Bridging the ‘two Kenyas’ is Jubilee’s historic mission

President Uhuru Kenyatta’s State of the Nation speech to a special sitting of Parliament on March 27 was a tour de force in landscaping the myriad economic, social, political and security challenges bedeviling Kenya today. (READ: Uhuru: My year in power)

But although Jubilee has rightly looked to Kenya’s new Constitution for the values and principles now framing its development priorities, crafting a clear vision of the future threading through this mosaic of agendas in its manifesto is, discernibly, still work in progress.

Lighting Jubilee’s path into the future are “the ideals of our founding fathers”. But upon ascending to power last year, it inherited the legacy of an economically, socially and politically divided nation.

Analysts have rightly described this phenomenon as the “two Kenyas” living perilously cheek by jowl. Indeed, the tale of “two Kenyas” existing side by side has been the ever-present bane in Kenyan politics. It stoked the titanic ideological battles over competing visions of the nation among the founding fathers in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of Kenya’s better known champions of the rights of the poor and “one Kenya” was JM Kariuki who decried the rise of “a country of 10 millionaires and ten million beggars”.

But over the years, the gaps between the “two republics” has widened in tandem with rising economic fortunes. The distinct contours of the “two republics” have become clear-cut following the economic gains in the last decade — linked to globalisation and prudent stewardship under President Mwai Kibaki.

One Kenya is philosophically Lockean: wealthy, secure and hopeful. This Kenya is part of a worldwide phenomenon that author Chrystia Freeland theorised as global “plutocrats” — the world’s wealthiest one per cent who have thrived on the last 20 years of globalisation.

But blissfully, Kenya’s nouveau-riche heralds the rise of a full-fledged capitalist class in the post-Cold War era in what used to be lampooned as the “periphery” of global capitalism. This is a radical paradigmatic shift.

KENYAN CAPITALISTS

In his book, Kenyan Capitalists: The State and Development published two decades ago, Rwandese scholar David Himbara declared that there were no indigenous Kenyan capitalists. Kenya’s capitalists are mired in “the new age of crony capitalism” dominated by a special form of money-making which economists deride as “rent-seeking”. Simply put, they are making fortunes, often unfairly, through a mix of sleaze, abusing weak regulatory systems and political connections.

But Kenya’s new entrepreneurs are also making their money through cutting-edge inventions, innovation and sheer hard work. The country is an emerging IT hub, and its M-Pesa is now a global model of money transfer. It has one of the largest Facebook membership on the continent; half a million others on Twitter. And many of its youth are venturing into online business.

The horizons of Kenyan capitalism are expanding. Following the discovery of oil in Turkana, coal deposits in Kitui, rare earth in Kwale and prospects of off-shore gas, the country is poised to join the club of resource-wealthy nations. Its economy, the fifth biggest in sub-Saharan Africa, is tapping into a quarter billion people in Eastern Africa.

Nairobi, recently rated by the Forbes Magazine as the third best city in Africa to live in, hosts diplomats and humanitarian communities working on crises in the Horn, Great Lakes and Central African regions. It also hosts key UN bodies. Major international companies are relocating their African headquarters from South Africa to the country.

And Kenya has upped the ante: working on a new sea-port in Lamu as part of the Kenya-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor and championing a dream standard gauge railway to link Mombasa to Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan and eventually across Congo to the Atlantic.

But this rosy future is a hostage of the second Kenya, which is philosophically Hobbesian: impoverished, insecure, nasty and overly disaffected.

This Kenya has been a fertile ground for deadly bouts of divisive ethno-centric populism particularly during election seasons. Populism hit a dangerous water mark during the 2007 disputed election, when armies of disillusioned and disaffected youth became fodder in an intra-elite conflict that nearly pushed the country down the cliff.

Because of the crisis, for the better part of last year, the President and his Deputy were hamstrung by cases facing them at the International Criminal Court which drew their attention away from their duties.

Kenya’s young people have remained soft targets of radicalisation and recruitment into cells of local and international terrorist networks, largely responsible for the recent waves of attacks in Nairobi, Mombasa and North Eastern Kenya. They are also caught up in the spiraling violent crime.

Four years ago, Kenyans agreed on a new social contract to bridge the “two Kenyas”, overwhelmingly endorsing a new Constitution. The architects of the supreme law opted for a two-tier state with 47 odd counties as spearheads of a rural renaissance receiving a minimum of 15 percent of the total national tax revenue.

There is no alternative to devolution as the surest pathway to creating one prosperous Kenya. But the counties have come unstuck and have devolved to the grassroots rent-seeking strategies, corruption, wastage and conspicuous spending now pushing the wage bill through the roof.

Supremacy wars are making the vision of “one Kenya” a bridge too far, and fostering the view that the new political order is unwieldy and unlikely to deliver.

On the road to one happy Kenya, Jubilee’s best choice is to train its focus on the forest (the macro issues of vision and policies) while empowering and overseeing counties to hack the trees (implementation).

Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute. [email protected]