Who Really Built the Hustler Nation?

It was in the deep stillness of a recent vigil, when the world lay supine and the spirit found itself untethered from the immediate dictates of the clock, that my own mind, thus sharpened by the keen edge of wakefulness, began to wander across the vibrant, yet vexing, terrain of our national economy. My thoughts were irresistibly drawn to two figures of monumental, yet often unrecognised, consequence: the stalwart Mama Mboga and the ubiquitous Mtu wa Boda Boda.

Whence came this legion of indispensable entrepreneurs?

Were they the mere, random efflorescence of commerce, or were they the inevitable, latter-day harvest of seeds sown by design?

 It was a question that lodged itself with the tenacity of an unsolved riddle, compelling a descent into realms of deeper thought and rigorous inquiry.

Thus motivated by this stirring of the intellect, I ceased my simple musing and commenced a thorough expedition through the archives of history, the scrolls of economic policy, and the shifting sands of political narrative. I sought not for facts only, but the unseen connective tissue that binds the colonial past to the hustling present.

And now, having emerged from that profound period of mental industry, having collected, curated, and chiselled these reflections into a coherent form, I can confidently present to you the fruits of this sleepless contemplation. 

Our subject is the astonishing, yet profoundly paradoxical, success of Kenya’s informal economy, the very theatre in which the ubiquitous Mama Mboga and the indispensable Mtu wa Boda Boda play their daily, heroic roles. These figures, so often hailed as the ultimate embodiment of African enterprise, are in truth the unwitting, involuntary inheritors of economic insequenciality, a grand structural flaw woven into the national fabric by the hand of Empire, and subsequently manipulated by the machinations of the political class.

To comprehend this phenomenon is not to only study economics; it is also to engage in a form of historical forensics. We must exhume the architecture of colonial intent, trace the path of post-independence policy, and, finally, dissect the ingenious political strategy that turned national precarity into a political triumph. This, I submit to you, is a chronicle of consequences, where the original sin of structural design dictates the fortunes of the modern citizen.

Let us commence our reflection at the genesis: the British Imperial Project in East Africa. The Crown’s mission, in its own language, was one of order and development; in reality, it was one of exclusive extraction. The economic model was rigidly structured to benefit the metropole and the European settler, rendering indigenous advancement not just secondary, but also actively antithetical to the system’s smooth operation.

The architects of Empire understood that wealth creation required two things: land and labour. They secured the land through alienation and ensured the labour through taxation. The African population was compelled, under duress of the hut tax and the poll tax, to enter the European-dominated economy, either as low-wage labourers on settler farms or as producers of cash crops for export.

This created the primary structural limitation: a formal economy that was slender at the waist, too narrow, too focused on raw material export, and too fundamentally averse to indigenous manufacturing and industrial diversification.

The colonial system of education was perhaps the most effective weapon in establishing this enduring structural imbalance as it was a strategy of cultivated mediocrity, designed to produce specific, non-threatening roles. The education offered to the African populace was, particularly in its initial phase, basic and rudimentary. Its aim was to produce literate subordinates, clerks, catechists, and low-level administrative assistants, individuals who could read instructions and keep simple ledgers, yet who were denied the deep, critical thought fostered by a full academic curriculum. A truly sophisticated education was rightly feared by the colonial authorities as the seedbed of political consciousness and intellectual independence.

Where technical and vocational education (TVE) was mandated, often by missionary societies with government grants, it was frequently promoted as the only suitable path for the African. This was a direct political message: your destiny is manual, not managerial; skilled, not intellectual. Critically, the African population quickly perceived this as a second-rate education, a deliberate strategy to keep them out of the coveted ‘white-collar’ offices. The result was an enduring, national-level prejudice against vocational and technical trades in favour of the academic certificate.

Thus, the system produced a vast, aspirational populace armed with academic certificates, the very tools designed to grant access to the formal economy, but then presented them with a formal economy too small, too exclusive, and too fundamentally undiversified to offer them appropriate, dignified employment. The inevitable consequence was a swelling pool of educated but excluded citizens. This is the core meaning of economic insequenciality: the failure of one state-controlled system (education) to find its necessary, subsequent consequence (employment) in the other state-controlled system (the economy).

When the nation achieved its hard-won freedom, the new custodians of the state inherited this structural deficit. The expectation, indeed the promise, was that the formal sector would rapidly expand to absorb the nation’s liberated talent. This did not materialise. The formal sector remained constrained by lack of capital, inherited dependencies, and, tragically, by the new elite’s preoccupation with primitive accumulation, the seizing and partitioning of the economic spoils left by the departing colonialists.

It was in this vacuum that the Jua Kali economy, the informal sector, ceased to be an anomaly and became an economic imperative. The Mama Mboga, the vegetable vendor, the small-scale trader, represents the most fundamental form of this economic resilience. Hers is a role of minimal capital requirement, maximum flexibility, and absolute necessity. She is the essential community node of food security and micro-commerce. Her success is a direct commentary on the failure of the national wholesale and retail architecture to serve the common citizen affordably. Her persistence in the open-air market, under the fierce ‘hot sun,’ is the clearest evidence of an economy that has disowned its citizens, forcing them to survive on sheer wit and tenacity.

 The Mtu wa Boda Boda phenomenon, a later, 21st-century iteration, is the clearest expression of inherited infrastructural insequenciality. Colonial urban planning prioritised main roads and central administrative areas, leaving vast, sprawling urban and peri-urban settlements, the residences of the workforce, unserviced by reliable, affordable public transport. The boda boda operator, with his motorcycle, provides the perfect solution: cheap, flexible, last-mile transportation. His enterprise monetises a failure of state planning; his boom is the measure of the state’s urban neglect.

The administration of President Mwai Kibaki (2002–2013) introduced a dramatic phase of Acknowledgement and Acceleration. Kibaki, a technocrat, recognised the reality of the Jua Kali sector's weight, yet his policies ultimately amplified the structural paradox he inherited. The most consequential policy action, the Zero-Rating of Import Duty on Motorcycles (of up to 250cc), was a game-changer. Overnight, the price of a work machine was halved, placing the means of production, the motorcycle, within reach of the average unemployed youth. The boda boda became the single most effective mass-employment creation scheme in the nation's history, not through state funding, but through market stimulation.

Yet, this triumph of market-driven employment simultaneously intensified the crisis of educational insequenciality. With the Kibaki-era Free Primary Education and subsidised secondary education, millions more highly-schooled young men and women graduated annually. When the formal sector, despite high growth figures, failed to expand commensurately, these graduates flooded the only remaining reservoir: the informal economy. A university certificate became merely the qualification one held while driving a boda boda, the ultimate statement of an economy that had failed to match educational ambition with industrial opportunity.

The Kibaki administration, in essence, provided the vehicle for the escape from unemployment but failed to build the necessary destination (a robust, high-wage formal sector). He took the colonial ailment of structural exclusion and wrapped it in a flag of entrepreneurial freedom.

This brings us to the latest and arguably most fascinating chapter: the ascent of President William Samoei Ruto. His victory was not only a political event but also a psychological and ideological masterstroke that turned the entire structural failure of the past century into a political asset.

President Ruto’s strategy was predicated upon the astute recognition of the deep psychological wounds inflicted by economic insequenciality: resentment, alienation, and a sense of having been unjustly excluded. He skilfully replaced the destructive, colonial-era focus on ethnic identity with a potent narrative of class consciousness: the Hustler Nation versus the Dynasties. The Dynasties represented the handful of families and elites who had monopolised political and economic power since independence, the very people who had perpetuated the top-down economic structure inherited from the Crown.

The Mama Mboga and Mtu wa Boda Boda were elevated to the symbolic vanguard of this movement.

 Mama Mboga was the Moral Heart, the long-suffering, hardworking woman whose small business was constantly menaced by punitive county levies and an unforgiving system as Mtu wa Boda Boda was the Energetic Foot Soldier, the youth who dared to create his own job, only to be constantly harassed by the police and regulatory authorities.

The Bottom-Up Economic Model (BETA) and its signature Hustler Fund were the tangible promises of restitution. This was a pledge to invert the economy’s gravitational pull, channelling capital directly to the base of the pyramid. The Hustler Fund, a micro-credit facility, was a direct and powerful address to the main obstacle facing the Jua Kali worker: lack of affordable capital and exclusion from the collateral-based banking system, a system rooted in the inherited, class-based financial architecture of the Empire.

Ruto’s political genius lay in his ability to validate the Hustler’s suffering, not as a personal failure, but as a systemic betrayal. He gathered the structurally excluded majority, the cross-ethnic coalition of the economically struggling, and forged them into a unified political force. The entire campaign was, in essence, a promise to use the power of the State to correct the centuries-old wrong of economic insequenciality.

We must conclude with the great, open question that hangs over this narrative. The Mama Mboga and Mtu wa Boda Boda have been the beneficiaries of an accidental boom (Kibaki’s policy) and the foundation of a successful political campaign (Ruto’s narrative). But what now?

Mama Mboga’s ultimate desire is not merely access to micro-credit, but access to secure, dignified market stalls and a tax regime that encourages growth rather than preys upon it whereas, mtu wa Boda Boda’s ultimate aspiration is not merely relief from police harassment, but a formal sector that offers an alternative to the risk and precarity of the road, a sequential destination for his education and his ambition.

The current challenge is the transition from populist symbolism to structural reform. The colonial legacy has endowed Kenya with a political class adept at exploiting the insequenciality but historically reluctant to eradicate it. True economic justice requires the following:

 One, a massive, sustained investment in industrialisation and manufacturing that creates formal, high-wage jobs capable of absorbing the millions of graduates produced by the education system.

 Secondly, a complete rethinking of urban areas to integrate, rather than exclude, the informal sector, providing modern, secure, and permanent facilities for the Mama Mboga.

 Thirdly, Creating a regulatory and tax environment so conducive to growth that the Jua Kali sector formalises itself, not through coercion, but through the irresistible attraction of security, capital, and market access.

We must recognize that Mama Mboga and Mtu wa Boda Boda are the indelible monuments to the resilience of the Kenyan spirit. Their success is a powerful, though deeply ironic, rebuttal to the limiting vision of the Empire. They represent the nation’s refusal to accept its designated place in the global economic order.

However, their necessity is the most powerful testament to the enduring structural flaw left by that very Empire. They were the key to political power. They must now become the central motivation for the final, sequential correction of Kenya’s economy, a correction that allows the hustle to become a choice, not a compulsion, and which finally honours the high ambitions nurtured in the nation’s schools.

Yours Truly,

Ojango Omondi Mc'Apondi 

Ruaraka MP 2027

The Leadership You Can Trust