, we could do business with This meant a lot of corruption, right?
[56:31] Speaker: Uh because, you know, if if the state investment agency, the uh sort of invested in your company and you are the chief say, in the Ministry of Finance or a senior government in another position, right, it meant a lot of insider dealing.
[56:50] Speaker: Uh because oftentimes, you know, you're the ones who appointed the very same people who are making decisions with regard to uh in your companies.
[56:58] Speaker: However, right, this generation of Kenyans uh delivered years of the early to mid-70s.
[57:08] Speaker: Uh why?
[57:09] Speaker: Because they had skin in the game.
[57:12] Speaker: Uh, and because they had skin in the game, they were oriented to make the system work.
[57:18] Speaker: And in taking care of their own interests, they were able to have this encompassing interest, which ensured that you uh, the economy as a whole prospered because they stood to Um now, you know, this finally gets me to a point that I to make, which is part of the challenge now with trying to Tammany Hall.
[57:40] Speaker: And I should say that, you know, we we we probably shouldn't to recreate Tammany Hall, right?
[57:46] Speaker: Because the problem isn't the solution, isn't the corruption.
[57:49] Speaker: The corruption is not the mechanism, right?
[57:52] Speaker: I think the mechanism, uh, as I see it is elite level ownership of everything that is required to get stuff done.
[58:02] Speaker: Right.
[58:03] Speaker 2: Like residual claimancy is something people talk about.
[58:06] Speaker: Right.
[58:06] Speaker: Absolutely, absolutely.
[58:08] Speaker: Uh, right.
[58:09] Speaker: And so so in a world where, you know, that's off the table, because, you know, uh all the global transparency and movements and donors are on your neck, then you know, you almost you almost have to hide the corruption uh or pretend that no corruption, or pretend that you don't need to sort of spend extra resources in building and maintaining coalitions.
[58:35] Speaker: And so nothing gets done because the coalition building work the uh sort of rellocations for residual claimancies, right, are not made, and so nothing gets done.
[58:47] Speaker: Uh so, so, so you know, the way to get back is to you know uh empower elites in a way.
[58:56] Speaker: And uh I know you know uh some people out there may not like idea, right, given the performance of these same elites, But these are the elites we have.
[59:04] Speaker: They they have their own sort of uh uh traitical arrangements that are needed to get stuff done.
[59:09] Speaker: So we should be a little bit more accommodating uh in terms you know, and and open to the idea that there's need to spend money and resources on building and maintaining coalitions, that we can't pretend that um that that's uh entirely wasteful.
[59:26] Speaker: Because I'd make the case that pretending otherwise means that uh a lot more of these sort of deals uh are done below the which makes them a lot more inefficient than if they were done above above the table.
[59:41] Speaker 2: And there's a there's a pretty good book on this time that mentioned in Kenya in the sort of, I guess, early, mid, maybe late 70s.
[59:49] Speaker 2: African Successes, those four Kenyan Bureaucrats.
[59:53] Speaker 2: Do you know the one I'm by Leonard, yeah.
[59:56] Speaker: By uh is it David Leonard?
[59:57] Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
[59:59] Speaker: It's a UC UC press book.
[1:00:01] Speaker: Fantastic case studies.
[1:00:03] Speaker 2: Right?
[1:00:03] Speaker 2: Good example of this exact thing you're you're laying
[1:00:07] Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[1:00:08] Speaker: Highly recommend uh the book by Leonard, yeah.
[1:00:11] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess the other one that pops to mind too is yeah, Yuan Yuanang has obviously written about corruption her newer book, but even before that, in her 2016 book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, there's an awesome chapter on um what is it called?
[1:00:26] Speaker 2: Um franchising the bureaucracy, I think she called it like that, where to your point, uh a lot of the reforms worked because a lot of the local government folks now had a stake in the upside if they achieved high rates of economic growth.
[1:00:44] Speaker 2: They got talk about residual claimancy, they got a they a chunk of the uh leftover uplift that wasn't sent to the sender, right?
[1:00:53] Speaker 2: So to your point of uh of an encompassing interest, right?
[1:00:57] Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[1:00:58] Speaker: And you know, I mean I I guess this is this is uh a reminder all of us, right, that incentives matter and and we moralize too much about public administration, uh, because know, ideally public administration is supposed to select selfless people.
[1:01:17] Speaker: But that's not the world we live in, right?
[1:01:19] Speaker: The self-interested people, especially in smaller economies, who for whom the public sector is the only avenue for a income.
[1:01:28] Speaker: Uh and to the extent that is possible, right, uh we should that.
[1:01:33] Speaker: And you know, I think Yuan Yuan Aang's work makes is great in this regard because she makes a distinction between greasing wheels types of corruption, or, you know, which I would expand on to include this coalition building and maintenance you know uh leakages versus outright theft, right?
[1:01:53] Speaker: So outright theft is bad, and we should never tolerate that.
[1:01:56] Speaker: But you know, spending resources on building and I think, is uh is a core feature of the political economy of
[1:02:04] Speaker 2: Okay, so kind of related to this uh Tammany Hall discussion, and and I guess related to some of your recent writing on state capacity and the subnational and city levels being places to do this, I want to turn a bit to talk about cities and urbanization.
[1:02:21] Speaker 2: Uh, we are, after all, the the Africa Urban Lab.
[1:02:25] Speaker 2: So in your most recent essay from a few days ago, it's the for listeners, the mechanics of building strong states 21st century Africa.
[1:02:33] Speaker 2: Um, you say at the very end of the essay that urbanization a quote unquote cheat code, right, for accelerated state if it's done well.
[1:02:42] Speaker 2: I want you to just expand on this.
[1:02:43] Speaker 2: Like what, you know, why do you see urbanization as such a for state building and for economic growth?
[1:02:52] Speaker: Um, yes.
[1:02:52] Speaker: So urbanization, right, packs a lot of people in a small relatively small space.
[1:02:59] Speaker: So, you know, I think I think one of the core functions of building is uh making your population legible to the state.
[1:03:07] Speaker: Uh the smaller the geographic area you have to cover you know, the better you are at it.
[1:03:13] Speaker: Um especially if you know the schools, uh, the hospitals, uh, you know, household registration is done well.
[1:03:22] Speaker: Uh so you can you can provide a lot more services uh more in a smaller area than if you are trying to cover all of Kenya.
[1:03:32] Speaker: Um the other reason why urbanization is great is that you uh if you because of agglomeration effects, if you have people in a small space and uh the economic policy making side is done well, you can generate the revenue needed to uh all the public goods and services that cities require.
[1:03:54] Speaker: Right.
[1:03:55] Speaker: Um, unfortunately, I should caveat this by saying that uh countries are uh urbanizing at much lower rates of income than we've historically seen in much of Europe, North America, or Asia, which then means that African cities are on average poorer than cities elsewhere, uh, which explains the lack of resources for public goods services provision.
[1:04:21] Speaker: And so, you know, growth in cities have to be part of the if urbanization can serve the function that uh alluding to in the post.
[1:04:35] Speaker 2: And and you know, you your previous answer, a couple of ago, I had asked about uh fiscal capacity and sort of public finance management.
[1:04:43] Speaker 2: And um, you know, you just mentioned that uh a lot of because they're urbanizing at lower levels of very difficult at the city level to finance a lot of the urban infrastructure through taxation.
[1:04:57] Speaker 2: But one of the things the lab is working on is um precisely this building local fiscal capacity.
[1:05:03] Speaker 2: And that's mainly via uh helping cities uh and city implement um land and and property taxation.
[1:05:11] Speaker 2: And so this is something that'll be sort of announced uh uh a bit later on, but um it's sort of greenlit and happening which we're really excited about.
[1:05:20] Speaker 2: And I mean, you're you know, you've you've probably known sort of Georgist arguments or theoretical arguments that um land and property taxation, one of the least ways to raise revenue, and probably especially for rapidly cities and areas, um, you're gonna see huge whopping in urban land values while while cities are rapidly And a lot of a lot of the increase in the land value is uh due to the public investments, oftentimes in roads or or nearby hospitals.
[1:05:54] Speaker 2: Um, and so, you know, by rights, sort of the the government that provides those public goods.
[1:05:59] Speaker 2: Should be capturing at least partially some of the uplift that land value.
[1:06:03] Speaker 2: So that kind of justifies.
[1:06:04] Speaker 2: But yeah, we'll see how it's going to be.
[1:06:07] Speaker: I mean, yeah, it creates incentives for governments to the physical infrastructure.
[1:06:11] Speaker: If it means being able to capture some of the revenue.
[1:06:16] Speaker 2: Right, right, right.
[1:06:16] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:06:17] Speaker 2: I want to pick up on something you said at the very of that answer, though.
[1:06:21] Speaker 2: You said cities help, at least in the jurisdiction of the people to be legible to their government.
[1:06:28] Speaker 2: And uh legibility is this nice word that James T.
[1:06:31] Speaker 2: Scott uses in Seeing Like a State.
[1:06:34] Speaker 2: And uh in this essay, uh you you kind of write about James D.
[1:06:38] Speaker 2: Scott.
[1:06:39] Speaker 2: And I wanted to give you some some time here to vent a little more about the seeing like a state thesis as it applies to Africa.
[1:06:45] Speaker 2: Um and I say this because for me, in in particular when it uh comes to his chapters about urban planning, I also with Scott uh on that front.
[1:06:56] Speaker 2: So please, you know, Ken, the floor is yours.
[1:06:58] Speaker 2: Uh vent away.
[1:07:01] Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think I think you know, often uh you see mismatch of people who've clearly grown up in places with states that yes, may have had instances of overreach, some of them egregious, then sort of superimposing those sort of views against states in contexts where it doesn't make any sense, So if you're you know overgoverned, an overgoverned city and yeah, maybe your city does some planning exercise that awry, perhaps to you know the Scott thesis.
[1:07:39] Speaker: Uh but if you're in Dar es Salaam, right, where you know there isn't much evidence of planning, right, uh we're not at a where we should be worrying too much about uh city overreach in planning, right?
[1:07:55] Speaker: Uh instead, we should be applying models of thinking about government that are more pro-intensifying, right, the ability of the city to organize city life.
[1:08:08] Speaker: Uh and so my venting in that piece was, you know, this where, and it goes back to the the you know, this other theme in most of my writing of, you know, where are the ideas coming from, right?
[1:08:20] Speaker: Because if if if your idea of you know the private sector is by some guy from San Francisco who doesn't like big right, and then tries to apply it in Kenya where you need big businesses, right?
[1:08:35] Speaker: So, yes, it's one thing to fight Walmart in the US, it's quite another to come in and be anti-big business where there are no big businesses.
[1:08:43] Speaker: Similarly, it's one thing to sort of fight city overreach and go to places where there's barely any city government and think that that's a useful model to think about the context.
[1:08:53] Speaker: So it we should we should be applying the right model, mental models when thinking about these policy questions uh in
[1:09:03] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:09:03] Speaker 2: You're a very diplomatic ventor, Ken.
[1:09:06] Speaker 2: I don't know if anyone ever has ever told you that.
[1:09:09] Speaker 2: Um uh I I well to take my opportunity to to vent a bit.
[1:09:16] Speaker 2: So the re the reason the urban planning chapters of that book in particular uh get at me.
[1:09:22] Speaker 2: So I I tend to see myself as a pretty like I'm a pretty big accolade of Alain Burteau.
[1:09:26] Speaker 2: I don't know if you've read his book on on urban planning, without design.
[1:09:30] Speaker 2: It's fantastic.
[1:09:31] Speaker 2: Highly, highly recommend it.
[1:09:33] Speaker 2: Um I think it's much more, yeah.
[1:09:37] Speaker 2: I think it's much more closer to to reality.
[1:09:39] Speaker 2: Bertot basically says, you know, some things, like um, he the example of arterial road networks, uh, like, you know, defining what is public space and what is private space the city, these types of things, they're just going to some amount of top-down intervention.
[1:10:00] Speaker 2: Like that just requires like a government to set the for broader city growth.
[1:10:06] Speaker 2: But then within that broader framework that it requires intervention, um, most other things you can just let sort the market fill in organically as the city grows over And so, yeah, I tend to, you know, and his book is called Without Design.
[1:10:21] Speaker 2: This is like a Hayekian phrase.
[1:10:22] Speaker 2: So it's not like Alan is a full-on top, top-down um, very much a market-oriented urban planner, far as urban planners go.
[1:10:32] Speaker 2: But I think, yeah, especially in African cities, um, to be this nice middle way between sort of anarchist no planning at all, and like over-aggressive, crazily convoluted, financially unviable master plans, right?
[1:10:49] Speaker: And and and, you know, and so the challenge for the region, is that you you often get this swing in either direction.
[1:10:57] Speaker: Right.
[1:10:58] Speaker: Right.
[1:10:58] Speaker: So it's it's either there's no planning or there's a uh a World Bank or whatever funded crazy master plan that nobody has intention of of implementing, but you know, which to pretend is is going to be implemented someday.
[1:11:16] Speaker: And so nothing gets done, as opposed to what you're which is, you know, can we just have a standard approach so Lagos doesn't flood every time it rains, a crowd doesn't flood every time it rains, right?
[1:11:28] Speaker: Someone should think about the planning process, uh uh and then you know, allow room for the private sector to fill in the uh uh down the road.
[1:11:39] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:11:39] Speaker 2: And I mean, you're you're in, you're calling from Nairobi now.
[1:11:43] Speaker 2: Um I happen to know that Nairobi's, I don't know if it's the current one, but this because this was a while ago.
[1:11:48] Speaker 2: But in the aughts, the the sort of 2000s, uh, I believe the government partnered with Jica, the Japanese.
[1:11:55] Speaker: Oh yeah, there's a Jaika master plan.
[1:11:57] Speaker 2: Bilateral.
[1:11:57] Speaker 2: That comprehensive master plan for Nairobi, I think it took seven years to write.
[1:12:03] Speaker 2: And and you know, they interviewed the drafters during the of this seven-year, you know, master plan, comprehensive plan for Nairobi.
[1:12:12] Speaker 2: And even the the drafters, they they were like, yeah, kind of this is not going to happen.
[1:12:18] Speaker 2: Um, and so, you know, if that's the norm, clearly we have room for for improvement.
[1:12:23] Speaker: No, I mean, you know, they there's there's there's so much that happens in international development, but you know, it's it's like so sometimes when, you know, uh, so in my classes, I teach this first year seminar.
[1:12:35] Speaker: So, you know, uh in in the in the critique week, I often have to remind them that look, this is not a conspiracy theory, There's there's no one conspiring to do all these crazy It's just that, you know, the mode of doing things just keeps yielding these ridiculous outcomes.
[1:12:53] Speaker: Uh because I'm sure people knew, right?
[1:12:56] Speaker: Yeah, maybe the the Japanese folks didn't know, but City Hall knew the beast that is Narabi City, and uh that you know planning has to be politically conscious.
[1:13:08] Speaker: Uh there are things you can and cannot do.
[1:13:11] Speaker: And uh if anything, you know, roads, sewer lines, right, about recreational facilities and spaces, you know, minimum, as you're suggesting, right?
[1:13:22] Speaker: The minimum infrastructure that then allows the private sector to fill in, uh, that would have been uh more useful.
[1:13:28] Speaker: And planning for things that you can do, right?
[1:13:31] Speaker: Because, you know, if I couldn't zoom out a little bit on question, right?
[1:13:35] Speaker: Uh uh and Pritchett writes about this, right?
[1:13:38] Speaker: So if if you load a public process or system with too much than it can bear, it inevitably collapses or fails, And then failure begets failure, right?
[1:13:52] Speaker: Because now Nairobians are convinced that we can never a master plan, right?
[1:13:56] Speaker: There's no need for planning because it can never be But that's because repeatedly, whenever Nairobi for the Rol's Royce of master plans rather than you know more like, okay, step one, let's plan for things that we can execute on, build the confidence, learn by doing, and then move up uh uh in terms of you know big advantage.
[1:14:19] Speaker 2: Like the Greeks in like 500 BC, 400 BC were doing these very simple grid plans, right?
[1:14:25] Speaker 2: So maybe this is a good first step, right?
[1:14:27] Speaker: Houston, you know, Houston with all this craziness, right?
[1:14:30] Speaker: Houston kind of makes sense.
[1:14:32] Speaker: Uh and it's cute that the buildings that look different Uh and and you know, I think I think Nairobi, there's kind order in in even with the current department boom, right?
[1:14:43] Speaker: So, you know, the people who are against the density that we in places like, you know, Lavington, Killilesh or whatever, But you know, I see mostly as an infrastructure problem.
[1:14:54] Speaker: If the sewer lines and water lines were done well and the you know, and other amenities, then you know, density is Uh that's where people want to live.
[1:15:06] Speaker 2: On this point, Ken, so uh uh this is kind of reading your as and and a few other things, and this is just a notion I so feel free to be like this guy's crazy.
[1:15:14] Speaker 2: But um I was thinking trying to like connect threads of various street streams of your work.
[1:15:21] Speaker 2: And to me, like one uh pretty easy, well, not easy is a word, one like maybe low-hanging fruit way to um maintain uh keep some talented elites around.
[1:15:36] Speaker 2: Because I think uh, you know, to your point, a a problem is let's say the the sort of children of these elites go get educated in Paris or London, and a lot of them end up there, and this is, you know, they they don't end up coming back.
[1:15:52] Speaker 2: There's job prospects in Paris and London.
[1:15:54] Speaker 2: Paris and London are also amazing cities to live in for other reasons.
[1:15:58] Speaker 2: They've got great amenities, infrastructure works, you right.
[1:16:02] Speaker 2: They have transit, you can get around relatively cheaply, don't need a car and be stuck in traffic for two hours or hours.
[1:16:10] Speaker 2: Um, so I'm I'm thinking like if I'm an elite and I have across the globe and I want to live in a high amenity city, like this probably skews me towards the Paris or the Londons or even the Dubis until my city back home, be it Lagos, or Nairobi or Lusaka, figures out a way that I can get my home to work or my home to my friend's place or my home wherever I socialize on a Friday night in like less than an hour and a half or two hours, you know.
[1:16:44] Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
[1:16:45] Speaker: No, I mean I I think you know, getting making cities nicer, will suck in more, more people, more talented people, you people with a a good sense of aesthetics who also tend to be people, right?
[1:17:02] Speaker: Just, you know, instead of what we have now, which is a city crushes your soul and and forces you to find ways of adapting.
[1:17:10] Speaker: Now, you know, I think one of the problems that we have is also that the same elites, right, they've adapted so much that become comfortable with the confusion, right?
[1:17:19] Speaker: So that instead of uh you know fixing power, you have your own generator, you have your own borehole and water tank.
[1:17:26] Speaker: You buy a big car to avoid the portholes.
[1:17:30] Speaker: Um which and then you know you develop an aesthetic that that's that's a marker of of wealth.
[1:17:36] Speaker: Um as opposed to you know my ideal, which is can I walk to the coffee shop, right?
[1:17:43] Speaker: Can I put my kid in a stroba and walk to the coffee shop?
[1:17:47] Speaker: Right.
[1:17:47] Speaker: Uh is there a playground nearby?
[1:17:49] Speaker: Um which you know people seem to like because you know the Kenyan elites that I follow on Instagram and whatever, and every time they travel abroad, they seem to like these amenities.
[1:18:00] Speaker: Uh it's it's a huge puzzle why they don't think they can on the same uh uh bicle.
[1:18:07] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:18:07] Speaker 2: Um okay, so a couple more questions on this theme, and then we'll come to a close here.
[1:18:12] Speaker 2: So on this topic of sort of subnational level state building focusing on the subnational, um, I checked through old old blog posts, and you've basically been been pumping Boone's work since the beginning of your blogging days.
[1:18:28] Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
[1:18:29] Speaker: Boone is terribly underrated.
[1:18:31] Speaker 2: Yes.
[1:18:31] Speaker 2: And so, you know, you and you mentioned her, by the way, in in this most recent essay from a few days ago.
[1:18:36] Speaker 2: So, you know, for listeners like less familiar with I want you to you have the floor now.
[1:18:42] Speaker 2: Explain her main argument in her political topographies book, which is great.
[1:18:47] Speaker 2: And and um, you know, why you find it such a compelling for how state building happens in the African context.
[1:18:54] Speaker: Yeah, so so you know, I think everyone who talks about state in Africa talks about Herbst.
[1:18:58] Speaker: Uh, Herbst has an early 2000s book which looks at African as you know uh uh having the power of the state concentrated urban areas, in particular in urban uh sort of the capitals.
[1:19:13] Speaker: And so power then radiates out in concentric circles.
[1:19:16] Speaker: That's why the African periphery is undergoverned or weakly etc.
[1:19:20] Speaker: Which is, you know, I think that's it's a compelling argument, but but it's it's not the whole story.
[1:19:26] Speaker: Uh Boone, on the other hand, uh uh looks at the variation of subnational state building by post-colonial African with excellent examples from uh mostly West Africa.
[1:19:40] Speaker: Uh sort of like you know, the uh the Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal sort of examples are fantastic.
[1:19:46] Speaker: So the basic idea is that you know post-colonial African coming from the capital in the Hub sense into the periphery, uh face a dilemma.
[1:19:57] Speaker: One, you know, if you had subnational, pre-colonial elites, you couldn't just ignore them and set up a civic You had to work with them.
[1:20:06] Speaker: And so in places like that, the the national administration grafted itself on top of these sort of local, uh locally structures.
[1:20:15] Speaker: And then in places where you know uh uh sub you know the elements of pre-colonial statehood uh or state-like did not exist, you had this more top-down uh uh sort of of state power from the capital.
[1:20:33] Speaker: So in Senegal, she contrasts the uh sort of religious and whatnot in the ground basin compared to Casamans on the side of uh the Gambia, uh, the latter not having had sort of sort of systems.
[1:20:49] Speaker: And so, you know, this this is a process of state building in which the center was actually negotiating with the on the terms of sort of incorporation, uh, which makes Now, you know, if uh this is important because we often assume that, uh, and and this is why, you know, hard tip to Scott, We often assume that everyone just everyone wants more right?
[1:21:16] Speaker: But that's not always true, right?
[1:21:18] Speaker: People, even people who want more government often want
[1:21:22] Speaker 2: This is his better book, by the way, The Art of Not Being I love that.
[1:21:25] Speaker: Yeah, it's like, you know, that's that's the one that everyone should, you know, to temper our ambitions, uh, you know, for of us who want more order and and whatnot, right?
[1:21:36] Speaker: Uh so Scott was spot on that not everyone wants to be the experiences of the state are not always great.
[1:21:42] Speaker: So people want to negotiate, you know, that process.
[1:21:45] Speaker: Uh and so we should pay attention to that.
[1:21:48] Speaker: And you know, sometimes it means that we need to empower the so that even as it's negotiating, it's negotiating from a of strength.
[1:21:56] Speaker: Uh because you know, not wanting to be governed may not be a good thing, because sometimes elites can hijack that and want autonomy even as they're presiding over, you know, infant mortality rates and poverty and whatnot.
[1:22:10] Speaker: Um so I think the Boone sort of story is a more textured story which matches the record, as I see it, in the efforts of state building.
[1:22:22] Speaker: Rather than, so Hobbes should be understood as a structural of state building in a post-World War II era where holding Capitol is enough.
[1:22:35] Speaker: Right.
[1:22:36] Speaker: You don't have so there's this truth in it.
[1:22:40] Speaker: But Boone actually tells us what African elites tried to do, So it's not the case that they were content just sitting in Capitol.
[1:22:46] Speaker: They tried to venture out and it succeeded uh in some more than others, and even within countries there was So the Senegalese state, for example, was very weak in hence the sort of simmering rebellion, because they just it they couldn't make it as legible because they want elites that were uh atop of whom they could just graft themselves.
[1:23:09] Speaker: They had to build the bureaucracy, uh, and they didn't capacity to do that, uh, at least not in the beginning.
[1:23:18] Speaker 2: And and so I understand that you're working on an on a new project as well on on decentralization and subnational in Kenya and its role in in building the Kenyan state since since 1900.
[1:23:31] Speaker 2: So like this seems pretty Catherine Boone-esque.
[1:23:34] Speaker 2: Uh I know it's not published yet, but but you know, do to talk about this new work and you know, maybe how it does and does not relate to Boone's arguments?
[1:23:43] Speaker: So, yeah, so the inspiration from Boone is that I state building through services.
[1:23:50] Speaker: So, you know, security and justice, education, healthcare, um, and agricultural extension services over time from 1900, so the colonial era to the present.
[1:24:02] Speaker: The idea being that, you know, as part of this give and take, which she uh alludes to in her piece, right, we can see the for specific services and how the state responded to those right?
[1:24:16] Speaker: So you say so, say you may want agricultural extension but want you know, a specific crop, and the state says, the colonial era, that no, you can't grow this crop, we would rather help you do this, right?
[1:24:28] Speaker: That may lead to a bargaining failure, which then means state actually doesn't extend its authority to your sort of Um instead of assuming that states always want to maximize goods provision, or that citizens always want to maximize to public goods from the state, sort of unpacking the that goes along this process.
[1:24:54] Speaker: So that's one thread in the book, looking at specific uh public service sectors.
[1:25:00] Speaker: Also inspired by this book by Ben Ansel and Coth on sort of conquest, right?
[1:25:07] Speaker: How countries intensified uh uh sort of their domination uh of their own societies.
[1:25:15] Speaker: Uh and then and then the second sort of thread in the book will be this back and forth on centralization.
[1:25:22] Speaker: So both throughout time and across Kenya, there has been variation on who wants a centralized versus decentralized of government and why, right?
[1:25:36] Speaker: And it's always been about power and influence, as you know, is true in the US and other contexts, right?
[1:25:41] Speaker: So again, you know, the institutional reform like now with right?
[1:25:46] Speaker: It I don't see it as a final endpoint, to see it as a negotiation.
[1:25:50] Speaker: Uh I think the central government won round one for sure.
[1:25:56] Speaker: But I think the way I see things, future politics will perhaps empower the counties to get ever more resources in grants and whatnot from the central government.
[1:26:06] Speaker: Uh as part of that negotiation between the center and
[1:26:12] Speaker 2: Okay, so everyone heard it.
[1:26:13] Speaker 2: Pro tip, read, read more, Katherine Boone.
[1:26:16] Speaker 2: Um so so last question, Ken.
[1:26:21] Speaker 2: Uh other than this this book on Kenya that we have to look to that you're working on now, uh, what else are you working on now?
[1:26:28] Speaker 2: And um feel free to split your answer into your more academic work and the more policy-oriented work you're doing.
[1:26:33] Speaker 2: And and where can people find out more about your work?
[1:26:37] Speaker: Yeah, so so you know, I think the uh after 10 years, you I've had two quick babies, uh, took a sabbatical, mostly to my research agenda.
[1:26:50] Speaker: You know, I think I went to grad school to run away from econ.
[1:26:53] Speaker: Uh and then post-grad school, I've been running back to So jokes on me.
[1:27:01] Speaker: Uh and so, you know, I think my my next stream of work will you know, a lot a lot less pure political science and more in the bucket of political economy.
[1:27:11] Speaker: Uh and so, you know, I think the book on educational reform Tanzania, which hopefully will come out next year, uh, is step one.
[1:27:20] Speaker: Uh uh, you know, uh the book on state building in Kenya uh this subnational angle.
[1:27:27] Speaker: Uh is another one.
[1:27:29] Speaker: Uh I'm hoping to do a trade book which brings together the many threads in the blog uh so that people can read it in one uh uh um uh time permitting sometime soon.
[1:27:43] Speaker: Um I mean most of the ingredients of that are in place, hope the trade book will be easier than the academic books.
[1:27:50] Speaker: Uh but the Tanzania book has taken a while.
[1:27:55] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:27:55] Speaker 2: I was gonna ask too, Ken, where can people find you?
[1:27:58] Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I probably your Substack would be the uh step one.
[1:28:03] Speaker: So yeah, so the Substack is step one.
[1:28:05] Speaker: Um and then, you know, I think in the fall and spring, I will I'll have a stream of working papers.
[1:28:12] Speaker: Uh so you know, currently working on uh a review of over the last 30 years in in Africa, uh picking up on some of the themes in the blog.
[1:28:23] Speaker: Um uh there's an aid paper coming uh uh with some evidence from Kenya uh looking at how bureaucrats perceived uh the aid last year.
[1:28:35] Speaker: Um uh and then you know uh a paper on uh industrialization uh in Africa, looking at green industrialization in particular.
[1:28:44] Speaker: Uh and then, you know, uh I haven't given up on legislatures so uh we'll also be putting out some working papers on Um so far, you know, the Tanzania book has been the biggest over the last year.
[1:28:59] Speaker: Uh so that has taken taken quite a bit of time as I pivot to political economy uh output.
[1:29:08] Speaker 2: Great.
[1:29:08] Speaker 2: Well, uh Ken Apollo, thank you so much for coming on the It was a uh great conversation.
[1:29:14] Speaker 2: And yeah, please, Ken, keep writing about the the growth of cities.
[1:29:17] Speaker 2: I love those ones.
[1:29:20] Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[1:29:20] Speaker: Thanks.
[1:29:20] Speaker: Thanks for having me.
[1:29:21] Speaker: And uh yeah, keep doing the amazing work that you're doing.
[1:29:24] Speaker: And uh, you know, I'm jealous that you get to enjoy Zanziba on a prominent place.
[1:29:29] Speaker 2: Hey, Karibu, anytime you're an hour flight away and it's a beautiful flight uh across the summit of Mount So uh Karibu.
[1:29:37] Speaker: Yeah, thank you.
[1:29:39] Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Africa Urban Lab podcast.
[1:29:41] Speaker 2: To listen to our other episodes, follow us on your favorite podcasting platform or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
[1:29:49] Speaker 2: And pretty pleased, if you like the episode, share with friends and your network.
[1:29:54] Speaker 2: It really, really helps grow the show.
[1:29:57] Speaker 2: We appreciate it and we appreciate you.
[1:29:59] Speaker 2: Thanks so much.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.