Kenya’s middle class must drive the change agenda lest it consume them

When social services like public health care, roads, supply of water and electricity collapse or deteriorate, one expects the middle class to react by demanding a radical policy change at best, or a regime change at worst.

These are the people with a voice. Besides having access to both mainstream and social media through which they can mobilise change, they also have the ears of those they finance, from their elderly relatives upcountry to the youthful cousins seeking better opportunities in town.

So, if they wished to champion change, they could marshal a tyranny of numbers greater than any political party’s or coalition’s.

But in Kenya, the middle class has instead formed a privatised social services system under which it builds and runs hospitals, water supply and other infrastructure, and even fixes erratic electricity supply by adopting alternative technologies. That is why manufacturing and selling diesel-powered generators is a growth industry.

SUBSIDISING INEFFICIENCY

Similarly, when policing services collapse, rich landlords and their middle-class tenants hire private firms to secure their homes.

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As a result, the people who can afford private alternatives for social services opt to bypass public institutions rather than change them.

The irony is that citizens pay privately for services that ought to be provided by public institutions. This is akin to subsidising the crippling inefficiency that characterises these institutions.

In the short and medium term, this approach can solve the problems that confront those with disposable incomes, but it also entrenches institutional decay, making inefficiency in public institutions look normal.

To get around this contradiction, families, especially those in the middle class, are now bribing to ensure that their teenagers are recruited into the disciplined forces, medical schools and other institutions that provide social services.

HAULED TO COURT

Through these suspect investments — remember they expect to earn a dividend after paying for these slots — the middle class is seeking to vicariously privatise public institutions.

What this means is that before a parent with a feverish child gets to a public hospital, she will have called a relative who works there as a doctor to prepare for treatment, as those from poor families wait in the wings for hours on end.

Similarly, families with relatives in the policing services can use public guns to intimidate debtors to settle private debts or to secure the release of suspects linked to all manner of offences. In the end, the justice system ceases to become an institution that redresses ills impartially in the interest of social harmony.

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Yet, those who support this skewed system will be shocked when the poor pour into the streets to demand radical change.

RADICALISED CHILDREN

They forget there is nothing in the public and social services system that gives the poor even the barest of creature comforts. They will be harassed by the police because they know no one in the service; they will wait without hope in public hospitals as the only doctor runs parallel services for those who paid his college fees; and they will be hauled to court because there is no one to short-circuit the justice system in their favour.

And when, out of desperation, they seek alternative services, they will find that the middle class owns the firms that provide clean water, better health care, superior education and so on.

Why then, is the middle class surprised when the children of the poor are “radicalised”, be it into religious or criminal zealotry, while their parents take to the streets to demand a review of commodity prices and a renegotiation of the social contract?

This is the problem that Kenya has to confront. However, it is not a problem that is unique to Kenya. Even in Europe and the US, a heated debate about how to reduce social inequality has consumed the attention of many a scholar, politician and public policy analyst.

There, however, unlike in Kenya, the middle class has seized the initiative by asking its best brains to dig into the mountains of data available in search of a solution. For them, the problem of inequality is not a ticking time bomb. But can the same be said of Kenya and its middle class?

Mr Mbugua is an editor with the Daily Nation. ([email protected]) Twitter: @NgangaMbugua