Why reforms have failed in Kenya

• REALITY CHECK: The men and women we have placed at the helm of our country are our biggest enemies and, as PROF MAKAU MUTUA writes, it is time we sent these wolves packing

Any good student of Kenyan history knows our state has been an unforgiving graveyard of reformist politics. It is a script that stretches back to the heroic Mau Mau, who were militarily vanquished by British imperialists and politically buried by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s founding neo-colonial ruler.

Kenya reached its nadir during the long reign of President Daniel arap Moi as a conservative and voracious elite suffocated all political space and looted resources with impunity.

Under President Mwai Kibaki, the state drifted to lawlessness, open corruption, and a virtual civil war. What happened to Kenya, once touted as the beacon of hope in Africa?

It is an incontestable truth that the Kenyan state has been an abysmal, if not catastrophic, failure. Even to the untrained eye, the crises bedevilling the country seem pathological. Brief periods of hope have been doomed by long spells of despair.

Analysts have identified several reasons for this malaise, the important ones being the despotic constitutional dispensation, tribalism and a rotten political class. This is a witch’s brew that has arrested Kenya’s development.

The ruling political class has been remarkably successful in reproducing itself — biologically and ideologically — since independence. The country’s constitutional and legal edifice has been constructed to protect the craven political class and prevent reform.

Challenge of nationhood

Wherein lays the problem? I have written before that actual Kenyans do not really exist, even though there is a country by that name. Kenya is vexed by what the late Tom Mboya, regarded by some as a political genius, called the “challenge of nationhood.”

At its fundament, Kenya has failed to cohere into a nation. Sadly, it is a country and a state run by tribalists for tribalists. I know it’s politically correct to blame tribal nativism on the political class and paint the masses as innocent putty in the hands of manipulative ethnic barons, but I reject such reasoning.

Ordinary folks in Kenya, whom I refuse to call Kenyans, are deeply tribalised, and it is this consciousness that the political class both nurtures and preys on.

It is convenient to blame all the country’s woes on the hated political class. But tell me which of the tribal barons does not have a fanatical tribal base? It is a good bet that you cannot build a democracy before building a nation, although you can — and should — do both simultaneously.

The bane of Kenya’s existence has been the deliberate refusal by the political class to lead the country in cleansing itself of tribalism. In fact, the survival of the political class explicitly depends on feeding the beast of tribalism.

Very few political and public figures are committed to forging a national consciousness — a Kenyan zeitgeist — in which tribal loyalties are transferred to the Kenyan nation. The tribe is their bread and butter.

Tribal lens

Virtually every person in Kenya sees almost every question through a tribal lens. This is a national cancer and the single most important retardant of the country.

It is a condition under which no meaningful reform can be carried out, a view that assumes that Kenya is not larger than the sum of its parts. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Each part is presumed to be larger than the whole!

However, this is an illusionist’s mirage that the political elite perpetuates at the expense of “their” ethnic groups and the country at large.

It is against this backdrop that we must understand the history of the failure of reforms in Kenya. A look back over the last 20 years — an intense period of the agitation for constitutional reform — shows how, time and gain, the country has come up short.

With one exception, only minimal and erratic reforms have been achieved. (The exception was the repeal of Section 2A, which opened the door to Kanu’s eventual demise).

But that change was a result of an irresistible global avalanche against one-party states that overwhelmed even the most implacable dictators.