Protecting Kenya's Civic Space

This wasn’t how things were meant to turn out. It was so very different 16 years ago, when we sang of how Unbwogable we were and dreamt that Yote Yawezekana Bila Moi. Across the entire governance space, the state was in retreat. By 2002, a true civic space had been created which was evidenced by the flowering of music and arts. Organized civil society could indeed claim a lot of the credit for it through their efforts to advance political rights and freedoms as well to broaden the democratic process.

Fast forward 16 years and the situation is reversed. To understand what went wrong, we have to look back at our history.

According to Wikipedia, “civic space is created by a set of universally accepted rules which allow people to organize, participate and communicate with each other freely and without hindrance and in doing so, influence the political and social structures around them.” From colonial times to the present, organized civil society has played a prominent role in the struggle to create and protect this space from the predations of the state.

In fact, civil society groups were the forerunners of political parties. It was folks like Harry Thuku and organisations like the Young Kikuyu Association and later the East African Association who early on articulated the political visions and programmes, and defined the goals, values and principles that would drive political action for a generation and beyond. Their significance for the civic space lay in the fact that their struggles often went beyond the acquisition of power to encompass respect for fundamental rights, social and economic justice as well as the freedom and dignity of Kenyans as human beings.

After WWII, with a broke Britain beginning to retreat under pressure of such organizations, many in civil society -from journalists to trade unionists to activists- transformed into politicians. By the time independence arrived, civil society organisations had taken back seat. Politicians and political parties were doing the driving. And very quickly, they constricted the space for citizens to communicate freely and influence politics. It would be a pattern with which Kenyans would become familiar.

In the first decade-and-a-half of independence, politics and governance were for the most part left to the politicians. However, the 1980s and 1990s, as donors increasingly conditioned their support on governance reform and democratization, civil society became more vocal. Outfits like the National Convention Executive Council and religious organisations under the Ufungamano Initiative refused to leave constitutional reform to the state. Others, like the local chapter of Transparency International, were determined to hold their own against the government in the anti-corruption space. By the 2002 elections, Kenyans had clawed back many of the freedoms and reclaimed many of the spaces that the colonial state had denied them.

Sadly, though, we made the same mistake we had made 60 years before. Many of civil society’s leading lights switched sides and became politicians, ran for office and actually won. Others were raptured into government via appointment. Organized civil society was effectively decapitated and went quiet. Once again, the civic space was slowly constricted. Soon the Mwai Kibaki regime was sending GSU into the Bomas of Kenya to stop debate on a new constitution, sending masked police into The Standard, teargassing demonstrators and stealing elections.

The same happened in 2013 and 2017. And every time civil society has retreated, the state has expanded with the consequent loss of civic space and the threat to civic freedoms.

Our history has shown that the state will not be reformed from within. Rather it will only be kept accountable by citizens interacting with each other freely within a civic space. The guardians of that space are organized civil society – churches, NGOs, media, trade unions, academia and other institutions citizens establish outside the state. We should thus be worried when civil society stalwarts troop to the state. Journalist-turned-politician, Mohamed “Jicho Pevu” Ali, and his Parliamentary colleagues, Charles “Jaguar” Kanyi from the musical world and trade unionist Wilson Sossion are walking a path many have trod before them. And we now know what comes after.

Holding the state requires powerful actors outside the government and able to challenge it. We should therefore urgently find ways to incentivize the habitation of non-governmental spaces. We must also work to protect the existing spaces where citizens today can congregate and freely interact - especially on the internet and on social media – from a state that is keen on policing them. The fox must not be left to watch over the hen house.

A Kenya for All Kenyans

2002 was a momentous time, a good time to be a Kenyan. The elections to be held later that year which would see the exit of KANU as the governing party after nearly 40 years in power. The atmosphere was electric, election campaigns were in full gear and, contrary to previous polls, there were few reports of violence. Kenya had come of age. After decades of struggle against the tyranny of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi, the people were about to strike a blow for democracy, for good governance and to annihilate corruption.

For me, the zeitgeist was all encapsulated in a song that became the signature tune for the coalition standing against Moi’s hand-picked successor. “Unbwogable!” by the Luo duo Gidi Gidi and Maji Maji. “I am unbwogable, I am unbeatable, I am unsueable … Who can Bwogo me?” we all sang. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were about indomitable Luos. By then we were all Luos. We were all Okuyu or Kamba. In short, we were all Unbwogable Kenyans.

Fast forward to 2013, and little of that remains. Faith in our united strength has given way to an abiding fear of the other and we have sought solace in the comfort our tribal cocoons. It begun almost as soon as the Kibaki administration took power, with wrangles over MoUs and cabinet positions. These were quickly followed by mega-corruption scandals of the sort we thought were a thing of the past. Citizen arrests of corrupt traffic police officers, common in the first euphoric days of the Rainbow government, quickly dried up as we woke up to the cruel hoax that had been perpetrated. Nothing had fundamentally changed.

The anticipated prosecutions of Moi regime figures never materialized and the very people that had been eager to feast at the table of US Ambassador Smith Hempstone and call for economic sanctions against the country, now only “vomited on donor shoes” whenever called into account for their orgy of graft. Suddenly, the overhaul to the constitution that they had championed, was neither urgent nor did it need to be as comprehensive. Newspapers were raided and we were warned about rattling snakes. Foreign criminals broke our laws with impunity, called press conferences to threaten the Police Commissioner, and could stroll unimpeded into our supposedly secure airports.

By the time the first constitutional referendum rolled around, we seemed distinctly bwogable. The polarisation signified by the “41 against 1” formula would slowly, and inexorably lead to the balkanisation of the country into tribal units and the violence that erupted following the disputed 2007 elections. The uneasy ceasefire that has held since then, was itself inaugurated with the spectre of mass starvation as politicians looted the national granary and stole food from the mouths of the hungry.

The idea of Kenya that had blossomed in 2002 thus proved to be nothing more than a transient phenomenon, a moon flower. Perhaps it was the irrational exuberance of youth that led us to believe that a different Kenya was possible; perhaps it was our sheltered upbringing as privileged members of an aspirational middle class nurtured on a diet of false patriotism, fantastical promises of development, western sitcoms and CNN. Perhaps we wanted to see in ourselves something that wasn’t really there.

For Kenya had not been founded as a community of Kenyans but as a playground for the privileged. The uplifting of the living standards of the majority of the people has never seemed to be the goal of our politics and our politicians. As I have written before, it has always been about the wenyenchi, not the wananchi. Democracy, human rights and all other fashionable slogans have been for them little more than a pathway to power and riches.

Any who thought otherwise were quickly shunted aside. Today we glorify their courage as we trample underfoot everything they stood for. On national holidays, we dutifully trundle out the sanitized memories of Dedan Kimathi, Bildad Kaggia, Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto, JM Kariuki, Robert Ouko, Wangari Maathai and others. After the celebrations are done we hide them away till next year, not wanting to be reminded for too long of what was, and perhaps still is, possible. Their modern day equivalents are cast as neo-colonial stooges and ostracised for imagining a Kenya for all Kenyans, where justice reigns, with equality and opportunity for all.

We no longer believe in ideals or values or greatness. The country has become little more than a flag to wave to the world, especially when one of us excels internationally, in order to obscure the rot and stench within. In the rubble of the crumbling cases at The Hague we are happily burying any notions that the fortunes of our people matter and that someone should be held to account for depriving them of life and livelihood.We would rather build and repair the roads between our towns while neglecting the bridges between our communities. We connect cities but not citizens.

We are now creating new songs that reflect the limited visions we have adopted. Last weekend, the streets of Nairobi rung with a bastardized version of our national anthem. The words “natukae na uhuru, amani na undugu” were no longer about living in unity, peace and liberty. In the common imagination, uhuru now refers not to an ideal but to a person. Others now sing about living with Raila, Kalonzo and Wetangula. Unbwogable is rarely heard on radio stations anymore.

I suspect that we are in a situation not very different from that of our parents. Following the initial euphoria of independence, I am pretty sure that the predations of the Kenyatta and Moi governments had vanquished in them the idea of a Kenya for Kenyans. “Kenya Nchi Yetu” is probably for them just a reminder of the idealism of a bygone age. Yet its message is not very removed from that of Unbwogable. That the citizens can decide to remake the country. That a Kenya that is different from its previous incarnations is possible. One that caters to the desires and needs common to all and not the self-aggrandizing ambitions of a few. If we can commit to that, then perhaps one day our kids can learn to sing confidently of their genuine greatness.