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“Let them do what they like. A time will come – I can see it coming – when they shall cry for a savior.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between
On Friday, March 27, 2021, Uhuru Kenyatta, now former president, announced new Covid-19 containment measures that included restriction of movement in and out of five counties namely: Nairobi, Machakos, Kajiado, Kiambu and Nakuru. He also banned worship in churches in the five counties for the next thirty days as the country continues to experience an upsurge in coronavirus cases.
The President’s announcement elicited mixed reactions from Kenyans with majority viewing it as inconsequential and punitive. A group of Kenyans took to the street on Wednesday, March 31, 2021 to protest against what they described as punishment by the government. Protesters who tried to access President Uhuru’s office on Harambee Avenue were dispersed by the police. The hashtag #UnlockOurCountry trended on Twitter for the better part of the week.
But before this, on March 28, a day after the announcement, Rev Peter Ambuka of Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), Kahawa West Branch, Nairobi County, had issued a damning statement directed at President Uhuru in what was seen as the most daring criticism yet by the church against the government in recent times.
The soft-spoken man of cloth blasted the political class led by President Uhuru for the third wave of coronavirus in the country, thanks to political rallies that were witnessed during and after the second wave.
“Let me put it to you plainly; it is this careless action by you and the politicians that has [sic] made rallies to become the super spreaders of this virus,” Rev Ambuka told the President Uhuru.
In a bare-knuckle speech, he reminded President Uhuru that he, like all elected leaders, is an employee of the people of Kenya and as such his accessibility ought not to be a problem for the ordinary Kenyans. “A time has come Mr President for the citizens and leaders of this nation of Kenya where [sic] they need to know that elected leaders are public servants and they ought to know that they are there to serve the citizens,” he said.
Earlier in January 2021, Rev Sammy Wainaina of All Saints Cathedral had dismissed Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) – a constitutional amendment project conceived by President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga following the now famous handshake on March 9, 2018 – as a Trojan horse that is designed to serve the political elite at the expense of the people. “BBI will not solve your problems,” he warned Kenyans. In a strongly worded sermon, the Anglican Provost gave a bad press for the recent narrative of dynasties and hustlers terming it a potential catalyst for anarchy.
In September 2020, Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) and Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims (SUPKEM) officials had dismissed BBI has retrogressive and an unnecessary burden on the Kenyan taxpayers.
These bold statements from religious leaders come at a time when the church in Kenya has been captured by the State and rendered incapable of speaking its truth. Until recently, the church in Kenya had been a shadow of its former self. Having entered into a relationship with the State, it has over the years struggled to find its place as a moral majority. However, on those occasions when it endeavored to do so, the price was incredibly grim, and sometimes ultimate.
On October 22, 2017, Kenyans woke up to a disturbing video that did rounds on social media. News of the murder of Evans Juma Oduor, a Catholic priest working in Nyando parish, Kisumu County, cut through the hearts of most Kenyans like the razor of Ockham. “Why?” “What did the man of God do to deserve this?” Kenyans asked.
There was a feeling that the country was slipping away to President Moi days when people paid with their lives the price of speaking the truth. Stories have been told of the violence that was meted out to dissents (including religious leaders) in the torture chambers at Nyayo and Nyati houses.
In a stinging sermon before his death, Father Oduor had asked President Uhuru to stop killing Luos who were protesting against electoral injustice that mired the August 2017 presidential elections. His unconscious body was discovered near a sugarcane plantation in Chiga market center in Muhoroni, Kisumu County before being pronounced dead at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital where he was checked in by residents.
While it became a victim of state capture under the Moi Presidency (pretty as much under the Jubilee administration, to which I am coming shortly), the church in Kenya enjoys a rich history of active participation in the democratization of the Kenyan story.
In a journal article titled; Church and State in Kenya, 1986-1992: The Churches’ Involvement in the ‘Game of Change’ (African Affairs, 1997), Galia Sabar Friedman observes that between 1986-1992, the church in Kenya generated and sustained public discourse on democracy and change and organised grassroots political activities prior to the first multiparty elections in 1992.
Church leaders who chose to cement the church’s position as a moral majority under a regime that thrived on unbridled bacchanalia of greed, impunity and corruption did so a great personal cost.
The revered Anglican Bishop Alexander Kipsang Muge died in a mysterious road accident along Kisumu-Busia highway in 1990 at the height of clamor for repeal of section 2A of the constitution that had reduced Kenya to a one-party state in 1982. Timothy Njoya of PCEA sustained serious injuries from the police during Saba Saba demonstrations in Nairobi on July 7, 1990 in which eight people were killed and hundreds others injured.
The church was trying to fill the leadership void that was growing in the national consciousness as a result of Moi’s failure. Earlier, in 1975, Bishop Henry Okullu had written in his seminal book Church and Politic in East Africa that by virtue of being the conscience of the nation, the church ought to teach and safeguard intrinsic values of persons.
Bishop Okullu’s searing brilliance and courage in his sermons and writings reverberated in major pulpits across the country. The church had become a thorn in President Moi’s side. Something had to be done.
So, how did the church in Kenya lose its moral voice and ended up as an appendage of the State?
President Moi was a Bible-thumping believer in the religion of Christ and member of the African Inland Church. He presided over a chaotic regime of dictatorship and self-righteousness. In a highly Christian country like Kenya (more than 75 per cent of Kenyans were Christians according to the 1999 national population census), Moi was perhaps compelled to carve out a consequential image of the proverbial guy who started out to sell his soul to the devil but the devil did not want the soul and the gods gave him all the happiness of this earth. Only that the happiness in Moi’s case entailed usurpation of political power.
Limitless pursuit of power was the fundamental principle upon which President Moi’s Christian socialism was founded and upon which it thrived. Apart from muzzling the church, Moi’s Christian socialism quietly promoted reactionary jingoism in the same way Hitler’s concentrations camps made deaths anonymous.
When he was faced with popularity crisis in the early 1990’s, Moi turned to structural tokenism that was implemented through, among other institutions, the church. He dished out money in churches and charmed religious officials with gifts. At a time when political coups were rampant in the region, and having survived one himself in 1982, it would have been foolhardy for any serious head of state to leave anything to chance.
With the assistance of colonized intellectuals who surrounded him, and a captured voice of the church, Moi not only hacked his way into national memory but also succeeded in rewriting national history.
President Moi may have been a benevolent leader, however, his benevolence turned into the chief political instrument of tyranny and dictatorship that characterised his horrendous 24-years stay in power.
Charles Dickens described the French revolution as; the best of times, the worst of times. The same could be said of Moi’s presidency depending on which end of his leadership style you found yourself.
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By the time National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) came to power in 2002, the church had already started losing its voice. Political theology of the 90s was supplanted with partisan political sermons by unscrupulous bandits who passed as men of God. The clergy became as loyal to the State as sunflower drying in a drought. It is said that Catholic Bishops in Kenya discouraged their priests from criticizing the government.
By abdicating its established role, the church in Kenya had become a faith based commercial institution where stolen money was ‘prayed for’ and shambolic elections were sanitized.
But nowhere was the church’s demise as a moral majority more evident during President Kibaki’s first term than the period after the contested 2007 presidential results. Leaders of the Catholic Church (particularly) were reading from separate scripts. Forces of ethnic nationalism that had found traction in the church – following political glacier (read 2005 referendum) that threated to bring down Kibaki’s government – overpowered those of reason and conscience. The house of our Lord fell apart.
While the Catholic Church in Kenya has failed to speak its truth in recent times– until recently when we saw its bishops coming out strongly to criticize BBI – as far as governance and democracy is concerned, in Democratic Republic of Congo it had performed fairly better.
In his masters thesis titled The Role of Religion in the Democratization Process: A Case Study on the Catholic Church in Democratic Republic of Congo, Kerstin Eneflo notes that between 2016 and 2019, Catholic Bishops in DR Congo encouraged the masses to rise against President Joseph Kabila whose leadership was characterized by corruption, human rights abuse, intolerance and institutional negligence.
In December 2016, National Episcopal Conference of the Congo (CENCO), a congregation of bishops in Congo, led the negotiation process that saw President Kabila agree to step down after the expiry of his term in 2017. But Kabila would renege on his promise, as a result inspiring protestations from the public led primarily by Catholic bishops.
If Joseph Kabila yielded to the ineluctable by letting power change hands in 2018 – although in a boardroom arrangement that most analysts have dismissed as a choreographed scheme to have him run the show from behind with his puppet Felix Tshisekedi (now the president) at the top – he did it on account of growing public discontent whose main motor was the Catholic Church.
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After the electoral autocracy of 2007 that propelled Kenya into a despotic state faster than many could have imagined, the political elite (also the national bourgeoisies) normalised the use of the church to sanitize its evil agenda.
The church in Kenya would enter into an unofficial alliance with the State following the election of Uhuru Kenyatta as president in April 2013. If we look at history, it would be unfair to expect a different result when the church and the State enter into an alliance.
The Lateran Pact of 1929 between Benito Musolini (the newly elected Italian president) and the Vatican cemented Catholicism as the only recognized religion in Italy. The church had monopoly over weighty matters such as birth, marriage, death and education. In return, it encouraged its followers to vote for Musolini.
Ultimately, the Catholic Church developed interest in democratic processes. As Christopher Hitchens observes in God is Not Great: “Elections were not to be a feature of Italian life for very long, but the church nonetheless brought about the dissolution of lay Catholic centrist parties and helped sponsor a pseudo party called ‘Catholic Action’ which was emulated in several countries.”
It was Musolini who tried to justify the use of poisonous gas in Ethiopia (known as Abyssinia at the time) because of Ethiopians’ alleged belief in the heresy of Monophysitism (an incorrect dogma of the Incarnation that had been condemned by Pope Leo and the council of Chalcedon in 451).
Thanks to the good relationship between the church and Italian government, Vatican was slow to call out Musolini for violet invasions in territories that were inhabited by non-Christians or, as Hitchens puts it, wrong kind of Eastern Christians. These territories included Libya, Ethiopia and Albania.
The church endorsed right-wing military coup in Hungary as much as it supported fascist movements in Slovakia and Austria. Charles Maurra’s Action Francaise and Croix de Feu, Catholic fascist organizations, openly campaigned against French democracy.
In Russia, Czar’s autocratic regime enjoyed immense support from the Russian Orthodox Church. In the 19th century, the Czar was the formal head of faith in Russia and was regarded by most fanatics as something a little more than merely human.
As Hitchens observes (with regard to the connection between the Christian churches and fascism and the capitulation of the churches to National socialism) the church’s complicity with fascism is an ineffaceable commitment so much as a working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period had itself passed into history.
“The long Association of religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase; from Cromwell, through Henry VIII to the French Revolution, and the conditions of warfare and collapse, that obtained in Russia these interludes, were exponentially brutal ones,” he writes.
In South Africa, the Dutch Reform Church and the Lutheran Mission Church openly supported apartheid. It took the militancy of agnostic members of African National Congress (ANC) to save South African society from implosion.
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During the 2017 presidential elections, a section of religious leaders authoritatively declared that God had chosen UhuRuto – the alliance between the incumbent President Uhuru and his deputy, William Ruto – and prayed away the possibility of a Raila presidency. A separate group of religious leaders took the liberty to remind Kenyans that Jubilee administration was a curse that God was determined to do away with sooner rather than later. Both arguments were strange and lacked objective remise and moral freedom but that doesn’t mean they didn’t achieve their purpose.
Many Kenyans, lost in what Nanjala Nyabola calls political schizophrenia, voted for Uhuru because their pastor advised so. Many others voted for Raila because he had not only promised, like the Biblical Joshua, to take them to Canaan, but because their pastor insisted that he was the choice of God, and therefore voting for him was the right thing to do, as Christians.
To paraphrase Robert Pirsig, American writer and philosopher, when a man of cloth from one tribe suffers from political partisanship in a way that compromises the choice of the electorates, it is called liberal hypocrisy. When men of cloth from different tribes suffer from political partisanship to the extent that their views compromise the integrity of the elections, it is called ontological misfortune.
Whereas Moi’s Christian socialism served as an effort to demean historical legacy while acting as a means of self-preservation, Uhuru’s Christian bourgeoisie dictatorship has turned Kenya into a class and ethnicity-ridden nation-state unprepared to detotalitarize.
Like Moi who used his “generous nature” to extract personality worship from a citizenry that was grounded in social and biological poverty, DP Ruto’s generous contributions to the church in recent years – which he often describes as an investment in heaven – in anticipated exchange for political support is a perfect case of how benevolence morphs into tyranny and dictatorship.
According to Nation, at least 60 per cent of the Ksh 60 million that Ruto had donated in fund raisers between January and July 2018 went to the church.
There is a thin but powerful connection between benevolence and tyranny. There are opinion leaders and politicians in Kenya who have advised President Uhuru to “find a way of staying around” after his term expires. “Kenya needs a benevolent dictator,” Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro offered in 2019. His sentiments were shared by Jubilee party vice chairman David Murathe.
While Kenya is not a totalitarian State, it is a despotic state run by national Christian bourgeoisie. Totalitarianism is interested in global domination that, as Hannah Arendt observes in Origin of Totalitarianism, is facilitated by a net of secret agents that functions in an onion-like structure. Despotism, on the on the other hand, although also facilitated by a private police, has its authority limited within a specific country.
Jubilee administration has turned Kenyan state into a despotic country in which constitutionalism, for example, is an alien idea. Take the case of BBI.
In his essay BBI: A Textbook Case of Compounding Constitutional Illegalities, constitutional lawyer Waika Wanyoike argues that BBI violated the Constitution of Kenya 2010 from the first step. “Essentially, what Uhuru did in establishing the steering Committee and Taskforce to deal with his and Raila’s nine issues was to usurp responsibilities that have already been assigned by the constitution and the law to establish state institutions and hand them over to a group of friends and loyalists to steer,” he writes.
Wandia Njoya submits that beyond the silencing of Kenyans, convergence of the media and the civil service suggests that there is a class of Kenyans who are not only interested in BBI but are also driven by a belief in white supremacy and anti-democratic spirit against the people.
This emerging class of Kenyans that Wandia talks about also interprets the law in the context of its own choosing and regards itself as above the law. It is the national Christian bourgeoisie that control Kenyan political space.
The Kenyan nobility (the national bourgeoisie) continues to hold ordinary Kenyans in complete contempt. We saw it in 2020 in the first months of the pandemic when Covid-19 containment guidelines were enforced selectively depending on one’s social standing. But as Frantz Fanon warned, the national bourgeois should not find conditions conducive to its existence and fulfillment.
“The combined effort of the masses, regimented by a party, and of keenly conscious intellectuals, armed with revolutionary principles, should bar the way of this useless and harmful bourgeoisie,” he wrote in Wretched of the Earth.
What stands between the church in Kenyan and the road to Damascus is not the thirty pieces of silver; it is not even the pandemic or the red sea. The biggest obstacle on the church’s journey to restoration is the national Christian bourgeois that runs the show in Kenya.
