Following the 2007-08 post-election experience, tension among ethnic groups has become a growing concern every time Kenyans go to the polls.
Ethnic relations have become so fragile that it takes a coalition between tribal kingpins, in what is purely elite exploitation of ethnicity, to defuse tension – if not violence – between two tribes, every election circle.
It is out of this understanding that, in September 2020, Emurua Dikir MP Johanna Ngeno and his counterpart Kapseret MP Oscar Sudi were charged with, among other offenses, incitement to violence. The two had made separate statements that bordered on tribal bigotry. These developments came at a time when the country was warming up to 2022 general elections, seen by many as the most consequential since President Kibaki’s first term.
The searching question, however, is the sustainability of the pork-barrel technique used in brokering political peace. Political truce, or compromise, as some armchair analysts in Kenya like to call it, founded on ethno-political entrepreneurship, is always unsustainable, for the simple reason that it lacks democratic principles of legitimacy.
In the run up to 2013 presidential elections, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto entered into an alliance to end what many had described as historical differences between Kikuyu and Kalenjin communities. “We brought together two communities that were previously thought could not work together,” William Ruto said. Suffice it to mention that the alliance between Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto was not inspired by the desire to unite Kenyans. Many observers agree that it was chiefly a marriage of convenience designed to grab power at all costs to save the skin of the two from the teeth of the International Criminal Court.
It is the liberal principle of Kenyan politics to have an ethnic “spokesperson” enter into political pacts and negotiations purportedly on behalf of the whole community. The interest of the members of the said ethnic community is rarely given priority in this ethnic arithmetic that has dominated Kenya’s-post independence political history.
Somehow, Kenyan voters accept the ineffectiveness of using ethnic hegemony by the political elite as a political currency with little resistance. Perhaps this is what prompted Prof. Makau Mutua to ask: Why do Kenyans allow themselves to be manipulated by elites with whom they have nothing in common? Why is the average voter so gullible and easily tricked and bamboozled with the predictable tribal card?
Also Read: Tribalism And The Voting Patttern In Kenya
“Jubilee marriage was an opportunistic alliance of convenience and one of unequals, political scientist Susanne Mueller observed. Mueller’s prophesy came to pass; the differences between the two partners played out quite interestingly in the run-up to 2022 general elections. “Jubilee marriage was bound to suffer the strains of how each side sees the end and outcome of state power, Prof. Anyang Nyongo, one of Kenya’s most respected academics, announced.
Less than eight years since Jubilee marriage was sealed in a colorful ceremony at Nakuru’s Afraha stadium, a section of Kalenjin leaders came out strongly to warn President Uhuru Kenyatta against reneging on his famous “kumi yangu, kumi” ya William statement. During presidential campaigns in 2013 and shortly after assuming office, President Uhuru repeatedly made statements to the effect that he would serve his maximum two terms (10 years) then pass the button to his deputy to serve for another 10 years. Those are not the kind of statements one would wish to hear in a country that bills itself as a liberal democracy.
In his wild sense of entitlement, Uhuru Kenyatta had concluded that the duo was guaranteed victory in the upcoming four presidential elections. In March 2016, President Uhuru said that if the opposition wanted to have power, they should wait until 2032. By 2015, Kenya was seen as slightly less than a full democracy. With the shambolic 2017 elections, and the events that followed thereafter, as far as the existence of political opposition is concerned, it is safe to say that Kenya is an anocracy: it is neither fully democratic nor autocratic.
Before his dramatic arrest in September 2020, Kapseret MP Oscar Sudi recorded a short video in which he called out the government’s highhandedness in dealing with a section of leaders. He went ahead to remind his audience that “they” are not fools. “Sisi sio wanjinga”, we are not fools, he blurted. It is needless to make sense of what the good legislator meant by “we” in his rant.
Also Read:Tribalism in Kenya—Its Bitter Origins
In the pursuit of political power, ethnic arrangements could serve to defuse tension and violence and wars especially in a nation-state whose orbit is dominated by different ethno-linguistic groups. But the dynamic nature of politics would work against the effectiveness of such an approach. If 2013 presidential contest was an experiment to defeat the International Criminal Court cases in which Kenyatta and Ruto were charged with crimes against humanity, the just concluded 2022 presidential elections was about character reinvention and self-preservation.
To save the United States, Abraham Lincoln maintained that Americans had to disenthrall themselves. To save Kenya from tribal tension and wars, Kenyans must free themselves from traditional authority of tribal kingpins. They must begin to see ourselves as a people with shared aspirations that can only be achieved when they come together.
Ideologically, as is the case with any nation-state, Kenyans lack a shared past. A nation-state is basically a forced marriage. A nation is a people who share a common ancestry while a state is a political community, governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community, governed by laws, that, at least on paper, unites a people who share a common ancestry.
This cracked foundation is the reason why the country’s stability easily crumbles whenever tribal kingpins shift loyalty, which, by the way, they do effortlessly like the protein shifting outlines of a living amoeba. We have failed as a people to establish good government from reflection and choice. We have accepted to have our political transactions on accidental and forceful terms rather than on clear democratic conscience.
To genuinely address the question of unity in Kenya, there is need to “cosmopolitise” every part of the country. If the constitution allows every Kenyan to live and work in any part of Kenya, it means every corner of the country could cosmopolitise, if we allowed it to happen. There are two ways of achieving this: One, by improving economies of the county governments; that is, increasing allocations to the counties (currently at a maximum of 15 per cent of all revenue collected by the national government).
More money, accompanied with strengthened oversight, means more jobs. When an area is ethnically diverse, the notion that particular resources such as land belongs to the majority community naturally dies. Equal distribution of resources will solve the problem of marginalization so that one community does not feel threatened by incursion of another.
Also, it is the federation of tribes that forms the nation. Relation between tribes leads to development of tribal identities that preserves such things as culture. “Maasai Mara in its entirety belongs to the Maasai community; do not play games with us.” Narok Senator Ledama Olekina wrote on Twitter on September 14, 2020. While the Senator was right to express himself on the economic significance of the Mara to his community, his sentiments serve to fuel dissatisfaction among the Maasai hence threatening peace within the larger Narok area.
There are better ways of protecting economic activities of the marginalized without stocking embers of fire. Two, there is need to make democracy work at the grass roots level. Negotiated democracy is not sustainable. Kenyans need to decolonise ethnic solidarity that accompanies them to the ballot. Although this process would demand collective introspection and consciousness, it is the first step towards turning Kenyan politics from an ethnic solidarity affair to a policy-based process of choosing leaders.
In Kenya’s book of genesis, unlike, say, Tanzania’s, the big communities felt entitled to acquire and preserve political power at the expense of small communities. A sense of dissatisfaction has thus developed over the years. This situation has turned into a powder keg that even the smallest of things can explode. Like converts of the Second Great Awakening who believed that they were on the verge of eliminating sin from the world, to make possible the second coming of Christ, Kenyan politicians advocate for ethnic solidarity to achieve private political interests as they promise temporary peace and prosperity. This kind of behavior does not serve the interest of the nation-state.
Principles of social justice
Most societies accept the two principles of social justice: equal right to the most extensive basic rights and acceptable arrangement of socio-economic inequalities. But Kenyan society is not most societies. For instance, Kenyans do not have equal right to the protection of their dignities and the social system under which they live has all the characteristics of an animal farm. I was reminded by one of my lecturers to whom I submitted the first draft of this book for comment, that we are not equal before the law; that the sooner I made peace with this fact, the better for me.
Although I agreed with the first statement, I told him that it was a dereliction of our civic duty to make peace with such a travesty of social justice. Every society must, as American philosopher John Rawls explains in Theory of Justice, set principles of social justice for determining the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.
In short, the normative function of every nation-state is to ensure that there is a form of social cooperation that serves to satisfy these principles, which are unique for every society. Firstly, Kenyan citizenry is a textbook example of an Epicurean society. Epicureanism – the theory that personal pleasure is the highest good – was part of the four main schools of philosophy in Greek and Roman periods following Aristotle.
Capitalism, Kenya’s independence ideology, created individualism. Under individualism, our peoplehood has withered and our social transaction is anything but selfless. Of course every human being cares about their pleasure first before anyone else’s. Societies and individuals always tend to approach the drama of life firstly from an angle that serves their interest. However, when a people are obsessed too much with pursuit of their individual pleasure, the interest of humanity as a whole is normally threatened.
When families of victims of police brutality took to Parliament gates in April 2020 to protest against extrajudicial killings, they performed their dissatisfaction almost on their own. Kenyans who have not experienced police violence do not see the essence of speaking against it. If they do, they tend to think it is of no consequence.
Secondly, by virtue of its obsession with pursuit of individual tranquility, Kenyan citizenry presents itself as a Stoic society. A stoic is a person who maintains a calm indifference to pain and suffering. Stoics believed that people should not struggle against the inevitable – however absurd the inevitable was – instead they should understand that what is happening is for the best.
In May 2020, Kapseret MP Oscar Sudi said, “they” would reveal killers of Chris Msando, the former Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission ICT manager, if the Kenyan State continued to frustrate politicians allied to William Ruto, now the president. Msando’s body was discovered dead a few days to the 2017 elections. While investigative agencies ought to have taken up the matter in earnest, to allow Sudi to tell us what he knows about the murder of Msando, that process would ordinarily be instigated by public anger and calls for justice.
But Kenyans are not the ones in the business of caring about the pain of others. In 1791, during the early stages of the French revolution, Antonie Barnave appeared before the Colonial Commission and said the following about the King Louis XVI‟s regime: “This regime is absurd, but it is established and one cannot handle it roughly without unloosing the greatest disorder.
This regime is oppressive, but it gives a livelihood to several million Frenchmen. This regime is barbarous, but a still greater barbarism will be the result if you interfere with it without the necessary knowledge”. Kenyan citizenry is behaving like the foolish Barnave. They excuse state indiscipline not because it is rational but because fixing it means disturbing our imaginary tranquility.
Thirdly, Kenyan citizenry can be understood as a utilitarian one. If the pleasure of misappropriating public resources brings more happiness to the people than it brings unhappiness to the lords of corruption, then corruption should be instituted. For our total happiness would be far greater with corruption than without it. When Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) Party argued that it was necessary to impeach former Migori Governor Okoth Obado because he is corrupt, many Kenyans dismissed ODM.
They argued that it is dishonest for ODM to call for a leader on grounds of corruption on account that some of its leaders are also corrupt. That is bizarre. Ideally, Kenyans ought to, regardless of political affiliation, recall or demand resignation of underperforming leaders, not to defend them. Fourthly, Kenyan citizenry is morally evil.
As we see in Ethics – the philosophical study of moral judgment – the source from which a society draws its morality determines its understanding of principles of social justice. St Augustine, Christian Philosophy’s most influential figure, is best known for Christianizing ethics. The heart of Augustine’s ethics lays in his version of moral evil which he maintained was a case of misdirected love and not misdirected education, as was previously suggested by Plato.
According to Augustine, moral evil arises when we turn away from God. As a country Kenyans cannot say we have turned away from God, although the moral evil in us is still flourishing.
In early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Kenyans held an extra-religious gathering at Statehouse to pray away the virus. The performance by the evangelicals on that day dispelled any doubt that Kenyan story might be digressing from God. In sum, monstrous immorality of Kenyan politics is as a result of the fragile principles of social justice on which its founding philosophy was built. How fragile these principles are depends on who you ask.