MAKOKHA: Making the plan supreme in Kenya’s development state (Siasa)

An artiste's impression of the Rironi-Mau Summit highway /FILE

Kenya stands at an inflection point in its constitutional and economic evolution. More than six decades after independence—and nearly fifteen years into the devolved order established by the Constitution of 2010—the country has produced an impressive corpus of development blueprints, sector strategies and fiscal frameworks.

Yet one structural defect has persisted across administrations: economic planning has too often been treated as persuasive and fragmented literature rather than as a binding framework for public decision-making.

Fragmented planning is therefore not merely a governance inconvenience. It is a measurable macroeconomic leakage and an long term fiscal burden. It is the root of Kenya’s development delivery problem.

The Government’s current development blueprint—Kenya Vision 2030’s Fourth Medium-Term Plan—sets out a clear ambition: to move the economy from low productivity to higher productivity, and from consumption-led growth to production-led growth. The Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda provides the political economy vehicle for this transition.

Its language is deliberately practical: raise productivity, expand value addition, grow exports, scale enterprise, lower the cost of living, and convert economic growth into jobs and incomes.

In plain terms, it reflects a “hustler economics” thesis—work must pay, enterprise must scale, markets must function, and the state must stop allocating scarce resources to projects that do not shift productivity.

But Beta’s promise will not be realised by rhetoric or by layering new priorities onto an unchanged institutional architecture. Structural transformation requires a planning state that behaves as though the plan is supreme—because that is the only way national ambition is translated into consistent outcomes.

Today, economic planning occurs at both national and county levels, yet without a legally enforced hierarchy it remains largely procedural. Plans guide decision-making but rarely control it. The consequences are visible across the development portfolio.

A significant share of public projects carry implementation risk—manifesting in delays, cost overruns, scope revisions, stalled works, or projects that fail to deliver their promised economic returns.

The draft Economic Planning Policy seeks to correct precisely this structural weakness. It is not another vision document. It is a constitutional and institutional reform intended to restore coherence, discipline and accountability to the development state.

The policy gives effect to Article 220(2) of the Constitution, which requires national legislation to define the structure of development plans, the timelines for their submission to legislative agencies, and the mechanisms through which national and county governments coordinate their planning and budgeting processes.

It also reinforces the intent of the Public Finance Management framework, which presumes integrated planning but has not always prevented budgets from drifting away from approved development priorities.

At the centre of the reform lies a simple but consequential principle: planning must be legally binding.

This is not rhetorical flourish; it is a governance rule. It means the state cannot finance what it has not planned.

The policy establishes a binding planning hierarchy to enforce this rule. Long-term national frameworks define strategic development direction. Medium-term integrated plans translate that direction into investment priorities. The Annual Development Plan then becomes the legal gateway through which development expenditure enters the budget.

If a programme or project does not appear in an approved ADP, it should not be financed through the development budget. This provision is the reform’s most critical enforcement mechanism because it closes the porous entry point through which unevaluated projects have historically entered the public investment pipeline.

This hierarchy also clarifies an important constitutional principle. Parliament retains full authority over public finance. However, that authority should be exercised within an approved planning framework.

The national budget should represent the financial expression of an already approved development plan—not a parallel instrument for renegotiating development priorities.

Where deviations become unavoidable, they must be justified transparently through formal variance reports accompanied by fiscal impact analysis.

The second pillar of reform is public investment discipline.

The policy shifts project appraisal upstream, where it belongs. Identification, feasibility assessment, economic appraisal, risk analysis and sequencing must occur before projects are admitted into the planning framework and long before resources are committed.

This approach raises the institutional cost of poor projects and reduces the likelihood that Kenya continues accumulating development expenditure that produces little productivity, few jobs, and limited export capacity.

Equally important is the policy’s emphasis on evidence-based planning. This is not technocratic embellishment—it is a prerequisite for effective economic governance. Successful planning states operate on macroeconomic intelligence: credible statistical systems, fiscal sustainability analysis, scenario modelling and forward-looking forecasting capacity.

Singapore—often cited as an aspirational benchmark—runs its economic planning system precisely on these foundations. Kenya already possesses strong analytical institutions, including KNBS, KIPPRA, the Central Bank and the National Treasury.

What has been missing is the systematic requirement that major policy and investment decisions be supported by structured modelling and risk-adjusted economic analysis. The new policy corrects this by embedding macroeconomic modelling and forecasting as core functions of the national planning architecture.

In the language of Beta, this is the transition from guessing to engineering outcomes.

The third pillar addresses the institutional realities of devolution. The constitution assigns national economic policy and planning to the National Government, while counties carry responsibility for county planning and development. This division does not create parallel planning sovereignties; it presumes coordinated and complementary action.

The policy therefore introduces the 'Planning as One' model. This approach aims to eliminate duplication, clarify complementary responsibilities and align investment sequencing across jurisdictions.

Such coordination is particularly important in sectors where value chains and service delivery systems span multiple levels of government—agriculture, infrastructure, health, trade facilitation, enterprise development and human capital formation.

Effective coordination, however, cannot rely on goodwill alone. The reform seeks to establish structured alignment mechanisms through common planning standards, integrated project databases, harmonised reporting systems and clearly defined institutional roles.

Counties should not be treated as administrative extensions of national government, and national ministries should not act as though counties are peripheral actors.

Planning as One is about a single national development logic executed through two levels of government with shared data, clear responsibilities and disciplined sequencing.

The fourth pillar of the reform is performance accountability. The policy links the continuation, redesign or termination of programmes directly to verified implementation performance.

Monitoring, evaluation, reporting and learning are therefore embedded as operational controls within the planning cycle rather than as retrospective reporting exercises.

In practical terms, this means stalled projects should lose funding, cost overruns should trigger institutional accountability, inefficient programmes should be redesigned or discontinued, and new projects should not enter the portfolio unless existing investments are rationalised.

Ultimately, legal reform alone cannot guarantee institutional discipline. Laws can structure incentives, close procedural loopholes and raise the credibility cost of fiscal indiscipline. But the success of any planning framework will depend on whether political actors choose to operate within its rules.

Kenya’s development challenge is therefore not a deficit of plans. It is whether the country is prepared to treat economic planning as a binding constitutional function rather than a discretionary advisory exercise.

The draft Economic Planning Policy provides the institutional scaffolding required to restore that discipline: plan supremacy, ADP project screening, rigorous investment appraisal, integrated national–county planning and performance-linked funding.

If implemented with institutional resolve, it will transform Beta from a political programme into a functioning delivery system—one in which every development shilling can be traced to an approved priority, justified by economic analysis, and held accountable for results.

The writer is the Principal Secretary for Economic Planning