Mutua’s ‘maendeleo ideology’ and the clash of generations

On August 30, 2015, Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua, broke into tears at a meeting with leaders from the adjacent Kitui County. The youthful governor accused the old guard of “practising politics of poverty” in Ukambani.

Since ascending to power in March 2013, Mutua has decidedly taken a development oriented and assertive leadership style. In a country stalked by ethnic hegemonies, Mutua has courted trouble with the movers and shakers of Ukambani politics.

Mutua is treading a familiar intellectual and policy path. Development has been a major ideology of our times. As the development thinker, Francis Sutton, perceptively noted in his article, “Development Ideology” (1989), development is widely invoked to rationalise policies and to cope with competing doctrines.

In another sense, development ideology has been hoisted as a doctrine of liberation and assertion of human rights. It is in the latter sense that the renowned economist and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, Amartya Sen, declared “development as freedom” in a book by the same title. Development is freedom; it is something worth crying for.

Governor Mutua is using development — “Maendeleo chap chap” or accelerated development — in an ideological and programmatic sense as an expression of hope and aspiration in Kenya’s fifth largest peoples (over 3.8 million people or 11 pc of the country’s population) living in a high-potential region, but characterised by poverty and under-development.

Kenyan-French scholar, Francois Grignon first introduced the concept of “wave” in the analysis of the 1997 election in Ukambani. Since then, Ukambani politics has been thought of in terms of waves. Mutua’s “Maendeleo ideology” is morphing into a new political wave in Ukambani, the fifth in nearly two generations.

The first wave, “the Ngei wave,” coincided with independence in 1963 and reached its acme in the 1970s. As a liberation icon and one of the “Kapenguria Six” (together with Kenyatta, Fred Kubai, Bildad Kaggia, Achieng Oneko and Kung’u Karumba), Kangundo MP and Cabinet Minister in Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s Government, Paul Joseph Ngei (1923-2004), was a founding-father figure in Kamba politics.

As the most advanced part of Kambaland that rivalled Kabete in Kikuyuland, Ngei’s Kangundo was touted as “Kabete B.” But the well-watered Kangundo with its rich soils and modernisation remained a mere enclave in a largely under-developed Ukambani region.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of this era is a distinct style of leadership that gave a pride of place to personality and power and ignored the strategic interests of the Kamba people. This form of power is squarely responsible for the poverty and under-development in Ukambani.

The second wave, the “Mutisya wave,” coincided with the peak of the Kanu dictatorship in the 1980s when Mulu Mutisya was the regional kingpin.

At this time, Kalonzo Musyoka rode the crest of the Mutisya wave to become Mwingi North MP, Cabinet Minister and Kanu organising secretary. Sadly, during this period, christened “the lost decade” by scholars, Ukambani became a basket case virtually dependent on food aid (maize or mbemba) widely used by politicians as a tool to gain or retain power.

The anti-thesis of the lost decade was the third wave, the “Ngilu Wave,” which coincided with Samuel Huntington’s “third wave” of democratisation in Kenya also popularly known as the “second liberation.”

In 1997, Mrs Charity Kaluki Ngilu became Kenya’s first serious woman presidential candidate and launched the Akamba into national politics as one of the “Big Five” communities.

However, Ngilu came a poor fifth. Whatever Ngilu fell to, for a while she had succeeded in refocusing Kamba politics on community interests on a national scale.

It paved the way for the fourth wave, the “Kalonzo wave,” which reached its all-time high in the 2007-2013 hiatus. With 8.9 pc of the total vote in the heavily contested 2007 presidential poll, Kalonzo came a poor third behind Mwai Kibaki (46.4 pc) and Raila Odinga 44.1 pc.

After the election, a rare strategic approach to Kamba interests in the form of behind-the-curtains deal with Kibaki ensured that the Kamba remained in power. The deal catapulted Kalonzo to the vice- presidential perch.

But Kalonzo lost the wheeler-dealer battle for the Kibaki succession, backing Odinga and Cord, who lost the 2013 election. For the first time, the mainstream Kamba leadership was out of power and the community faced the double-jeopardy of historic poverty and missing out on the opportunities that come with being in government.

However, the new system of devolution has provided a reprieve. It is in the context of devolution as the new engine of development that Mutua has unfurled his “Maendeleo ideology,” now gaining traction across Ukambani and nationally.

Three ideological winds are behind Ukambani’s fifth wave. First is the development orientation of Ukambani Governors — Dr Mutua (Machakos), Prof Kivutha Kibwana (Makueni) and Dr Julius Malombe (Kitui) — which has familiar echoes in the development orientation of the Kibaki and Kenyatta governments.

But the development ideology has its foes in Ukambani who accuse the governors of supporting the government and of not being committed to the Wiper agenda. The second wind is the re-birth of strategic politics that gives a pride of place to the interests of the Kamba people.

Third is a clash of generations signified by a simmering supremacy war between Mutua and Kalonzo. Mutua insists he is not interested in edging out Kalonzo. But his “Maendeleo ideology” is sounding the death knell for the “Kalonzo wave.”

Prof Kagwanja is chief executive, Africa Policy Institute, [email protected]