Worryingly, ‘Star Wars’ reflects Kenya’s political order

During the Christmas holidays, I took time to watch the seventh movie in the Star Wars franchise.

I came out agreeing with Jessamyn West that “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures”. I also feel that The Force Awakens is profoundly instructive as a metaphor for political economy in Kenya.

The film shows that the universe is extremely vast, and even major players can disappear for ages without anyone knowing where they are hiding.

This message, about the vastness of the universe, is one that competitive patriots ought to be at peace with because the place of most nations in the global scale of things is very small.

Thus, despite the strong nationalist fervour of these patriots, Kenya is not unimportant but remains a small player within the global economic and political landscape.

The tendency, in Kenya, to take offence easily and try to shut other nations up reflects the insecurity of a small nation. Greatness shouldn’t be driven by 36 paid bloggers but should be self-evident.

The inhabitants of most planets in The Force Awakens live in an autocrat’s paradise, where all beings are chattels of the state.

State authority in the First Order state is represented by macho figures starting with the dispensable Storm Troopers, patricidal Kylo Ren and the barely visible Snoke, wearing white, black and imperceptible colours respectively.

First Order state is represented by macho figures starting with the dispensable Storm Troopers, patricidal Kylo Ren and the barely visible Snoke.

Historically, those at the top are all-knowing and their orders represent all that is good for everyone in the Galactic Empire. Like them, we Kenyans desire to speak with one voice but different views affect our pride because we fear they would make outsiders view us unfavourably.

There’s more than a light suggestion that people do not know how to handle freedom and they therefore must be made aware that the First Order will catch you and make you obey the state.

SCAVENGERS FOR METAL

Defenders of freedom cannot be the ones who have to justify state efforts to reduce civil, economic and social freedoms. Thus the more authoritarian and martial language the leadership in Kenya and elsewhere use, the less comfortable every citizen should be.

There is no doubt that the purpose of the First Order is to rule by directive or decree while dismissing issues such as law and the Constitution as mere inconveniences advocated by activists with un-African ideas.

Those Kenyans who argue that politics should be suspended for society to better concentrate on “matters economy” would find Jakku the ideal world. This is an arid land whose inhabitants are mostly scavengers for discarded metals.

The economic order in Jakku is extreme. Scavenging, the main activity, is controlled by a single firm that buys up all the metal, determines its value and pays collectors in rations as opposed to cash.

This firm is probably run by the Jakku equivalent of a “tenderpreneur” and exists because of state authorisation and protection. In return for this monopsony position, the firm sets arbitrary prices for material and spies on the citizens for the New Order.

SURVIVING ON A DAILY RATION

Today’s Kenya is more complex because it has M-Pesa and state issued currency, but BitCoin would probably be prohibited in Jakku too.

Transportation in the age of The Force Awakens makes inter-galactic travel possible because scientific development has enabled travel approaching the speed of light. It is implied here that material development has surpassed what is possible in the present century.

The shared paradox between the Star Wars world and ours is that of state-constructed inequality. Here is Rey, an intelligent woman living in Jakuu who can pilot space machines without prior training, but lives the life of a scavenger surviving on a daily ration from the state monopsony.

Kenyans too are familiar with high unemployment rates and an undiversified economy, and many people finding employment in single-person enterprises that have low productivity and income, or subsistence agriculture.

THE TECHNOLOGY ITCH

The make-believe world in The Force Awakens and Kenya also share a total commitment to technology by the State.

This high-technology itch, manifested in different ways, shows how the bureaucracy can get enamoured with technology as an end in itself and not for the purpose of advancing public welfare.

For instance, the First Order is preoccupied with research that aims to drain the energy from the sun or some other star in order to build the ultimate weapon of conquest.

This technology itch, and its contradictions, would be familiar to us given the Kenyan obsession with shiny, large infrastructure projects including stadiums, railways that are not cost-effective and pipelines whose capacity far exceed what is required.

May the Farce depart from us.

Kwame Owino is the chief executive officer of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA-Kenya), a public policy think tank based in Nairobi, Kenya.Twitter: @IEAKwame