Securing democracy is the historic mission of Kenya’s middle class

A fitting “last word” that aptly sums up the eventful, albeit chaotic, 2014 is Kenya’s enchanted middle class.

This class is part of the emerging grand narrative of “Africa rising” now the dominant imagination of the continent in the 21st century.

In 2014, Kenya’s middle class was on course in steering socio-economic transformation to even greater heights.

But as the chaos and calumny over the new Security Laws (Amendment) Act 2014 in Parliament revealed, Kenya’s middle class has failed to forge a “broad national consensus” on how to secure the country’s fragile democracy from the mortal threat posed by terrorism.

STABILISING FORCE
Conceptually, Africa’s burgeoning middle class has continued to be a subject of intense media and academic debates. Because of its class values, which stress the development of human capital, savings and capitalist accumulation, the middle class has been widely perceived as a stabilising force in democracies.

Scholars have highlighted a “middle class consensus” as an antidote for high societal polarisation and inequality and as the basis of democratic stability. This imagination of the middle class as a harbinger of democratic peace and stability has long roots in the Ancient Greek cradle of Western philosophy.

In his politics, Aristotle posited that “the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class,” adding that “where the middle class is large, there are least likely to be factions and dissentions.”

In Africa, emergence of a broad middle class with capacity to driving markets and investment; it is also expected to neutralise the polarising forces of ethnicity, class, religion and regions.

In the last two decades, Africa’s middle class has risen meteorically, raising hopes that its “stabilising qualities” will secure Africa’s fragile democracies.

A widely-cited report by the African Development Bank (ADB) estimates the size of Africa’s middle class — those spending between US$2 and US$20 (KSh180-1,800) a day— at about 313 million people, or 34.3 per cent of the continent’s population. This is a spike from 111 million two decades ago.

Kenya’s economy, as elsewhere in Africa, has grown at an average of 5 per cent a year, with the proliferation of medium enterprise companies shifting its earnings from agrarian to the formal employment sector.

In 2014, Kenya joined the rank of Africa’s top 10 economies after rebasing its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), thus becoming a middle-income economy. Correspondingly, Kenya’s middle class stands at nearly 45 per cent of the population, ahead of Uganda’s 18.7 per cent, Tanzania’s 12.1 per cent, Rwanda’s 7.7 per cent and Burundi’s 5.3 per cent.

However, Africa’s nouveaux riches are not a seamless category. Over 60 per cent of Kenya’s middle class is made up of the “floating class” living on US$2-4 per day, a stratum vulnerable to sliding back into poverty in the event of economic shocks or political instability.

Government policies target the floating class with a view to pushing it up to the lower and upper middle classes, which live on US$4-10 (KSh360-900) and US$10-20 (KSh900-1,800) per day respectively.

AFRICA RISING

Africa’s middle class has risen from the ashes of the ruinous Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in stagnation, unemployment and poverty.

However, in the last two decades, globalisation, technological innovation, especially access to the Internet and mobile connectivity by both the poor and the rich, have created new opportunities and tremendously transformed the communities and improved livelihoods. An estimated 78 per cent of Kenyans are connected to a mobile phone.

Added to this is access to new markets, development assistance and external investment from emerging economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, particularly China, Brazil and India.

However, beyond earnings, savings and consumption, the middle class is widely held as embodying the values that drive social cohesion and stability. But Kenya’s middle class is yet to become a force of stabilisation in the country’s sharply divided polity.

Scholars attribute the failure of Kenya’s powerful middle class to live up to its expectation in forging a national “middle class consensus” to several reasons.

On the one extreme, the various ethnic factions of the middle class are rocked in competition for control of the state, increasing its fragmentation and vulnerability to cronyism, patronage, corruption and sectarian conflicts.

As another extreme, the middle class has increasingly disengaged from the state and abandoned its civic duties. Because it enrols its children in private schools, seeks medical services from private hospitals and hiring private security guards or goons to address insecurity concerns, the upper middle class has abdicated from its civic duties to push for better public services.

The lower-middle class and the floating class are following suit, struggling to get their children to private schools and hospitals.

The disengagement of the middle class from civic duties has been a threat to national security and stability. In 2007-2008 post-election violence was driven by ethnic hatred within the elite.

Since 2011, the Kenyan middle class has failed to forge a common approach to the threat of terrorism. Al-Shabaab and its sympathisers and cells have exploited these divisions in the power elite to divide the middle class and weaken Kenya’s war on terrorism.

An ideal middle class able to secure democracy from terrorism is yet to emerge in Kenya.

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute and former Government Adviser.