Taming Kenya's rogue ‘civil society’ key to electoral peace

Kenya’s civil society is a frightening paradox. Scanning the horizons ahead of the August 8, 2017 election, the petrifying rise of a rogue ‘civil Society’ is the greatest risk to peace.

A cursory read of Makau Mutua’s acerbic article, “Ndemo wrong to bare fangs at civil society for oversight role” (Standard, July 23, 2017), brings to light the horrifying intellectual hubris of the godfathers of Kenya’s new mafia-like ‘civil society’, now stalking the country’s political terrain like colossus, threatening fire and brimstone, scorching rival initiatives and terrorizing alternative voices.

Self-evidently, the godfathers have read Niccolo Machiavelli with a toothcomb, and taken to heart his logic of power.

Discernibly, since 2002, they have cobbled together a powerful ‘informal empire’ based on an unholy alliance with known corruption rings, adroitly infiltrating and capturing strategic cogs in state institutions such as Judiciary and forging gainful linkages with Western donors.

Surprisingly, their power and influence ripples deep into the United Nations bureaucracies in Nairobi and New York!

PRISONERS

Nairobi’s civil society godfathers take no prisoners. They wield untrammelled power to reward and punish loyalty in a classic patrimonial fashion.

But their real power rests on a universal moral claim to the talismanic power that civil society organizations and actors have enjoyed since Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the triumph of liberalism over rival ideologies. 

Civil society is liberalism’s heaviest gun against rival ideologies and models of development.

This moral power of Nairobi’s godfathers thrives on tapping instrumentally into the wisdom that the future of democracy in post-authoritarian societies in Africa, as elsewhere, is inextricably tied to the strength of civil society, with weak civil societies blamed for flawed or trapped democracies. 

Ideologically, this is the wind driving the sails of Western donors, UN agencies, professionals in the charity industry and dispensers of aid who support activists as the white knights in the construction of an alternative order and promote civil society as a precondition for development.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

But this argument is standing on its head.  Indeed, sustainable development and the consolidation of democratic regimes rest on the existence of strong and functioning political institutions, not on the configuration of a nebulous civil society stratum.

At least, this is the argument Omar G. Encarnación makes so convincingly in his seminar work, The Myth of Civil Society (2003).

In Kenya, the tail is wagging the dog. Here, the idea of civil society as a neutral, humane and altruistic space is a myth.

Nevertheless, its godfathers have no qualms masquerading as a “neutral” progressive force while trafficking in partisanship.

CIVIL SOCIETY

Confronted with this ugly face of civil society in Darfur, Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, coined the term, “human rights fundamentalism” to describe the nasty underbelly of rogue civil societies.

But the Kenyan dilemma is deeper.

The phenomenon of state capture, as a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage, is familiar. Not so the capture of civil society.

Kenya’s civil society sphere is no longer a force for progress.

It is an unholy trinity of intellectuals of nihilistic hue, human rights extremists and corrupt business networks, hell-bent on capturing k both civil society and political opposition as a grand strategy to capture state power during the August polls.

UNHOLY TRINITY

But the capture of some United Nation’s agencies in Nairobi and its transformation into an integral cog of this unholy trinity is perhaps the most untypically, saddest.

From this powerful perch, Nairobi’s godfathers have managed to use their networks in a stick-and-carrot style to punish those outside their realm or perceived as rival networks.

Ignorance of this incipient force is likely to cost one dearly.

On Friday, July 28, 2017, the Africa Policy Institute, which I head, was to hold a joined high-profile forum with the United Nation’s Development Programme (and UNESCO) on the: “Preparedness for 2017 General Election.”

Among those slated to take part in the dialogue, the third in a series of debates within the aegis of UNDP’s Africa-wide “Maendeleo Policy Forum,” was the the Chairman of IEBC, senior security officers, academics, international experts and civil society actors.

CANCELLED

“I don’t understand this”, exclaimed an UNDP official when word came that the forum had been unceremoniously cancelled barely 24 hours to the event.

There was not even enough time to write to API or to communicate to the invited participants!

It is now official.  Powerful doyens of Kenya’s civil society with global networks made urgent calls to “New York,” ratcheting pressure on the UN’s Nairobi offices to willy-nilly call off the forum.

This was a massive show of retributive force by the kingpins of Kenya’s new civil society for publishing an article that appeared on my Sunday Nation column titled: “Fundamentalism that casts a dark cloud over election” (SN, July 23, 2017).

Seemingly, the godfathers are not yet done, and are coming for me. Uncannily, Makau Mutua, the attack dog (to borrow his signature phrase) of the unholy trinity in Kenya’s civil society, was back at his vitriol, describing me as part of “Jubilee’s intellectual pit bulls” (Standard, July 23, 2017).

INTELLECTUAL DEBATE

Earlier on, in April 2016, Mutua published a loutish article: “Confront the epidemic of fake academic credentials”, an invitation to a dwell in a pig-sty disguised as an honest intellectual debate. “Methinks Dr. Kagwanja is an intellectual coward”, he posted in his Facebook page.

As I pondered the next move, I recalled my grandfather’s sagely advise, inspired by the collective wisdom of the Rwathia hills: “If Waitina’s (Mr. Whitener’s) tailless stray dogs back at you, stay away.” I took heed, and declined.

Mr. Mutua’s gift of the garb as a grandmaster in conjuring up the obscene and the grotesque to tear into the fresh of his victims can only be rivalled by the legendary market women of Kwame Nkrumah’s Accra. 

Sadly, the public cost of the Mutua phenomenon on our freedom of expression, intellectual decency and public culture will be felt for generations to come.

Prof Kagwanja is the author of: Unwanted in the White Highlands: The Politics of Civil Society and the Making of a Refugee in Kenya (Published Ph.D Thesis, University of Illinois, 2003)