At 84, when lesser souls would give up on life and resign to their hopeless destiny, the octogenarian had the audacity to stubbornly hope and do things that improved his station. Though many dismissed him as a crude joke, or even as an attention-seeking fraud, and others even tried to evict him from class, he stayed focused on his goal. For this he became the universal postcard image of the determination that says it's never too late to learn.

This ability to dream against all odds is what Mzee Maruge shares with President Barack Obama, who equally went against all odds to get his heart's desire. Obama dreamt of and achieved what many considered impossible because he never sat on his hands, but did all that was necessary to realise his dream.

And just as Mzee Maruge wore school uniform and laboriously attended class as required with pen, pencil, rubber, and books, Obama wrote two books telling Americans who he was. He incrementally mobilised supporters, building networks and assembling a winning campaign team, complete with a formidable fundraising strategy that baffled both friend and foe. Neither Obama nor Maruge dreamt then went back to sleep. Instead, knowing that a vision must be supported by a clear and realistic path to its realisation, and needs consistent and sustained effort for its achievement, they respectively did all it required to realise their dreams.

Hence, nothing could be further from the truth when claims were made at Mzee Maruge's burial, by a senior civil servant, that the dreams of the late were similar to the Kenya Vision 2030 mirage.

To begin with, whereas Mzee Maruge, like Obama, owned his dream, Kenya and the many other African countries infected by the Vision 20XX faddism don't own theirs. Just as was the case with the Structural Adjustment Programmes and other grand deceptions hiding behind a festival of sweet slogans to exploit our genuine desire for material progress, this World Bank and IMF inspired prescription of outrageous economic visions will impoverish Sub-Saharan Africa even further.

Botswana Vision 2016, Lesotho Vision 2020, Rwanda Vision 2020, South Africa Vision 2020, Ghana Vision 2020, Gambia Vision 2020, Nigeria Vision 2020, Tanzania Vision 2025, Namibia Vision 2030, Zambia Vision 2030, and others are foreign enterprises designed to entrench dependent economies in Africa. Once these African countries (cheaply) sell off their strategic national assets to Western multinationals they will lose both their capital base for industrialisation and their nascent sovereignty.

We must not sell but invest in professional management instead. Kenya has a considerable resource endowment, including a well-educated population and coastal location. We can become globally competitive with proper management, aimed at creating a technologically rational State with a modern industrial and political economy.

Kenya must reject sweet sounding but toxic World Bank and IMF prescriptions that result in dependency and underdevelopment. We must initiate workable home-grown strategies of development. Like the Asian tigers did, we must stop borrowing and squandering, and begin aggressively saving and investing. We must accumulate capital and invest strategically in education, health, infrastructure, industry, finance, security, energy, and management, to create conditions necessary for an industrial takeoff.

Currently, there are no programmes being executed anywhere across the land to realise any clearly articulated development policy. In fact, Kenya Vision 2030 is a statement that the Government has no discernible industrialisation policy. All that is happening under Kenya Vision 2030 is our nightmarish capitulation to domination and exploitation by global capitalism through the sale of our strategic national assets. The Vision's overarching economic non-rationality, that public policy should be driven by unregulated market forces pursuing profits, and not by coherent political ideology seeking the common good, was recently debunked in the West following the economic meltdown it caused. Kenya Vision 2030 cannot result in development; it's just a script for our total re-colonisation.

If we don't change for the better, Kenya, a nation tottering on failure, can't support the ambition of being globally competitive at any time. The fact that we are doing nothing to stop taking governance and development as a joke makes Kenya Vision 2030 a sheer optical illusion. To continue relying, for our policies, on technocrats inspired by the imperialist World Bank and IMF is to ensure that we will never transform from being a neo-colonial estate into a modern prosperous republican State.

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