Two faces of Kenya – competing ideologies mining the road to 2017

At the dawn of 2015, Kenya is awash with hubristic celebrations of a “revolution” unleashed by the new constitution.

But what kind of ideology is driving Kenya’s enchanted “revolution”?

Suffice it to say that after the 2013 elections, Kenya is in the throes of the destructive “power of Babel” now rolling back the ethical gains of the “revolution”.

Paradoxically, in defence of the “revolution” activists, politicians and scholars alike are heckling and trying to out-shout each other, using insults, innuendoes and high-pitched rhetoric where words are flying like stray bullets.

In the ensuing calumny, the rhetoric of “revolution” is brazenly abused, with the political class parodied as “sleeping through the revolution”— a trite phrase fast morphing into an extremely tired banality.

Ahead of the March 2013 elections, Mutahi Ngunyi, famed for his “Tyranny of Numbers” paradigm, quipped that the Cord principals “slept through the revolution” by failing to urge voters in their strongholds to register in large numbers. They lost the watershed election, and the hope of presiding over the implementation of the new constitution.

In an article last weekend, the economist David Ndii invoked the phrase five times in a single article, lampooning the Jubilee administration for “sleeping through the revolution sweeping across the country”.

REVIEW OF IDEALOGY AND POLITICS IN KENYA

The overarching perception of Kenya is that of “a country that lacks ideology”. On the contrary, I concur with Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o that “our political parties have ideologies” (January 2012).

Prior to 2010, Kenya’s political terrain was a coat of many ideological colours. Four distinct phases of ideological development are discernible, corresponding to global geo-political shifts.

First, in the 1960s decade, the nationalist elite across the political divide shared the ideology of “freedom” (uhuru). But the nationalist consensus soon collapsed, giving way to ideological polarisation between the left-leaning socialists and west-leaning rightists or capitalists. The leftists lost the fight.

Second, the 1970-1980 decade was Kenya’s age of absolutism philosophically anchored on the Hobbesian idea that people must willingly submit to absolute rulers because life without government is “nasty, brutish and short.” Absolutism inspired the “imperial presidency” of the Kanu days.

Third, the end of the Cold War and the triumph of capitalism over communism/socialism in the late 1980s ushered in the neo-liberal ideas of free market, progress (change), equality and freedom, which underpin the new constitution.

After Kanu’s demise in 2002, all political formations have ideologically claimed to pursue “a national democratic and developmental state” in Kenya. This overarching ideology drove the NARC Government’s Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation (ERS), the creation of the National Social and Economic Council (NESC) and Kenya Vision 2030.

Similarly, the manifestoes of both the Jubilee Alliance and ODM/Cord coalition are aligned to this overarching ideology.

Beyond this overarching ideology, after the 2013 elections, Kenya’s political class is badly divided along two competing and diametrically opposed ideologies, which are likely to colour the struggle for power on the road to 2017 election.
The first ideology, identified with the Jubilee administration, is the “productionist” or “growthist” paradigm that stresses economic productivity and growth. The productionist ideology is prioritising a plethora of mega-projects in energy and infrastructure calibrated to reduce the cost of production, grow the economy, transform the country into a middle-income level state and pull the mass of Kenya’s poor out of poverty.
The second ideology, identified with ODM/Cord coalition, is the “distributionist”paradigm. The new constitution, especially the devolution component, was expected to end the perennial problem of distributional grievances behind the 2008 post-election violence. The “distributionist” paradigm rests on two ideological planks.
ANARCHISM

The first plank is an incipient anarchist ideology, a belief that “everything about government is repressive”, and therefore must be challenged or abolished entirely.
The new Security Laws (Amendment) Act, 2014 has been used to fortify the alarmist thesis of the return of dictatorship.
Pushed to the extreme, anarchism leads to another ideology known as nihilism or a belief that “everything must be periodically destroyed in order to start afresh”.
The second is a brazen ethnocentric ideology that seeks to polarise the country into ethnic-haves and ethnic-have-nots. Speaking in September 2013, the retired South African Judge, Johann Kriegler, noted that, despite its much acclaimed new constitution, the only “way to save Kenya is by liberating the country from ethnic ideologies”.
Recently, the ethnocentric ideology has been buttressed by “official” studies claiming injustice in the public sector because certain ethnic groups dominate civil service.
A report unveiled this week by the Public Service Commission chairperson, Margaret Kobia — which incidentally found its way into the cover story of the Daily Nation (DN January 8, 2015) — claims that five communities (Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Luhya, Kamba and Luo) are over-represented in the public service.
Why this “revelation” should be newsworthy and intriguing is puzzling. Collectively, these communities constitute over 75 pc of the national population! Naturally, they are bound to be proportionately higher in any sector of the Kenyan society.

Professor Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute and a former government adviser