Saturday, January 19, 2019

Kenya vs NYT is not about press freedom. But it could be.

The New York Times decision to publish graphic images of victims of Tuesday’s terror attack at Dusit D2 Hotel in Nairobi and the backlash it has engendered online have sparked furious debates about everything from the perceived racism of the foreign press, to media ethics and the limits of press freedom.

Many shades of opinion have been expressed with some seeing the photographs and the NYT’s refusal to take them down as a continuation of violence against the victims and their families, and as evidence of racist double-standards in the reporting on terrorist atrocities. Others have opposed the torrent of personal abuse and calls for deportation visited on incoming NYT bureau chief, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura following her initial tone-deaf and seemingly dismissive responses to complaints on social media. Now threats by the state in the guise of the Media Council of Kenya to revoke or suspend her and her colleagues’ media accreditation if the Times did not remove the images and issue an unconditional apology have also opened up a regulatory can of worms.

Photographs of deceased victims of terror attacks strike a particularly sensitive chord in Kenya and it is not just the foreign media that has found itself on the receiving end of a social media backlash. Following the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall, in which 68 people lost their lives, the Sunday Nation was excoriated and forced to apologize after it published on its front page a gory photo of bloodied and screaming woman. Three years ago, the government arrested and threatened to prosecute bloggers for circulating pictures of dead Kenyan soldiers following the overrunning of their base in Somalia.

While extremely sensitive, it is not one that lessens Kenyans’ general commitment to press freedom. Fifteen months after Westgate, many were outraged when the government rammed through Parliament amendments to security laws that included a prohibition on the publication or broadcast of images of terror victims without the consent of both the police and the victim. The law was later struck down by the courts which ruled it infringed on the constitutional guarantees of press freedom and freedom of expression.

Media editors also have to contend with evolving community standards and attitudes as well as social media’s empowering of audiences to forcefully express themselves. Two decades ago, in what seems a completely different era, graphic images of victims of the 1998 bombing of the of the US Embassy in Nairobi in which 224 people died, caused little uproar. And while pictures of victims of state violence do not always attract the same umbrage, the traumatizing and, in many ways, uniting effect of terror incidents gives their expression particular force.

It is within this context that we must understand the reaction to the publication of the photographs. The New York Times claims it was motivated by the need “to give our readers around the world a clear picture of the horror of an attack like this”. However, many are not buying it, pointing out that, despite the paper’s assertions to the contrary, similar standards are rarely applied to white and US victims. In a telling interview explaining the Dusit D2 decision, Meaghan Looram, the NYT’s director of photography admitted that she could not recall seeing pictures of victims of school shootings in the US and the need to abandon historical notions that “may have applied different standards to material from locations broadly thought to be remote or “over there,” rather than close to home.”

But it is these same racist notions that have seen the paper refuse to bring down the offending photograph despite over 14,000 people signing a petition for it to do so. That this demand is being made by ordinary Kenyans is what should matter. It is not about censorship by the state. Rather, Kenyans are demanding that the folks at the New York Times choose humanity over their editorial policy. It should be a no-brainer.

The stand-off with the MCK is thus unnecessary. But it does have rather toxic implications for press freedom in Kenya. Not only does it make it easier for the state to isolate and target the foreign press corps, something it has previously done, but giving the government a taste of the power to decide what content media can carry could whet its appetite for more. As was demonstrated with the 2014 security laws amendments and again with a shutdown of local private broadcasters for a week last year, this is no idle threat.

So, for the sake of humanity and press freedom, the Times must take down the photo. And an apology would be nice too.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

How to Talk About Terror Attacks

The attack on the Dusit D2 hotel complex seems frighteningly familiar. From the images of people crouching along flower beds as gunshots ring out, to the smoke billowing from the top of the building, to the report of people hiding in rooms from terrorists, it feels like a rerun of the attack on the Westgate Mall in September, 2013.

There are crucial differences though. The government's response was much faster and appeared much better coordinated than it was at Westgate. The government communications are also much better managed, if not exactly more informative - at least the confusion of five years ago has not been repeated.

However, some things have sadly remained the same. The media coverage, for example, has largely consisted on regurgitating the government line and especially urging Kenyans to desist from sharing information that the state has not verified. This has been taken to ridiculous extremes, with analysts on one TV news station warning that terming the attack a terrorist act before the government declares it to be one is aiding the terrorists. On social media, there is talk of the circulation of fake pictures and news as well as constant admonitions against sharing anything. As KTN's Lindah Oguttu put it, "the less you say, the better". 

Given the country's long familiarity with attacks, especially since 2011, you would think that Kenyans would have figured out a way to talk about and around ongoing operations against terrorists. Yet across both mainstream and social media, the message is the same - follow the government's lead. This is despite the state's equally long record of lying and obfuscation during and after terrorist attacks. Rather than keeping the public informed, its primary goal has been to deflect any criticism and pre-empt any calls for accountability.

For example, nearly everything government officials said about Westgate turned out to be false. In fact, while the attack itself was done and the attackers either dead or had escaped by the evening of the first day, the security forces maintained an elaborate fiction of fighting terrorists while they systematically looted the mall for three days.

Today's attack comes on the third anniversary of the sacking of a camp manned by the Kenyan contingent of the African Union Mission in Somalia during which at least 173 Kenyan troops were killed. Once again, the government's rendition of the facts surrounding the attack turned out to be largely a work of fiction. To date, it has refused to disclose the exact number of casualties and its initial descriptions of facing 3 massive truck bombs and "truckloads of suicide bombers" were designed to exaggerate the scale of the attack  in order to explain away the fact that the camp had been overrun.

It is thus clear that the government cannot be trusted to provide accurate information on terror attacks. While it is equally true that the unmitigated spread of information among citizens, especially through  social media, can harm security operations, when the government makes appeals for restraint, it is hard not to think of its past lies and to wonder what it is trying to hide this time.

Thus a discussion of how better to report on, or speak about, ongoing operations against terrorists must begin with addressing the state's mendacity. For as long as the government refuses to consistently deal truthfully and honestly with its citizens, it will be folly to ask them to ignore their suspicions of its motives. In any case, the idea that following an attack, citizens must suspend their thinking faculties, and blindly and unquestioningly support the government's every whim, is the very definition of being terrorized.

And it is not a very smart thing to do either.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

WHAT IS YOUR TRIBE? The Invention Of Kenya’s Ethnic Communities

David Ndii’s decision to publicly renounce Kikuyu ethnicity last year and adopt a “Jaluo” one may spark a long overdue debate about the nature of ethnicity in Kenya and in Africa. For many people, both on the continent and outside it, the idea of tribe - with its connotations of strong, primitive, primordial ethnicity and ancient cultural traditions - is an indispensable part of African identity. The makers of the blockbuster superhero movie, Black Panther, who imagined the fictional African state of Wakanda as the most technologically advanced nation in the world and one that retained its essential character, still felt constrained to organise that nation into tribes. Africans are first and foremost seen as tribesmen or tribeswomen and tribe is taken for granted as the best explanation for their actions. This idea is so deeply ingrained that few ever bother to question it.

Yet question it we should. For rather than something indelibly encoded into the African genetic make-up and over which one exercises little choice, tribe turns out to be largely an artificial construct. The fact is, there is a marked difference between how ordinary Africans, including Kenyans, think of tribe and its origins and what history and social science has to say about it.

To begin with, just what is a tribe? Even this question turns out to be not as straightforward as some would have us believe. “Tribe has no coherent meaning” wrote Dr. Christopher Lowe of Boston University in his 1997 paper “Talking about ‘Tribe’: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis”. “If by tribe we mean a social group that shares a single territory, a single language, a single political unit, a shared religious tradition, a similar economic system, and common cultural practices, such a group is rarely found in the real world,” he wrote.

What? But people do identify as Kikuyus or Luos, no? And they have done this for ages, haven’t they? Well, yes and no. People have always banded together in groups in search of security. As they grew, such groups, initially defined by kinship relations, developed common ways of responding to and relating with the world around them, as well as systems to manage relations within the group. But since the world kept changing, so did these groups. Some were subsumed into others, some got separated and developed along different paths, others disappeared altogether. Customs and languages changed. The idea that our current ethnic communities have survived unchanged from ancient times is plainly false. As Prof. Scott MacEachern of Bowdoin College in the US says, “‘Tribal’ and/or ethnic identities have never been primordial and immutable, in Africa or elsewhere.”

In fact, our current ethnic formations - some of which did not even exist a century ago - and our understanding of how they relate to each other, are the products of much more recent events. “What is a tribe?” asks Mahmood Mamdani, the Executive Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research. “It is very largely a creation of laws drawn up by a colonial state which imposes group identities on individual subjects and thereby institutionalises group life… Above all, tribe was a politically driven, totalising identity.”

“The politicisation of ethnic identity began with the colonial experience,” says Prof. Kimani Njogu in the recent Africa Uncensored documentary titled In Tribe We Trust. According to the book Ethnicity and African Politics by Crawford Young, “although the ethnic labels… have pre-colonial origins, they became comprehensive and rigidly ranked categories only in the colonial period; they were heavily influenced by imperial codifications and further transformed by politicised actions in the last half-century.”
Clearly, pre-colonial peoples had their ideas as to who they were and how they related to the world around them. But what we call tribes today bears little semblance to the ever-changing aboriginal identities they fashioned and would probably be completely unrecognisable to them. In any case, the idea that today’s ethnic communities necessarily grew out of kinship relations is bogus.

In pre-colonial societies, as Young explains, ethnicity was a fungible cultural artefact, one that was not necessarily encoded into one’s genes, attached to particular homelands or imbued with ideas of political sovereignty. Individuals and even entire societies could navigate in and out of them. In fact, even the ideas of kinship and shared ancestry were “notoriously malleable to serve contemporary social or ideological purposes. But once rooted in the social consciousness, mythology convincingly impersonates reality.” For example, a study by Timothy Parsons of Washington University details how the colonial government once urged Meru elders to accept anyone willing to bow to their authority as Meru. He further states that “Kikuyu” was more an expression of agricultural expertise than a coherent or bounded ethnic group.

However, for a colonial administration that required order and control in order to facilitate its extractive aim, such inexactitude was unacceptable. Confronted with the reality of the diversity on the African continent, the European colonisers tried to hammer it into compliance with their preconceived ideas. Much of this was accomplished using administrative measures and backed up by brute force. Young writes: “The task of the colonial state was to discover, codify, and map an ethnic geography for their newly conquered domains, according to the premise that the continent was inhabited by ‘tribal man.’ This ethnic template, as imagined by the coloniser, became the basis for administrative organisation.” Parsons adds that “faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conquered Kenya, colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units.”

Thus colonialism imposed its own version of order, superimposed its idea of tribes bounded within district boundaries on this ethnic patchwork, and even created an entirely new “traditional” administrative structure in the form of tribal chiefs who were actually state employees. Young writes of “the illusion that colonial ethnic mappings were historically authentic”. In this way, the state created the tribe which, in turn, became, as Parsons states, “the basic unit of government, education, labour, law, and most importantly land tenure.”

The late Prof Terence Ranger, in his famous 1983 essay on The Invention Of Tradition in Colonial Africa, shows how invented traditions, both European and African, were a crucial plank in allowing colonial settlers and administrators to “define themselves as natural and undisputed masters of vast numbers of Africans.” Which meant reinventing colonials as feudalistic patriarchs and the African as the tribal savage. Though many “found themselves engaged in tasks which by definition would have been menial in Britain and which only the glamour of empire building made acceptable” they were still proud to belong to “an aristocracy of colour”. Echoes of this remain today in the deference with which European “expatriates” are treated.

Ranger also notes that “since so few connections could be made between British and African political, social and legal systems, British administrators set about inventing African traditions for Africans… transforming flexible custom into hard prescription.” So successful was this effort that “many African scholars as well as many European Africanists have found it difficult to free themselves from the false models of colonial codified African ‘tradition’.” As he would more recently summarize, the colonial period was marked “by systematic inventions of African traditions - ethnicity, customary law, ‘traditional’ religion. Before colonialism Africa was characterised by pluralism, flexibility, multiple identity; after it African identities of ‘tribe’, gender and generation were all bounded by the rigidities of invented tradition.”

However, it is important to note that while tribe and tradition were built into the very foundation of the colonial state, the people were not just passive victims. Just as they had been doing for eons, they both resisted and reacted to the impositions, inventing and discarding identities and traditions of their own. At the outset of the colonialism, some identities, like Kikuyu, were already in the process of being created though, as described by Prof Bruce Berman, were not yet stable nor traditional; they hardened in response to the colonial state. Later, similar innovations like Gusii, Luhya, Kalenjin and Mijikenda appeared in the years between the two World Wars to essentially beef up numbers for the negotiation of status within the colonial state. What John Iliffe said of our neighbours to the south in his book, A Modern History of Tanganyika, was true in Kenya: "The British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial framework." Such ethnic and cultural refashioning continues to this day.

The important takeaway is that rather than ancient “nations”, today’s ethnicities are a creation of the colonial era - “state-sponsored tribal ethnographies and romantic essentialised notions of tribal culture”, as Parsons describes them. Writing a decade ago as Kenya threatened to descend into ethnic carnage, American historian Caroline Elkins, author of Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, noted that “Britain's famous imperial policy of ‘divide and rule’, playing one side off another, … often turned fluid groups of individuals into immutable ethnic units, much like Kenya's Luo and Kikuyu today. In many former colonies, the British picked favourites from among these newly solidified ethnic groups and left others out in the cold. We are often told that age-old tribal hatreds drive today's conflicts in Africa. In fact, both ethnic conflict and its attendant grievances are colonial phenomena.”

In addition to creating and freezing tribal identities, the colonial state discouraged and outrightly forbade political organisation across the district lines they had drawn up. This meant that tribes were not just administrative and geographical entities; they were also set up as units for political mobilisation. Tribes were, therefore, state-mandated political identities that substituted for authentic cultural expression. “The structure of tribal administration enabled the ruling British elite to deny any representative character to the troublesome urban nationalist, while claiming for itself just that,” wrote Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in his essay “Political Inequality in the Kababish Tribe.” “Thus ‘the tribe’ and the ‘tribal system’ from being a means of efficient administration became the justification for perpetuating colonial domination.”

During the bulk of the colonial era, competition for state power was conducted along racial lines (race being a similarly artificial construct) while resistance to it was channeled along the tribe.  The Legislative Council, for example, had a racial make-up, with representatives of Europeans, Arabs, Indians and eventually Africans. However, as Barasa Nyukuri of the University of Nairobi observes, “The early political parties in Kenya that championed the nationalist struggle against colonial establishments were basically `distinct ethnic unions'.”  As independence approached, feuds over the state that the British would leave behind were transferred to the tribal arena.

This understanding provides a different perspective to the essentialist arguments offered by David Ndii about Kenya being a marriage of tribes. The reverse is actually true. The reality is that Kenya created tribes and then based its governance arrangements around them. And this is the primary reason why tribalism continues to infect our politics – as the Kenyan investigative journalist John Allan Namu declared, “Kenyan politics, by design, was always meant to be tribal.”

Sadly, despite their relatively recent colonial origins, tribal identities have proven to be all too enduring and ingrained. In the post-independence era, the ruling elites who inherited the colonial state from the British largely maintained its extractive nature and divide-and-rule character, even further entrenching ethnicity while paying lip service to the need to eradicate tribalism. As noted by Professor Daniel Branch in his book Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, “elites have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first and foremost by ethnicity, in order to crush demands for the redistribution of scarce resources.”

The consequences have been predictable. Rather than tools for common advancement, the state and the resources it controls have become prizes in a bitter, no-holds-barred, ethnic contest for supremacy. The “totalising identity” of tribe has meant that Kenyans are unable to conceive of themselves otherwise, and thus are unable to imagine a different basis for political engagement. The zero-sum nature of the competition for power further reinforces and hardens tribal affiliations, engendering a with-us-or-against-us mentality with those who resist it branded as “ethnic traitors”. This all creates a vicious spiral at the bottom of which lie brutal conflagrations, death and displacement. Floating above the melee, just as the British did, is the political class that incites and is then able to continue its thieving ways with little fear of retribution.

Basing a state on the idea of tribe has also led to the perpetuation of regional inequalities as communities “not in government” are either neglected or, worse, treated as enemies of the state. It also drives corruption as public office is seen as an opportunity for tribal “eating”. Which is why the ethnic affiliation of the head of a public institution is always a good indicator of the ethnic composition of its employees. It is also the reason Members of Parliament feel constrained to defend public officials who suffer disciplinary action, as was the case recently when Lily Koros, the CEO of the Kenyatta National Hospital, was sent on compulsory leave after doctors at the hospital performed a brain surgery on the wrong patient. As Jerotich Seii observed on Twitter, “If Lily Koros was, say, Mjikenda, not a peep would have been heard from these Kalenjin MPs. Ok, perhaps from Mjikenda MPs. And therein lies the problem. We defend tribe and not competence.”

The tribalisation of governance also fosters development strategies based on false ideas of ethnic characteristics, such as the one that some groups are not as suited for modernisation as others. Further, as Mamdani explains, the idea of unchanging tribes leads to the deification of fake, colonially-articulated, “traditional” culture and values, as well as the externalisation of social progress as “Western”. That has real consequences for social policy, for example on gay rights.

It will be impossible to eradicate tribalism without undoing the colonial state on which our current ideas about ethnicity are founded and whose logic of extraction sustains them. As John Lonsdale puts it, “There are, then, two very different dynamics currently at work in Kenya: internal ethnic dissidence and external tribal rivalry. Neither can be disarmed without rewriting the rules of political competition for the power of a rather different (‘post-post-colonial’) state.” Tribes today exist primarily as vehicles for capturing the state rather than as celebrations of diversity – which they, in fact, try to rub out. They exist to safeguard elite extraction and to prevent us from imagining different ways of being.

Kenyans today have perfected the curious art of decrying tribalism even while accepting the validity of tribe. Following the colonial template, the 2010 constitution institutionalizes ethnic formulations as the basic unit of government via the creation of counties based on colonial administrative districts and the safeguarding of “ethnic diversity” in public jobs. Today’s social justice activists railing against “uthamaki” –  the skewing of state appointments towards particular groups – and demanding "regional balance" seem incapable of comprehending that the construction of the state around the idea of tribe is itself the problem. In a recent article, for example, Boniface Mwangi seems unaware of the irony of establishing his Kikuyu bona fides - “I am as Gikuyu as Gikuyus come”- before launching into a screed against Kikuyu tribalism.

Recognising that the tribe was a colonial-era invention is empowering because it means it can be disinvented or reimagined; tribe is not destiny. Many look to Tanzania as an example of how the adverse effects of tribe can be ameliorated through public policy. Young also cites Kenya as an example where this has been attempted via constitutional design through devolution, the proscription of ethnically-based political parties and the requirement for presidential candidates to garner 25 per cent of the votes in a majority of the counties. However, this retains – rather than challenges – the idea of tribe and only seeks to manage relations between tribes, which means the potential for harmful political mobilisation of tribal affiliation remains. As Young acknowledges, “while constitutional engineering is of substantial value, it cannot alone respond to the challenge of accommodating cultural diversity”.

The only way to completely eliminate real and potential inter-tribal tensions is to eliminate tribes. And the only way to do that is to eliminate the colonial state that created and nourished them, and to construct a different state and identities, even a national identity, on different foundations in its place. The problem is less the politicisation of ethnicity and more the ethnicisation of politics – the assumption that ethnicity is destiny without interrogating how ethnicity was and still is manufactured.

Kenyan social and political scientists can and should lead this effort. For too long we have left it to the politicians who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. Many Kenyans will understandably be scared of the idea of letting go of the ethnic brands that have defined them their whole lives, regardless of how hollow or counterproductive that branding may actually be. Providing a language to deconstruct the state and the tribe, as well as developing a basket of alternative, homegrown and much more authentic and beneficial political identities, are the overriding challenges of our time.

There is no point in pretending that this is going to be either easy or straightforward. Or that such a project would not itself be vulnerable to capture by a ravenous and oppressive elite seeking to legitimise its rule, as has happened in Rwanda. But we can begin a national conversation about who we really are as people and how we build a Kenya for Kenyans and an Africa for Africans. That itself means beginning to see ourselves not as the “tribes” of Western imagination strait-jacketed by concocted traditions, but as free and thinking human beings with varied and ever-changing ways of being, and who are capable of imagining and bringing to life new worlds of our own.


A version of this article was first published in The Elephant.

Friday, January 04, 2019

The Outlook for Kenyan Politics in 2019


For Kenyans, 2018 begun on a knife edge. The final months of 2017 had been dominated by a dispute over the annulled August presidential election and the repeat in October. After President Uhuru Kenyatta was controversially sworn in for a second term in November, his rival, Raila Odinga promised to have a parallel inauguration ceremony, which after being put off twice, was slated for end of January.

Odinga finally took his oath as the “People’s President” on 30 January, unleashing a wave of government repression, including the shuttering for two weeks of private media stations who covered the event live, the arrest and illegal “deportation” of the self-styled “General” of the National Resistance Movement, Miguna Miguna, as well as the prosecution of Lawyer and MP, Tom Kajwang, for administering the oath. The stage was set for a continuing gargantuan struggle between the two Presidents for power and legitimacy – each had one and craved the other.

Yet as I write this, all that seems to have been nothing more than a bad dream. The Handshake of March 9 completely scrambled the political picture, yoking Kenyatta and Odinga together in a political deal that was reminiscent of other deals the latter had forged with the former’s predecessors whom he claimed had stolen the Presidency from him: Mwai Kibaki in 2008 and Daniel arap Moi in 1997.

The deal conspicuously left Kenyatta’s deputy and presumed successor, William Ruto, out in the cold and set up an interesting historical dynamic. Since independence 55 years ago, Kenya’s ethnically-charged politics have been dominated by the shifting alliances and conflicts between 3 of its 44 officially recognized communities: Odinga’s Luo, Kenyatta’s Kikuyu and Ruto’s Kalenjin. In 1963, the independence party, KANU, was essentially a coalition of Kikuyu and Luo, and the Kalenjin, led by Moi, were in the opposition. Within a year, the opposition party, KADU, had been folded into KANU. By the close of that decade, following a falling out between Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga (Uhuru’s and Raila’s dads), Moi was Vice President and it was the Luo’s turn to be cast out into the cold.

In 2002, a coalition of Luo and Kikuyu elites, led by Mwai Kibaki and the younger Odinga, took over from Moi, who had been in power for nearly a quarter of a century, following Jomo Kenyatta’s death in 1978. This however, was not to last. Kibaki and Raila fell out and the latter joined hands with Ruto, the new Kalenjin kingpin, to challenge for the presidency in the 2007 general election. That bungled election, and the violence it precipitated in early 2008 forced all three together in a Government of National Unity. In a repeat of what happened in the 60s, this was followed by another Kikuyu -Kalenjin alliance which swept to power in 2013 and retained it in 2017 with the Luo again left in opposition.

The Handshake has reshuffled those alliances again, and William Ruto is now very much of the defensive. The President’s renewed and seemingly vigorously prosecuted war on corruption, which kicked off with the hiring of a new Director of Public Prosecutions, Noordin Haji, and threats of lifestyle audits, has been seen by some as an attempt to clip his deputy’s wings. Given recent comments by the ruling Jubilee party vice chairman David Murathe, to the effect that Ruto should retire from politics when Kenyatta’s final term ends, and despite the President’s protestations of innocence, Ruto’s fate and ambition will be a defining issue for politics in 2019.

Similarly, Kenyatta will be under pressure in the coming year to begin to show tangible results in the corruption fight in the form of convictions. He has staked his legacy on the ability to bag the “big fish” – corrupt senior government officials - but so far, has only an empty net to show for it. The wheels of the Kenyan justice system grind very slowly indeed and it won’t be long before public confidence the DPP and the President begin to wane. They will need a few quick wins early in the year but it is unclear whether the courts will oblige. It is a problem of Kenyatta’s own making as in his rhetoric he has repeatedly emphasized convictions, rather than an actual reduction in the prevalence of corruption, as the measure of success. He has failed to articulate a comprehensive policy beyond prosecutions to seal the loopholes that provide opportunities for the pilfering of public funds. And now, he is trying to set up the judiciary to take the fall, suggesting in his Independence Day speech that judges were offering easy bail terms to suspects and deliberately slowing down cases. This will be an interesting and continuing flashpoint throughout the coming year.

A final theme to watch in 2019 will be the issue of the national debt and the increasing skepticism with which ordinary Kenyans view the country’s relations with the largest holder of that debt – China. At the end of 2018, debt repayments and IMF conditionalities for new loans, have seen taxes raised on basic commodities like petroleum. The President’s upbeat rhetoric on the performance of his signature project, the Standard Gauge Railway, is undermined by seemingly waning Chinese confidence in the project and reports, denied by both governments, that China may take over Mombasa port if Kenya failed to keep up its payments. With the government now reduced to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, 2019 is set to bring even tougher economic hardships for Kenyans than 2018.

Happy New Year!