The other day, two colleagues on a listserv I subscribe to submitted posts that had troubling assumptions on growth and sovereignty in Kenya.
One assumed that the 6 per cent economic growth achieved in the first Kibaki term had so significantly leveraged Kenya that it was making donors jittery - Kenya was no longer begging. She also made the assumption that, because Kenya was funding most of its budget from local sources at 93 per cent, the country had gained a new level of autonomy from its donors. She then pointed out that the Prime Minister was the new potential danger to these ‘achievements', as he most likely would be a conduit through which dependency on foreign donors would resume in Kenya. The second colleague concluded this argument worrying that the assistance Kenya had received to get out of the post-election crisis came at a heavy cost to our sovereignty. There is ‘some' truth to the argument above; but that ‘some' is too little to warrant the conclusion that our sovereignty is threatened. The post-election uprising was due to Kibakinomics; an elite-centred economics that is useless to most poor Kenyans. Second, that the uprising underscores the ability of Kenyans to exercise autonomous actions against an illegitimately-constituted regime. Note that I do not conflate the genuine and spontaneous protest that we witnessed at the Coast, in North Eastern, Nairobi, Western, and Nyanza Provinces with the criminal violence in large parts of Rift Valley and parts of Central Provinces. I refuse to reduce a popular rebellion to the ‘criminal' instance which, in my view, was more of a Kikuyu-Kalenjin affair. These two communities are too few to be generalized for Kenya.
The starting point should be the pre-election debate. That debate raised the important question whether the successes of the first Kibaki regime constituted economic growth or economic recovery. My view is that we were still filling the big hole that Moi dug by the time we went to elections in 2007. The advantage for Kibaki in this process of filling the hole was that economic indicators stood to be good because they were coming against a backdrop of extremely poor economic performance. Any positive step by the regime stood to give positive indicators which were in turn blown out of proportion by Kibakists. The undiscussed part of that process is the other big hole we were digging to fill the old one. Let me use the notion of Kibakinomics to make my point. Kibakinomics is based on the logic that all that the government needs to do is to ensure economic growth and all else shall be added. The assumption is that such growth will reach a certain threshold at which point the benefits will begin to trickle down to everyone else. All the poor need to do is to relax and wait. Kibaki's and PNU's obsession with growth statistics were based on this logic of the threshold.
This characterization of Kibakinomics is borne out of the fact that in implementing the economic recovery strategy, the Kibaki government left out the sections on poverty and inequality. The result was that even in Central Province (Kalonzo's Eastern is worse off) where people voted largely in support of this logic (or did they not?), the effects of rising commodity prices are hitting home thoroughly. We are all losers for voting this economic logic.
The combined effect of rising commodity prices and increased taxation (the source of the 93 per cent) is that the burden on the poor worsened while the very rich laughed their way to the Bank. It is not very difficult to show continued exclusive donor funding for roads in Kenya. The beauty of Kibaki's presidency is that it ‘re-established' Kenya as a key centre of foreign capital in East Africa. The tourism sector, for instance, is almost totally dependent on foreigners. Just ask Amos Kimunya why he felt it necessary to reserve quite so many shares in the recent Safaricom IPO for foreigners. Are these not comprador elites in the old Marxist sense?
Should we celebrate when government funds its programmes by over-taxing its people? Is there anybody who denies that Kenyans are over-taxed? Isn't this kind of excessive taxation the basis of revolution in society? Government ought to fund its programmes through resources generated by a combined process of new wealth generated by exploiting resources, etc. and from taxes that facilitate circulation of money.
The balance between the two (wealth creation and taxation) is what Kibakinomics has completely failed to achieve. Has the government encouraged people to create wealth? Isn't the tax burden so strenuous for the majority that they are de-motivated from creating wealth? It is obvious that tax levels are not commensurate with the services one gets from this same government. Inequality in distribution of state resources is the biggest problem. Not only is infrastructure still poor in most parts of the country except Central Province; health care is inequitably distributed. Othaya Constituency, for instance, received more funds for provision of water than the largely semi-arid and arid areas of North Eastern province.
In other words, the economy may be doing well, the people are doing badly. They have nothing to celebrate about 6 per cent growth or 93 per cent local funding of state expenditure. At least from the vantage point of most Kenyan provinces, it is not yet Uhuru.
The reason for foreign intervention in Kenya to stem the post-election crisis was because Kenyans threatened to destroy the very edifice that supports comprador parasitism and foreign exploitation. The protest violence that spontaneously arose in response to Kivuitu's inability to count votes from Emanyulia, as from villages among the Wadawida were popular rebellions against the elite and their foreign benefactors. It was an assertion of independence against a ‘choiceless democracy' in which people vote and wake up to find all the contestants working in the same government, and the one with the least votes claiming to be more powerful than the one with higher votes. The inability of the power elite to deal with this furious uprising explains why the foreigners jumped in. Police guns just could not do it.
Foreigners resorted to a grand coalition that was cobbled together so quickly there was no time to anticipate protocol problems. In Nigeria, where there was no popular uprising and where the elections were so thoroughly rigged, kondoo na mchele (Condi Rice), as a comedian put it, never showed up. In Zimbabwe, where the foreigners seem to have nothing to lose at the moment, they have not mounted similar pressure on Comrade Bob.
Foreign intervention was a reaction to popular autonomous action. Foreigners shudder at the fact of such a popular uprising. Had the uprising been in Kisumu alone, they would have talked of a violent ethos among the Luo. Had it been in Eldoret alone, they would have talked about that relic of post-Moi Kalenjin phobia. But it cut across the country and they had so much to lose. They will never let it go that bad again. ________________________ Godwin R. Murunga (PhD Northwestern) teaches history at Kenyatta University, serves on the board of CODESRIA, and has written on everything from democracy in Kenya to colonial-era sanitation in Nairobi. Publication prohibited without the permission of the editor at
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