Kenya must entrench basic skills to plug unemployment gap

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My sister’s Christmas present to me when she came from London was David Goodhart’s new book, The Road to Somewhere. I’d never heard of Goodhart, but I am an admirer of the thoughtful Prospect magazine of which he was the founder editor. (Whenever I fly with British Airways I find a copy on board, and immediately pounce on it.)

So where is the “Somewhere” in his title? Or rather, who are his “Somewheres? They are people rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated. And these he contrasts to the “Anywheres”, who are footloose, often urban and socially liberal, university educated (the “exam-passing classes”, the “cognitive elite”) and upwardly mobile.

In Britain, he reckons that Somewheres, many of whom are the “left-behinds”, make up roughly half the population, with Anywheres accounting for 20 to 25 per cent and the rest classified as “Inbetweeners”.

Goodhart describes them as belonging to different “Values tribes”. The Somewheres are characterised by an unease with the modern world, a nostalgic sense that “change is loss” and the strong belief that it is the job of British leaders to put the interests of Britons first.

Anywheres, meanwhile, are free of nostalgia; egalitarian and meritocratic in their attitude to race, sexuality and gender; and light in their attachments to larger group identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realisation before stability, community and tradition.

You can readily deduce which tribe wishes to remain in the EU and which craves Brexit — just as you can guess where most of Trump’s supporters fit. With nearly half of British students benefitting from higher education, and — in the developed world at least — with fewer and fewer opportunities for those without significant academic qualifications, the gap between the tribes risks widening further.

I was only a few pages into the book when I began to reflect on Kenyan Somewheres and Anywheres and Inbetweeners. For these tribes exist here as they do in Britain, America and elsewhere.

Our Anywheres are drawn to Nairobi just as their British counterparts swarm into London, expecting that the capital is the only place where they can fulfill their potential. And from there so many Kenyan Anywheres find opportunities elsewhere in Africa and way beyond.

But Goodhart suggests that there can be virtue in staying put and remaining loyal to one’s community — as we are beginning to find with the newfound draw to the counties that has come with devolution.

Just as in the developed world, we have our rising middle class professionals who are at ease in the competitive global village, and we also have our “left-behinds” — those without the skills needed to make them employable and without the unusual character-traits of job-creators.

Goodhart praises Germany for having managed the Anywhere-Somewhere balance best, with its much greater focus on “the middling and the local” — not least through its apprenticeship system that continues to confer respect on even basic jobs.

In Britain by contrast the apprenticeship system never recovered from the de-industrialisation of the 1980s. They “went out of intellectual fashion”, writes Goodhart, perhaps wrongly considered too job-specific to be of use in this era of flexibility.

And like here (indeed perhaps acting as our inspiration) polytechnics were upgraded to universities, leaving an awful vacuum of institutions offering technical and vocational training.

Like here too, in Britain these skills and qualifications are looked down upon, making the low demand for them out of balance with the great shortage of those who possess them.

At least now, here as elsewhere, there is a realisation of this folly, and steps are being taken to fill the void.

Goodhart calls for leaders who not only understand the feelings and aspirations of both Somewheres and Anywheres but can find ways of bringing them closer together rather than merely appealing to one or the other for their support.

His appeal is aimed primarily at the British ones, but surely they apply equally to ours. As we launch on our journey through 2018 I close by wishing my readers a fruitful one, whether they be Somewheres or Anywheres or Inbetweeners.

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