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I guess you guys are missing the big picture. No single engineer ever builds a car, or a washing machine, or a fridge. If you bring the best engineer from Toyota or BMW and put him in Nairobi he would probably at best be able to build a more efficient jembe or design a better seating arrangement inside a matatu.
A car is not the product of an engineer, it is the product of an industry, which is the product of a much larger social, political, cultural and economic ecosystem. The engineer and the car are the tip of the iceberg.
The man most credited with the transformation of China , Deng Xiaoping was born in 1904 and then in 1919 at the age of 15 he left China for France to "To learn knowledge and truth from the West in order to save China." The rise of industrial China is a product of many years of chini ya maji changes to how that society functions that has given rise to industries and production of many goods.
The engineer part is actually the easy part. It is easy for a guy to grow up in Kenya, go to Kenyan schools, become an engineer and work for the best car making company in the world as has been demonstrated by the guy who worked at Tesla. Creating the industry is the hard part because it needs to be supported by many other things that take time and a lot more to build.
This is exactly what Mugundaman was trying to say.. to much talk/excuses and no substance whatsoever. Kwani Wright brothers who invented the aeroplane walikuwa wangapi. Few kenyan engineers can even assemble a car/ pikipiki engine. Its largely juakali guys who do it.. with hardly no qualifications. Or Wale kalasinga wa River Road
From time to time we see in the press juakali guys coming up with various clever inventions but because they're
....well juakali.. They get very little or no support at all ( from the so called engineers) to hone their skills
Show me one tangible invention a graduate Kenyan engineer has come up with hapa Jamhuri in the last 50 years. Hata mtego wa panya is made in PRC
Looks like our engineers are taught Chinese dynasties and history and how others industrialised and NOT how Kenya can Industrialise.
@ Kusadikika when is Kenya's Deng Xiaoping moment going to happen? Kenyan Engineers have let this Country down.
Just like the Japanese in the 20th Century the Chinese have thrived at coping and perfected other people's innovations and technologies. The only thing Our Engineers can copy is an exam
Kenyan Engineers need not to go anywhere like Deng Xiaoping did. All info is at finger tips courtesy of information technology
They simply need to copy and modify the technology that is already there. The problem is 99% of their coursework is classroom based. Some graduate without wearing Workwear overall
America Australia Europe don't sleep because they are worried the Chinese are stealing their technologies. And yes They are
Africa is sleeping while China dumps sub standard products whilst stealing trillions of dollars worth of minerals
While our engineers are reminiscing on Century old plus Deng Xiaoping ideology
Bure kabisa
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The wright brothers were not engineers. Since there were engineers and highly trained scientists in the same society at the time, do you blame them for not being the ones who built the first aeroplane? So, not being an engineer is no excuse for someone not to invent something. Being one is no excuse either.
But we need to find where our comparative advantage lies...we don't have steel, so there's no way we can produce cars from scratch that can compete with established markets. Our potential lies in agri processing, textile, leather, ICT, etc. If we can exploit this and then minimize headless chicken dishing of money to other economies e.g. by importing stuff we can easily make or do ourselves, we will go places