Covid-19 and our children’s sweet-and-sour inheritance

"Kagwe Hands Kenyan Youth a Dying Nation". If that headline had appeared in Daily Nation, it would probably have gone down in the annals of Kenyan political commentary history.

It would be up there with the Gado cartoon on late president Daniel arap Moi, published in Daily Nation on December 31, 2002, a Public Notice announcing that: “The person whose picture appears here above ceased to be president of Kenya on December 30, 2002. He is no longer authorised to transact any business on behalf of the Republic.”

It didn’t. It headlined a very readable opinion piece in the Business Today (Kenya) blog by one Hakeenah N. Njenga.

From the title, there’s little need to elaborate what the point it made was, but indulge us. It was a comment about Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe’s press briefing on the march of coronavirus (Covid-19) in Kenya, and his passionate appeal to the country’s youth to step forward and save the nation at an hour of great need.

It suggested that the political class were scared of the army of unemployed, marginalised youth, who economic fortunes have been imperiled further dramatically by Covid-19 control measures.

STIRRING REFORMS

Finally, in a clincher, that establishment politicians and elders have looted and trashed the country since independence, and facing one of their biggest crises, are calling on the youth to resuscitate its limp form.

It is a picture that fits into the bigger story being told about the world that will follow after the ravages of Covid-19; that it WILL change, and MUST change.

There is a basis for that projection. History suggests that deadly pandemics indeed do bring changes that many years of political agitation and reform movements had failed to achieve.

The plagues of past centuries were the engine for public health as we know it today. There are many clever men and women who hold that western democracy, and the feminist movement, owe a debt to the Black Death (also known as the Great Bubonic Plague, and the Great Plague), of 1347 to 1351.

It is estimated to have killed 30 to 60 per cent of Europe's population, and likely reduced the world population from an estimated 475 million to 350—375 million in the 14th century.

LABOUR MARKET

It put paid to serfdom in western Europe. With few workers left, indentured labour was no longer possible.

The competition for labour was so intense that serfs could afford to walk off and find a good pay for the times. It was also no longer possible to keep all women locked up in the house.

They were needed to work outside, and could negotiate a wage — more than 500 years before they would get the right to vote.

These crises don’t always go to waste. Kenya’s deadly post-election violence of early 2008 gave birth to the liberal 2010 constitution, after many failed starts and broken bones of reformists.

There are, therefore, several things that will change. Certainly, a greater state role in running social services, and increased social welfare, have won a big victory in the wake of Covid-19.

We will have new more enlightened regimes on the exploitation of nature, to limit zoonotic diseases (infectious disease caused by a pathogen jumping from animals to humans), given the dominant theory that Covid-19 came from a bat or a pangolin in a Chinese wet market.

DEMOCRACY'S DEATH

However, when it comes to politics, this time the old guard and political class, that some see as standing on wobbly legs, seem to have used the coronavirus to actually consolidate power, roll back democratic gains, and entrench surveillance over citizens.

And because, from wherever we are hiding from coronavirus, we are scared, and (sensibly too) support extreme control measures as necessary.

There are, as a result, many alarmed opinion pieces and commentaries around the world about the death of democracy.

So, did Hakeenah Njenga write the obituary of the old political class too early? It’s complicated. While power might have seized the Covid-19 moment to rearm and take more political ground, the fact that the pandemic will leave African economies (and most elsewhere) in shambles means they have to rebuild.

They have to get production up. They have to get even more taxes paid now, and they have to find a way of incentivising the creation of a surplus that they can cream off for themselves.

It will not be possible to get industries up and galloping without business reforms or concessions.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

It is going to be hard to maintain the waste of states and leeching off public resources by the bureaucracy, and sacrifice investment in health, and social infrastructure.

And, right from the short term, it will be harder to insist in the old ways of disregarding people’s voice, and doing things like holding elections only so that they can steal them.

In sum, they have to feed the cow, if they expect to get big milk from it. They won’t give the cow milk and play for it classical music, as some do, but at a minimum they will have to give it enough grass.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is curator of the Wall of Great Africans and publisher of explainer site Roguechiefs.com. @cobbo3