By Charles Onyango-Obbo

More by this Author

At the tail end of a lunchtime meeting mid-week in Nairobi with Joshua Oigara, KCB Group CEO and managing director, I asked him which East African companies he thinks are doing things that could have the most far-reaching impact on the region’s economy.

His answer, indicative of a man who loses sleep over the disruptive forces of the times, was Kenya’s giant telco Safaricom, it of mobile money service M-Pesa fame. Last year, M-Pesa transactions nearly hit $40 billion, more than the combined $30 billion of Kenya’s banks.

M-Pesa, therefore, is several times larger than the value of most economies in the region. Second, collectively, he named three airlines – Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways, and RwandAir.

M-Pesa, now the most used mobile money payment service globally, has radicalised payments, and he thinks it isn’t done yet.

The airlines are worth watching because, he said, after moving money, the next big thing for creating prosperity in Africa is “infrastructure and logistics.”

You can have a free market, he argued, but if you have no infrastructure to move people, goods, and services quickly and cheaply, nothing will come of it.

It is a point that Institute of Economic Affairs CEO Kwame Owino likes to drum up a lot these days, citing a World Trade Organisation study that shows that logistics offers far more gain for economies than sorting out trade taxes alone.

In short, you get more value if you can ship a critical spare part from Nairobi to Kampala within six hours and pay $5 on the package, than if it takes 10 days and you pay zero tax.

Cases where countries are close to pulling off an infrastructure and logistics coup, Mr Oigara said, are Ethiopia, which has all but won the battle to be the regional hub, thanks in part to Ethiopian Airways, and Rwanda, which is closing in on two million tourists a year. After 2020, it could potentially overtake South Africa for the sub-Saharan African tourist crown.

But there is also a need to rethink how East African, and in general African, societies are changing, to win in them, especially their demographics and urbanisation, he argued.

This is trickier, because it is a knowledge and information challenge, which is actually hard to crack.

My view is that with time, we shall get closer to understanding these social changes. Across East Africa, if one looks at the data coming out, most wealth is being created in and around the capitals, and the urban areas upcountry.

Nothing much is happening in the villages, where most voters still live but which people are leaving in ever larger numbers. Here’s where I go out on a limb. Our future is back to 800BC, to an era of city states.

Part of the reason for the failure of politics, is that we are trying to govern countries that no longer exist in the forms we imagine them, which are dying out as a dynamic force, instead of an agglomeration of cities and towns, where the growth and innovation is happening.

One immediate change I would make if I were East African Supreme Leader: My vice president or prime minister wouldn’t be my deputy, but president of the leading city, especially, where they are both the political and economic capital.

How does a federation of Kigali-Kampala-Nairobi-Dar es Salaam sound, for starters?

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3