I think Land is expensive in Nairobi because getting clean land with title is hard..but now Uhuru has focussed on it...Eastland got 50,000 titles...and more are on the way. That mean those new clean titles...can unlock value...as people can use them as collateral.As regard private sector...I think GOK should focus on it's role...building infrastructure including housing. We have huge housing defiicit. Chinese have an incredible building machine. We can take advantage of it to deliver very cheap housing.
In my view private sector can generate 5% growth yoy - and gov can generate 5% of growth - right now there is some balancing act - I' think something close to 3% each - private sector is suffering because of the credit squeeze - CBK has to find innovative ways to let the banks lend again without high interest - reduce cash ratio - reduce all those NPLS stringest condition - no bank has collapsed the last 20yrs from lending - those that have - did collapse because of bad governance!
Bottomline: private sector is private; let gok focus on public investment. Let private sector become innovative..if gok borrows from eurobond..what stops private sector from borrowing abroad? What stops private sectors from bringing on-board chinese? either as investors or partners or etc?
Private sector seem unable to re-orient from old british colonial structures to the new world where all the action is on China-India-US!! Gov and Public sector have done a far better job.
The natural economic growth of kenya is 4% which is about the same with population and inflation rate. Which means naturally the private sector is barely trending water. The reason is the weight of government on the private sector. The housing issue, yes there's housing deficit but why? Its because land prices especially in areas near CBD like bahati,ngara etc are ridiculously high where available and the rest is under the vault of city council. A developer would be hard pressed to make a return on investment where lending rate is 14% at best. The outskirts prices are cheaper but there are no amenities and transport cost is also a big factor.