Last Thursday evening, in a prime-time address, the President announced that Kenya will begin crafting Vision 2060. A national conversation opens on August 12, aiming at a development charter to carry us a generation forward.
It was announced with an honesty worth noting: Vision 2030, still has four years to run, and by the President’s own admission, many of its ambitions remain unattained. Sit with that arithmetic. We have started imagining the next horizon before arriving at the last one.
Our founders’ forum did not receive the news gently. One member argued that the only vision we need right now is the restoration of trust in public institutions; that as things stand, we would struggle to trust even a Vision 2027.
Another, who has studied every national blueprint since the sessional papers, traced how the 2030 momentum thinned after its early champions left, how flagship projects paused for years and restarted with new budgets, how each incoming regime prefers a fresh page to a handed-over one. His conclusion was one line: we do not need visions, we need ethical execution.
A third voice went deeper. Visions die, he argued, when the growth they produce is not broadly shared, because every election is a contest to capture the state rather than to continue the plan. And a fourth held up the mirror nobody wanted: we are hypocrites about values. We demand ethical leaders in public and support unethical ones in private the moment proximity pays us.
This column is not about the government. It is about the mirror. Because founders run the same play in miniature, and we run it fluently.
Walk into most companies and you will find Vision 2060 launched over an unexecuted Vision 2030: a new strategy deck every planning cycle, values framed in reception, mission in the annual report, purpose in the culture handbook. Encoded everywhere. Bent daily, in the corridor between the document and the deal.
The problem was never the encoding. Watch a kindergarten child learning the letter C. The small hand traces the curve until the shape lives in the fingers, and from that day a malformed C announces itself instantly.
The child does not debate it. That is not C. This is the literacy our companies lack. The kickback arrives dressed as a facilitation fee. Capture arrives dressed as partnership. And nobody in the building can say, with a child’s certainty, that is not us.
What converts a vision into arrival is what every faith tradition discovered long before management science: a creed. Not a statement drafted, but a belief practised. Building one asks hard things of the founder. Write values as shapes, not slogans. Integrity floating in the abstract cannot be traced by a junior officer under pressure.
Creeds die the day the congregation notices the priest no longer believes. If the founder bends the letter once, to rescue one quarter, the alphabet is renegotiated by Monday. And note what the nation keeps teaching us: visions collapse at regime change because they live in the leader instead of the people. Companies repeat this.
Every new CEO relaunches the culture; every founder exit resets the values. A creed is the only instrument designed to survive the transition. It is what you hand over when you finally leave the room.
Share the harvest. Here the forum’s hardest argument comes home. An anthem is only sung by people who share in what it celebrates. If the gains of growth concentrate at the top of the company, the vision becomes internal politics, and staff will execute a dream they participate in while quietly sabotaging one they merely witness.
Ethical execution is not only a compliance question. It is a distribution question. Then let the creed become the anthem, and test it in both weathers.
Tough moments test whether it survives fear: the lost contract, the payment that will not move, the offer that would solve everything quietly. Great moments test whether it survives pride: the award season, the scale that whispers the rules were written for the smaller version of you.
Most companies lose their creed not in the storm but in the sunshine. And let us answer the hypocrisy charge honestly, because it lands on founders too. We say we want ethical businesses.
Then we price the kickback into the tender, help the invoice along, and frame the values in reception on the way to the signing. The uncomfortable question of this season is not whether the nation can draft a trustworthy 2060. It is whether my company could survive an audit of the distance between its documents and its deals.
The national conversation opens on August 12, and I genuinely wish it well; a country shouldimagine its future. But founders do not need to wait for a charter to begin ethical execution. In 2060, most of us will be grey or gone.
What arrives at that horizon will not be the vision document. It will be whatever creed outlived us, carried by people who learnt the shape of our letters well enough to say, without fear and without us, that is not who we are. A vision names the destination. The creed decides whether anyone arrives.