Anyone going about to set ablaze someone’s business or property should be shot in the leg, taken to hospital and taken to court. They should not kill them, but break their leg.” These are not the musings of a vigilante property owner urging summary justice, or of a Haitian gang leader seeking to impose Queensberry rules on gangland warfare. No, these are the words of Kenya’s president, William Ruto — issued last month as an order to police dealing with the most persistent wave of youth protests the east African country has seen in decades.
Ruto, charming and articulate when addressing a foreign audience, turns out to be a thug when he talks to his own people. Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan writer and political analyst, argues that his choice of Swahili over English for this edict was calculated to avoid international opprobrium and to separate the president’s slick image overseas from his ruthless instincts in the cut-throat world of Kenyan politics.
Kenya is in many ways one of Africa’s most successful economies. But its political class has failed to build on that to create the investment climate or growth momentum needed to meet the aspirations of its increasingly well educated and sophisticated youth. The result has been more than a year of rolling demonstrations. They have been led by members of Gen Z, those born after the late 1990s, though they have appealed to broader sections of society. . .
Letter: Young Kenyans could get really mad, deservedly so From Peter Doyle, Washington, DC, US
David Pilling’s ode to Kenya’s Gen Z (“Why young Kenyans are so angry”, Opinion, August 11) describes Kenya’s economy as “in many ways, one of Africa’s most successful”.
But that leaves the principal culprit for their anger completely out of the script: long-standing macroeconomic disorder, fruit both of the persistence with colonial land distribution policies and fiscal policy under IMF supervision which has veered between too tight (mostly) and too loose.
After decades in which growth in Kenya’s GDP per capita consequently lagged far behind that of best peers at its level of income, tax demands in mid-2024 at the behest of the IMF constituted the straw which broke the Gen-Z camel’s back — hence the outburst of protests.
While, like Pilling, we at the Kenyan Institute of Economic Affairs lament the authorities’ subsequent return to authoritarianism, we welcome on macroeconomic grounds both their belated rejection of the badly ill- designed IMF demands and their premature termination of the IMF programme earlier this year.
But that has left Kenya with an unsustainable debt, a rightly enraged youth and a highly fragile political balance. So we have called for the immediate resolution of the debt situation via a “collaborative default” — with Kenya working closely with the IMF to write off debt worth some 15 per cent of GDP, promptly coupled with a highly targeted land reform. Both these steps are essential for long-run growth.
However the authorities simply turn a blind eye to the debt algebra, and the IMF too goes on ignoring the core Kenyan political economy. If both these conditions persist, look to the young to get really mad — and rightly so.
Peter Doyle Washington, DC, US
A novel has made it on to the longlist for business book of the year for the first time in 15 years, joining a wide range of non-fiction titles on topical themes from geoeconomics to growth to geniuses. Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie, which follows the paths of two start-up entrepreneurs, is the first work of fiction to grace the list since Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic in 2010, and only the third in the 21-year history of the prize.
The £30,000 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award, also backed by FT owner Nikkei, aims to identify the title with the “most compelling and enjoyable” insights into modern business issues. Last year’s winner was Parmy Olson’s Supremacy, about the rivalry between pioneers of artificial intelligence. Including Starritt’s book, 16 titles were filtered by FT journalists from more than 500 entries, to make up this year’s longlist.
Geopolitics and economics Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by academic Dan Wang, due out later this month, looks at the China-US relationship that is the central geoeconomic challenge for Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Wang describes China as an “engineering state”, pitting its innovation and ambition against the blocking instincts of the US “lawyerly” state.
In Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War, Edward Fishman analyses the use of sanctions, notably against Russia over the past decade.
A former US state department official, Fishman also describes the dedication and ingenuity of the people who devised and operate an economic arsenal that has evolved at pace during the 21st century, with profound consequences.
How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, by Carl Benedikt Frey — to be published next month — is a sweeping 1,000-year analysis of the fate of civilisations and institutions. Frey asks what happens when the balance between innovation and bureaucracy fails and what important lessons today’s dominant economic powers, including the US, China and Europe, should take from such failures.
Mike Bird’s The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset, due out in November, analyses the disproportionate weight land has on economic and political decision-making.
Bird explains the role of land in determining, through human history, how power is distributed, from the US to China, and the effect on investment, wealth and inequality. In Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Joan C Williams looks at the US left’s failure to challenge the rise of Trump, through the lens of workers and the working class.
She aims to explain how that happened and how the Democratic elite might use economic and political tools to recover support. Geniuses Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, published next month, is David Gelles’s look at the life and career of the founder of the ubiquitous outerwear manufacturer.
He explores Chouinard’s unconventional leadership, culminating in his idiosyncratic 2022 decision to forfeit ownership of Patagonia and direct profits to fighting climate change, and what it says about the nature of capitalism. Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie is, among other things, an examination of the nature of business genius.
Starritt’s novel traces the entrepreneurial partnership and friendship of two Oxford graduates and McKinsey alumni as they build an ambitious green energy company, and features real-life economic and business figures, including Tesla and SpaceX impresario Elon Musk and central bankers Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi. Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, sits at the heart of Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination.
Her deep examination of the rise of the company that created ChatGPT analyses the roots and results of Altman’s fierce competitive edge and the sometimes dysfunctional leadership style he practises. Helen Lewis’s The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers cuts through the idolisation of tech chieftains and sets our never-ending obsession with individuals in the wider cultural context that allows so-called geniuses to flourish, not to mention the role of luck and timing in their ascent.
In House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company, journalist Eva Dou delves deep into the mysterious past of Ren Zhengfei, founder of the Chinese technology group, drawing out both the commercial and geopolitical implications of Huawei’s rise, and Ren’s, and the Chinese state’s, role in shaping the company. Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the world’s most coveted microchip traces the ascent of Nvidia, the chipmaker behind the artificial intelligence revolution.
Witt analyses how Huang’s dictatorial leadership style, combined with dry humour, has helped shape the world’s most valuable company. Growth Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance: How We Build a Better Future addresses head-on the growth dilemma facing the US, trapped between a left wing that will not make necessary trade-offs between regulation and investment and a right wing bent on gutting the government’s ability to support innovation.
The consequences of growth are forensically analysed by Saabira Chaudhuri in Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. She lays out how branding, freshness, ease of use and pursuit of profit combined to override environmental and pollution concerns and makes the case for pushing the costs of plastic’s overuse back on producers.
Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About it takes the writer and activist’s term for the decay of online platforms and explains the implications for the wider world of allowing a technology oligopoly to extend its dominance.
In playful and profane language, Doctorow explains what has gone wrong, and how to put it right. Due out in October.
No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, by Gardiner Harris, is a profound, and profoundly disturbing, exposé of alleged unethical practices at the well-known US healthcare group.
His analysis is all the more striking for the fact that J&J has, over many years, crafted a reputation as an enlightened and purpose-led model of corporate capitalism.
Finally, in Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do Better (published as How Things Are Made in the US), academic Tim Minshall takes an eye-opening journey through the world of manufacturing. He argues that if consumers lose touch with how everything is produced, the system will become dirtier and more fragile.
Two new judges join the panel for 2025: Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management, and Adam Osborn, Schroders’ head of research, Asia ex Japan equities. The jury is again chaired by FT editor Roula Khalaf and the returning judges are: Mimi Alemayehou, founder and managing partner, Semai Ventures; Daisuke Arakawa, senior managing director for global business, Nikkei; Mitchell Baker, founder and former executive chair, Mozilla Corporation; entrepreneur Sherry Coutu; Mohamed El-Erian, president, Queens’ College, Cambridge university, and adviser, Allianz and Gramercy; James Kondo, chair, International House of Japan; Randall Kroszner, economics professor at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; and Shriti Vadera, chair, Prudential and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The shortlist will be announced on September 24 and the winner of the award on December 3.