Most folks grow up with certain hard-wired assumptions about the state. Omnipotent. Omnipresent. All-knowing. Cruel. Impenetrable. Permanent. The state is a jealous spouse. The state is a cannibal. Then there’s the concept of “seeing like a state”. That is, appreciating the environment as a quantum of things — counting, recording, remembering, and keeping statistics and records. That’s what a state does.
We think of the state as potent, not impotent. Except all the above are mostly illusory. In fact, the state is a fragile instrumentality. It can collapse at any time. It can unravel with lightning speed. Or likely become dysfunctional. This is the question — on this broad spectrum, where’s Kenya? Can Kenya, as we know it, become a failed state?
When I was greener, I thought states were largely indestructible. I thought the Soviet Union was permanent until it collapsed in a heap of ashes in 1991. That threw me for a loop. I think a lot of us thought the United States was an impregnable country.
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That was until the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The world’s greatest power was paralyzed by an attempted coup. Of course, the US, unlike the Soviet Union, didn’t collapse. It’s obviously a more resilient state with deep institutions and a large majority of the populace who embrace it. That wasn’t the case with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had long become an empty carcass ready for burial.
States can decompose, as did the Soviet Union. Is Kenya in the process of slow decomposition? To gauge the level of decomposition of a state you first look to the elite. The elite are the most reliable barometer for state fragility.
Does the elite understand its commanding role as the key steward of the state? Can it execute the basic functions of statehood, and then go beyond them to create a great society?
Can the elite harness the state’s resources, no matter how meagre, to give social and economic meaning to the largest number of people under its roof? Or is the elite so voracious, husbanding everything and leaving only the scraps for the rest of the citizenry?
In Kenya’s case, let’s remember the British created humpty dumpty. By which I mean an inchoate, fragile political entity without much rhyme, or reason, except one that was fit for exploitation. The story was pretty much the same elsewhere in Africa. Precolonial societies were either collapsed or reprogrammed into new polities.
The leviathan
At independence, these were the instrumentalities we inherited, and which we proclaim as ours. Except they are not ours, and never were. This monster of a state is the gremlin, the leviathan that we have been trying to tame since 1964. I must confess we have failed more frequently at this task than we have succeeded. Putting humpty dumpty back together again is a very tall order.
So first, our inability to cohere as a nation — and a functional state — must be laid at the feet of our elite. We are still a “tribal” society beholden to primordial calculations in our politics. The ethnic kingpins herd us like so many sheep. This vice-like grip by the elite on their ethnic communities is Kenya’s top anti-democratic concern.
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We either need to allow responsible individualism tempered by the community values of, say, Ubuntu, to rise to the top, or we create a Kenyan citizen. I’ve said before that the Kenyan creature — citizen — exists only on paper. That’s because we aren’t united by any overarching philosophical, cultural, social, or moral code. We are a people adrift in the wilderness.
Second, it’s not just that we lack a national zeitgeist or philosophy. Our elite have not understood how nations behave in a competitive world. Nations with an intelligent elite figure out wherefore they exist, and how they can maximize their advantages while minimizing their weaknesses.
Take China, for example. The Dragon hasn’t become a global power simply because it’s huge. No — what we see today of China is a result of deliberate choices made by the Communist Party under Chairman Mao and improved upon, and profoundly revised, by his successors. But it’s the party elite that has made China a global hegemon. The decision by US elites to make the university the center of American gravity delivered bountiful prosperity.
Today, I see our elite bickering about the whys and wherefores of the parliamentary bipartisan committee. Do we know what’s at stake?
If, God forbid, the committee fails, our country could go to hell in a handbasket. That’s because today Kenya stares at the biggest cliff in its history. We are hopelessly divided, traumatized, and in deep despair. We are, by design, very broke. If a spark ignites, we will collapse.
The committee represents an excellent opportunity for national recovery. We could fail as a state and join the likes of Somalia, Sudan or the CAR. Let’s not walk into an inferno eyes wide open. Let’s seek a just outcome.