Kenya at crossroads as crucial election looms

LAMU, tucked away on Kenya's border with Somalia, reminds one of the cliché "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Today, in the run-up to Kenya's general election on March 4, the island is bedecked with posters of candidates for president, MPs and, now, with the creation countrywide of 47 "counties", governors too.

The focus is especially on the presidency. Who will replace the somnolent Mwai Kibaki - his fellow Kikuyu tribesman Uhuru Kenyatta, or the candidate many say won the contested 2007 election, Prime Minister Raila Odinga?

There seems to be almost as many candidates as donkeys and there are no fewer than 3000 Equus asinus on the island - one for every seven people.

Not much seems to have changed over the past 100 years. Winston Churchill visited Kenya as undersecretary of state for the colonies in 1907, remarking that "every man in Nairobi was a politician and most of them were leaders of parties".

Lamu is a tourist paradise, an enthralling mix of medieval buildings, narrow streets, warm people, magnificent beaches and spicy Swahili cuisine rich in coconut milk.

It has, however, a bloody and sad history. Its prosperity as an Arab slaving post was ended by the advent of British rule in 1873. The territory was formally and violently incorporated into the Kenya protectorate within 20 years.

Fast forward nearly a century and Lamu and the surrounding islands of Manda and Kismayo emerged as hot global tourism destinations. Today, Lamu's waterfront has a string of restaurants, lodges and small hotels, all very much in the local tradition.

But this masks a security threat that put the industry flat on its back 16 months ago. In September 2011, an English couple staying on Kismayo were attacked by Somali gunmen. The husband was killed and the wife kidnapped.

A fortnight later, a French woman was kidnapped from Manda and taken to Somalia, where she later died. Because most Western governments advised their citizens against travel to the area, tourism died with her. It has battled to recover.

Somali militants and pirates aside, any trouble from the election, as in 2007, could spell the industry's death knell.

Kenya finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Its development challenges have escalated. In 30 years, Kenya's population will double to 80million. It was just nine million at independence 50 years ago.

Creating opportunities - put differently: finding jobs - is the biggest challenge. There is a huge backlog. Now the Kenyan workforce is just more than 20million people. About five million are in wage-earning jobs, the remainder in farming or self-employed. Only 1.3million work in the private sector.

About 25 years ago, the share of the informal sector in the job market was little more than 20%. Today it's more than 80%. This especially affects Kenya's young people under 35 - two-thirds of the population. Most are unemployed and poorly educated.

More than 40% have never attended or completed primary school, and less than one-fifth have completed secondary school, partly because they are sent out to work and fend for themselves at an early age.

It's a vicious cycle that the winner of next month's election will have to tackle.

If and how that is done will determine Kenya's trajectory and the fortunes of the current and next several generations.

It's a critical time, the proverbial fork in the road - the choice between a modernising vision and a country heading towards widening inequality and, inevitably, instability.

On the mainland near Lamu is the site of the planned $25-billion (about R225-billion) Lapsset rail, road, refinery, oil pipeline, resort and harbour project.

Designed to service the needs of not only Kenya but also South Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, it is little more than a bare patch in a mangrove forest. These ambitious projects are important for the long term - the next 50 years.

But in the next decade progress is only going to be made by getting politicians to stop their old corrupt ways.

Getting the port of Mombasa to shed its political parasites and work more efficiently is one example.

It takes longer and is more expensive to move a container from the port to Nairobi than to Singapore.

This contrasts with Kenya's extraordinary IT revolution, epitomised by the M-Pesa cellphone-based money transfer, which works brilliantly mainly because the state is nowhere near it.

If that and not Mombasa resembles the model for a post-Kibaki Kenya, then the glass is half-full.

• Mills has been in Kenya