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!

Innocent Victim? Not Exactly

The last few weeks have been rather trying for Kenyan media. The government’s criminal overreaction to the mock swearing in of Raila Odinga did not end with the shut down of the three leading television stations for over a week. Even after they were allowed back on air, the Uhuru Kenyatta administration has continued to throw a tantrum, with the President chasing journalists out of one of his official engagements and the state singling out three from the Nation Media Group, Linus Kaikai, Larry Madowo and Ken Mijungu, for special attention, forcing them to seek protection from the courts.

Faced with this onslaught, the media has been quick to don the costume of public interest and proceeded to play the part of innocent victim. In a piece published on the CNN website, Madowo condemns the “shutting down [of] networks that have such a massive following [and] public trust … by a rogue government.”

“Our job as reporters is to record history, whether the government of the day approves of it or not,” he continues, declaring Kenya “one of Africa's beacons for vibrant media [which] should not be dimmed out by an administration intent on censorship of independent voices, reducing the country to just another African dictatorship where critical journalism is outlawed and reporters constantly fear for their lives.”

Madowo deserves an Oscar for that performance. For while the government’s actions have been completely illegal and anti-democratic, outrageous in the extreme and deserving of full condemnation, Kenyan media has not behaved much better. The fact that he was forced to hawk his piece to CNN is telling. “This week, the @dailynation refused to print my column for the first time in nearly 4 years,” he had tweeted in explanation. In fact, a few days later, his column was to be cancelled entirely. And he wasn’t the only one targeted by the supposedly “vibrant media” which now seemed eager to do the government’s dirty work.

                     

On the eve of Odinga’s “inauguration”, a leaked internal memo from Nation Media Group (NMG) Editor-in-Chief, Tom Mshindi, suggested that he and Kaikai, NTV’s General Manager, were “aligned” on not providing live coverage for the event. That was before Kaikai that evening, in his capacity as Chairman of Kenya Editors Guild, blew the lid off a secret meeting at State House between of “a section of media managers and select editors from the main media houses” and President Kenyatta, his deputy, William Ruto, the Attorney-General as well as Cabinet Secretaries for Interior and ICT. It was at this meeting that the media was ordered not to cover the Odinga event live.

Ultimately, NTV did cover the event precipitating its being illegally switched off by the Communications Authority along with KTN and Citizen all of whom continued to stream their coverage on the internet. Kaikai would pay the price for his defiance as a quick reorganization at NTV has reportedly seen him sidelined on decisions regarding what content is broadcast and now even seems set to leave the group along with Madowo. At the moment, the two along with Ken Mijungu, the very people police were seeking to arrest, have been effectively banned from going on air and Madowo’s political talk show, Sidebar, appears to have been cancelled.

All this is part of a trend. Kenyan media houses have become adept at sacrificing top journalists to appease the government. Just as. in the current crisis, media owners and top management have been happy to throw journalists under the bus, so in 2014, The Standard fired 3 of its journalists after top editors were similarly summoned to State House over a story the government disputed.

In 2015, NMG fired world-famous cartoonist, Godfrey GADO Mwampembwa, after his cartoons drew the wrath of the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments. In 2016, Denis Galava was fired from his post as the Daily Nation’s Managing Editor for Special Projects, after he penned a New Year’s Day editorial that was, according to The Star, “deemed critical of President Uhuru Kenyatta's administration”.

Madowo’s notion that Kenya’s “vibrant” media conducts “critical journalism” is also quite misleading. We are talking here of establishments that are content to unquestioningly run press releases from State House as news, a habit which left the media badly exposed a few weeks ago after a claim by the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit that Kenyatta had been appointed a UNICEF global champion for youth empowerment turned out to be false. Further, many will not have forgotten that this same media houses were happy to pocket millions of public shillings for running illegal government advertisements during the campaign period. Or the role it played in allowing, and even encouraging, the delegitimization of civil society.

All this explains why many Kenyans have been ambivalent about supporting the media during the present onslaught. Poetic justice, some have called it, wondering why they should stand up for a media that does not stand up for them. There is a lesson for the media in all this. Protection does not come from courting the government, but rather from courting the people. In the end, as the Daily Nation’s own public editor wrote, it is the public that is “the best protector of press freedom”.

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Kenya's Future Increasingly Looks Like Its Past

In early 1965, after just a year of independence, Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta suspected Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was planning a coup against his government. Deep divisions within the ruling Kenya African National Union - between those wanting radical and populist change to the inherited colonial system and those who were intent on consolidating it and seeking more gradual change – had been exacerbated by the murder of radical Nominated MP, Pio Gama Pinto in late February.

Determined to eliminate the threat, Kenyatta sent the paramilitary General Service Unit of the Kenya Police Force into Luo Nyanza to look for weapons and to intimidate Odinga’s Luo base. As related by Charles Hornsby in his opus, Kenya: A History Since Independence, “there was a press blackout on their activities, which included house searches, beatings and rapes, which were only made public at the end of the month, when angry Luo MPs raised the issue in Parliament”.

Within a year, Odinga had been forced out of KANU and had set up his own political party in opposition, the Kenya Peoples Union. As Hornsby states, Odinga was betting “that Kenyatta and KANU would play by the rules and that the West would ensure they did so.” However, Kenyatta’s patrons were silent during the next three years which witnessed “more serious abuses than were conducted against a political party at any time before or since in Kenya’s history”. These included changes to the electoral system on the eve of, and rigging during, the Little General Election; branding Odinga as a threat to “national stability”; the mangling of the 7 year-old independence constitution to concentrate power in the President and eliminate all checks on it; the reintroduction of colonial-style detention without trial; and intimidation of both the judiciary and the press. The period ended with the murder of Tom Mboya, Kikuyu oathing, a massacre of Odinga supporters in Kisumu, the banning of the KPU and detention of Odinga and his allies.

Fast forward half a century and Jomo’s son, Uhuru Kenyatta, is President and Jaramogi’s son, Raila Odinga, stands accused of attempting to stage a coup. Once again, the latter has been demonized by the ruling party and dozens have been killed beaten and raped by the GSU in Luo Nyanza. The media is silenced, the courts ignored, the state accused of electoral malpractice including engineering last minute changes to electoral laws and a round up of Odinga’s allies is under way. A new constitution enacted just 7 years ago which imposed serious limitations on Presidential power is roundly ignored and institutions meant to be a check on it, including the parliament, are completely servile. All the while, Western powers are silent. Just as in the 60s, they have opted to side with the Kenyattas whom they consider the best bet for preserving the colonial system that safeguards their interests above those of ordinary Kenyans.

So how will this end? Is it likely that Kenyatta will have Odinga arrested for treason? After all, his allies have been charged with abetting treason and the courts may have a hard time convicting them if the person accused of actually committing treason is allowed to wander freely. But perhaps the intention is not to seek convictions but rather to send a message. Still, history suggests some action may be taken though it might not be as drastic or as harsh as a treason charge. The senior Odinga was subjected to two years in detention by the senior Kenyatta and then house arrest by Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi. The latter has already been bandied about as a possibility by Jubilee hardliners.

Any arrest of Odinga would undoubtedly spark massive unrest in Nyanza but, just as in the 60s, the Kenyatta government has shown that it is not averse to killing large numbers of citizens in order to cling to power. Further, the likelihood of the international community interfering to stop such is miniscule. Rather than an ideological battleground of the Cold War of yesteryear, Kenya is today on the frontline of other wars against terrorists and Chinese domination. These concerns outweigh Kenyan lives.

Kenya has basically regressed 50 years in the last 7 months and the 2010 constitution’s promise of a democratic renewal is fast fading. If extinguished, history suggests Kenyans may be in for decades of brutal and kleptocratic rule. It will be a steep price for the country to pay for not learning from its past.

The 55-year Fight For Kenya

Two elections in two months has not settled Kenya’s political crisis. But the impasse is not really about who will sit in State House. It’s a deeper question: it’s about who owns Kenya – its citizens or a historically entrenched political elite.

President, Uhuru Kenyatta, won the second edition easily after his main opponent, Raila Odinga, withdrew from the race citing the inability of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to carry out a credible poll. In fact, the reason the election was being done afresh was that the Supreme Court had annulled the August 8 version, accusing the IEBC of acting as if the Elections Act and the Constitution did not exist. His refusal to participate in last Thursday’s contest has now precipitated a deep political crisis.

Some have proposed that it is nothing more than a dispute between two of Kenya’s famously gluttonous and power-hungry politicians, each accusing the other of trying to get power through fraudulent means. Others blame the ethnicization of Kenya’s politics and the deep tribal faults within Kenyan society. Still others maintain that the country’s winner-take-all political system, which does not allow those rejected by voters a cushy and safe landing. In all this, the fate of individual politicians and of the country’s constitution takes on huge importance.

And yet all these diagnoses fail to identify the central conflict that lies at the heart of and connects all these issues – and that is the struggle to bend the country’s colonial and extractive state to the whims of a new and progressive constitution.

It is a war that has been silently waged for at least 55 years. In the run up to Independence in 1963, the two main African parties, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) premiered the main themes and power conflicts that were to dominate Kenya’s attempts to deal with the colonial state. According to the late Prof Hastings Okoth-Ogendo, KANU, the more popular of the two, prioritized the transfer of power over reform of the state, while KADU, which had already lost an election to its rival, was more focused in the limitation of that power in the interests of ethnic minorities.

In 1962, at the second Lancaster House constitutional conference, KADU insisted on a constitution that was broadly similar to the one the country was to adopt 48 years later. It established a Bill of Rights, created regional assemblies and government in an effort to devolve power from the center. KANU, on the other hand, reluctantly acquiesced, reasoning that when the party inevitably won power through the ballot box, it would be free to change the constitution.

And that’s what indeed happened. In less than a decade after independence, the constitution would be so mangled through amendments that in 1969, it was officially recognized as a different constitution.

Writing in 1992, current Attorney General, Prof Githu Muigai, explains:

“The colonial order had been one monolithic edifice of power that did not rely on any set of rules for legitimization. When the Independence constitution was put into place it was completely at variance with the authoritarian administrative structures that were still kept in place by the entire corpus of public law. Part of the initial amendments therefore involved an attempt - albeit misguided - to harmonise the operations of a democratic constitution with an undemocratic and authoritarian administrative structure. Unhappily instead of the latter being amended to fit the former, the former was altered to fit the latter with the result that the constitution was effectively downgraded.”

In short, under KANU, the colonial state and its logic of extraction of resources from the many to enrich the few -initially British colonials, but now a similarly tiny African political elite -prevailed and undid the constitution. What followed was an “eating” binge as politicians and senior officials and their families and friends grabbed whatever they could lay their hands on.

By the late 1980s, the looting and oppression had sparked a reaction from citizen groups, media and churchmen which featured a persistent push for a new constitution, even in the face of violent government crackdowns as well as state-led attempts to co-opt and hollow out their demands. The popular agitation came to fruition in August 2010 when the current constitution was promulgated which essentially was a reset to 1962.

Yet the colonial state did not just fade away. It had to contend with this new challenge and, at least initially, the political elite was happy to pretend to play along for as long as their position at the top was not seriously challenged. The more egregious aspects of the state that the constitution now abolished, were simply renamed and allowed to hide in plain sight: the hated provincial administration rather than being abolished, simply changed titles but was retained intact; the police, though nominally declared to be operationally independent, never actually behaved like they were -they still remained “a citizen containment squad” as the Ransley report had described them.

Though cloaking itself in the cloth of the constitution, the state refused to reform. Under Uhuru Kenyatta, it retained its authoritarian character but with a fresh, likable face. But all through, its violence was never far below the surface as was witnessed in the aftermath of its bungled responses to terrorist attacks such as the on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013, when the government scapegoated entire communities to cover up its failures. and, more recently, in the brutal crackdown on people protesting the two elections in which nearly 70 people have died.

On August 8, the elite embarked on what they assumed would be another coronation of their chosen one. Everything was in place, including 180,000 policemen to take care of troublemakers in opposition strongholds as well as a carefully constructed plot and narrative. It wasn’t the first time they were doing this. As Stanley Macharia, proprietor of the largest broadcast media network in the region, told the Kenyan Senate last year, in all five elections held since the return of multiparty competition, in only one -in 2002- had the presidency gone to the person with the most votes.

The Supreme Court annulment of the August election, therefore, came as a real shock to the elite and was the first real attempt to use the 2010 constitution to challenge the power and status of the elite as the ultimate owners of the state. The response was quick and effective: legislative changes to virtually make it impossible for the Court to nullify another election, threats to the judges, and a sham election to sanitize what the Supreme Court had impugned. Soon Uhuru Kenyatta’s supporters were extolling the benefits of a “benevolent dictator”.

It is within the context of this historically frustrated effort to bring the colonial state to heel that we must locate the current political impasse. It must not be made out to be about the Luo vs the Kikuyu (although there is an aspect of that) or Kenyatta vs Raila (although that matters too) or election winners vs election losers (a much less convincing argument).

The real question is whether the wenyenchi (the owners of the nations) will give up their control of the state to the wananchi (the people of the nation); whether they will allow the constitution to dismantle and remake the colonial state into one that works for all Kenyans.

History does not offer much encouragement. However, as the low turnout (even the highest estimates come in at under 40%) for the repeat election suggested, there is broad agreement across the country on the need for elections to adhere to constitutional standards of being free, fair, simple, verifiable, transparent and credible. One poll showed that even in Kenyatta’s heartland, more than half of the people were happy with the Supreme Court’s decision to annul the poll.

The politicians are out of touch with the people. Their brinksmanship demonstrates that they are yet to learn the lessons of the 60s and that they cannot be trusted not to repeat the same mistakes their fathers’ made.

Which leads us to the question of what should happen now. There is undoubtedly a need to resolve the immediate political crisis and generate consensus on how to address the longer term issues. Talks, as have been proposed, between Kenyatta and Odinga would be critical to this but, as noted above, cannot be left solely to them. the involvement of other sectors of society such as civil society, the media and the religious establishment both as mediators and participants in their own right would help lay a framework that is not solely dictated by the interests of the two main protagonists.

The goal should be to establish a roadmap to a resolution of the crisis including an agreed forum for a comprehensive national dialogue which would address not just the immediate manifestations of the crisis but, more importantly, deal with the unfinished business of reforming the colonial state and addressing its legacy of abuse, marginalisation and impoverishment.

Kenya faces much more than an electoral crisis. For over half a century, the contestation over who controls the state has been allowed to take precedence over the need to reform that state so it works for not just a few, but for all its citizens. That must now change.

The Marital State: Why Divorce Won't Solve Kenya's Problems

David Ndii is at it again. In the aftermath of the election, he has revived talk of his incendiary proposal for divorce. Basically, he postulates that Kenyan ethnic communities are in “an abusive marriage” and if they cannot come to an accommodation, they need to consider going their separate ways. Despite being one of Kenya’s foremost public intellectuals, he is demonized by many in the ruling establishment and among their rabid supporters.

Although the proposal far preceded the elections, Ndii’s most recent comments were made and will be understood in the context of the election and especially the contested presidential poll, which is now the subject of a Supreme Court petition. The root of his argument is the perceived domination of Kenyan political life, and the opportunity to “eat” the national cake, by a few large tribes.

The current focus of the griping is the Kikuyu-Kalenjin axis inaugurated by the alliance of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto. But the narratives of domination, by either a single community or an alliance of a few of them, and resistance to it are as old as the country itself.

The logic of oppression and extraction was built into the state by our founding fathers, the British colonialists. They created a structure of government that was meant to entrench their lordship over all they surveyed and to facilitate extraction from natives.

Local communities didn’t take too kindly to this and eventually ganged up to demand their independence. However, their inheritance from the departing and receding British was the colonial state, which they failed to fundamentally reform and instead fell into squabbling over who would control it. And always, behind this, was fear of domination, which is really fear of the state.

In the run up to Independence, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party was created, almost overnight, as the vehicle for what was largely seen as a Kikuyu-Luo alliance to take over the state. It was immediately opposed by the rest of the “small” tribes who majorly ganged up under the auspices of the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU).

The deck was shuffled again after KADU was swallowed up by KANU and the Luo jettisoned soon after. Though Daniel arap Moi, with his Kalenjin bloc, was nominally the number two in the party and in government, it was clear that for all intents and purposes the state now belonged to the Kikuyu elite. This was to continue until shortly after the death of Jomo Kenyatta. Now it was the turn for the Kikuyu elite to be tossed out into the cold where they joined their Luo counterparts to oppose the Kalenjin (Moi’s) state.

This alliance eventually forced Moi’s retirement and the re-enactment of history as the Luo were once again double-crossed – this time by President Mwai Kibaki – and kicked out of what again became the Kikuyu state. The violence that followed the 2007 election gave rise to the first all-inclusive government where elites from all communities got in on the feeding frenzy. The 2013 elections again saw the Luo shut out by the current Kikuyu-Kalenjin alliance. A partnership that is perhaps slightly more equitable than the version between the current President’s father and Moi.

What I’ve detailed above is a very simplified and simplistic model of Kenya’s history. However, it has the distinct advantage of helping us appreciate a fundamentally important fact that explains why Kenya is where it is today and why we go round in circles. The problem that we have been skirting for all these years is the state itself as a tool for domination rather than an expression of the people’s aspirations. We are fighting over who becomes the next oppressor, rather than trying to uproot oppression.

Which brings me back to Ndii’s argument. Last year, in response to his abusive marriage thesis, I wrote that Kenyans are actually in an abusive relationship with their elites, rather than with other tribes. The extraction that the state facilitates, and that is the real prize the elites are battling over, is from all Kenyans regardless of ethnicity – we all pay whoever gets to be the piper, some more than others, but that doesn’t mean we get to call the tune or avoid the rats.

In fact, the whole talk of ethnic domination is a device to hide state domination by the elite of all tribes, which has led to a situation where 8,000 individuals own 62% of everything. Dismembering the country will not fix this.

Clearly, as Ndii holds, there is in principle no reason why a discussion on secession or mutual separation cannot or should not happen. We should not fetishize Kenya since, as we have seen, it was not created for our benefit but rather as a tool for robbery. Think of that next time you feel compelled to sing its songs, salute its flag or declare its eternity. For most of the country’s existence, it has been little more than a mostly illegitimate political and administrative arrangement that we have been struggling to master. The 2010 constitution gave us a chance to begin to get to grips with that challenge and provides an agreed upon vision of how it can be made to work for us.

Part of that vision is decentralization as a cure to the overbearing central state. Since before independence, majimboism or its current iteration -devolution- has been at the crux of the struggle between those who were seen as domineering and the rest. It was one of the major issues that divided KADU and KANU. Although a pillar of the Independence constitution, which created 7 regional governments and assemblies, it was undone by KANU in the 60s which, among other things, simply starved the regional governments of revenue.

Today, devolution remains at risk. The fact that the vast bulk of the tax money is controlled and retained in Nairobi, where the elite congregates, rather than disbursed in the counties where the people are dispersed is in itself telling. There is a deep need to ponder the continuing centrality of the national Presidency in our politics (it was, after all, largely modelled on the colonial Governor-General) and the fact that it remains a potent symbol, not of unity as envisaged in the constitution, but of domination.

Simply put, the work of implementing the constitution is not done. It has only begun but the night is here and it is full of terrors. Only by doing the hard work of facing up to our history and rebuilding the state from the bottom up, not as a tool of oppression, but as a means to enable popular aspirations, can we hope to extricate ourselves of the vicious cycle.

We therefore must, as Ndii says, not shy away from scary discussions about the means we use to compel those in power to abide by the constitution, or even the possibility of separation if that fails. But we also must not be seduced by the easy, tribe-based formulations he offers, that only serve to mask the real nature of our state. However, the only way to truly appreciate what Ndii gets wrong, is to seriously engage with what he gets right.

Why Kenyans Are Deathly Afraid Of Presidential Elections

Another election. Another failure of systems. Another dispute, another anxiety laden wait. Another bout of violence. The routine has become depressingly familiar. Over the past week, Kenya has been at a standstill, holding her breath as votes were counted, announcements made and politicians bickered over the results, praying these would not summon the spectre of 2008.

Kenyan presidential elections have always been contentious - a legacy of our history dictatorship. Within a decade of independence from Britain in 1963, the country had been transformed into a de facto one party and as long as the centre was not challenged, other aspects of a competitive, democratic system were allowed to function.

This meant that for the first 30 years, while parliamentary races were fiercely competitive -with more than half of incumbent Members of Parliament regularly thrown out- at the presidential level, they remained a placid affair. Jomo Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel arap Moi, as heads of the party were “re-elected” unopposed at every turn.

A year to the 1992 elections, however, everything changed. Following a sustained two-year campaign of protests and international pressure, Moi was forced to reverse a decade-old change to the constitution which had formally banned political parties other than his own. This led to the first ever competitive race for President, which set the tone for all presidential contests to come -it was marred by large-scale, ethnic-based, violence, irregularity and outright theft.

The 1992 polls were preceded by government-instigated “tribal clashes”, in which 5,000 people were killed and another 75,000 displaced in the expansive Rift Valley. Just months before the 1997 elections, politically instigated violence killed over 100 people and displaced an estimated 100,000. While both 2002 and 2013 election campaigns were marked by several incidents of violence, with no incumbents running, the violence was somewhat limited.

At first glance, the violence of 2007/8 seems to sit pretty well within this picture. But, on closer inspection, there are fundamental differences. All previous large scale electoral violence was instigated controlled and perpetrated either by the government or with its acquiescence. The 2008 violence was the first time Kenyans confronted the prospect of a Hobbesian “war of all against all”, with the opposition also able to mount significant violence.

Kenya’s electoral violence had previously been controlled and limited in geography and scope. Though the 2007/8 was not the worst the country had suffered, it provided a glimpse of a possible and very scary future, where the threat of violence did not stem primarily from the state, but from one’s neighbours and friends.

Kenya has always been a violent country, one silently at war with itself. The colonial state is at the center of that conflict. The various communities and fractions of communities that make up the nation are constantly fighting to control the state which ironically was created to facilitate others preying on them. At independence, rather than reform it, the clique that inherited it, which includes both Uhuru’s and Raila’s fathers used it to enrich themselves and their friends and relatives at the expense of the rest of society.

Throughout it all, as Matt Carotenuto writes, the state has learned to weaponize the language of “peace” to avoid scrutiny of its actions and a discussion of the past. “From the days of Jomo Kenyatta’s regime to the Presidency of his son Uhuru, Kenya’s five decades of independence have been marked by wide ranging uses of “peace” to silence more messy notions of reconciliation and political change.”

As Kenyans settle down to the daily grind, there is a danger that they will once again be urged to as Kenyatta put it in 2002 “forget the past, however bitter we may be, and forge a common front to be able to overcome our emotions”. But that would be a mistake because, if there are any lessons to be learnt from Kenya’s history, it is that a true “common front” will not be forged through “forgetting he past” but by facing and dealing with it.

Kenya is thus has a choice. The country can either try to recreate the brutality that its colonial state wielded previously and attempt to force the genie back into the bottle, or it could actually attempt to confront and deal with its traumatic past and to begin to create a state that works for all.  Kenyatta appears to have settled for the former, judging by the viciousness with which post-election riots have been put down – at least 24 people have been shot dead and many more, including a six-month old baby, badly beaten.

What prevails in Kenya now, what has always prevailed, is not peace but rather, an uneasy calm -a ceasefire of sorts. But it won’t last, nor be translated into a deeper peace unless the country has the courage to fix its frayed national fabric.

The Tyranny Of Numbskulls

Over the last few weeks, the country has been embroiled in an acrimonious and largely inane debate on changes to the country’s elections laws. The controversial revisions to the Elections Act seek to introduce a “complementary mechanism” to the integrated electronic electoral system for identifying voters and transferring results from polling stations to tallying centres.

Yet no one knows what this proposed “complementary mechanism” is. It not defined in the law but has been widely interpreted to refer some sort of manual backup to be employed in case the biometric and electronic devices fail as they did in 2013. That would allow voters to be checked off a physical register, basically a printout of the electronic one, and for forms containing results to be physically transported from polling stations where all the voting and counting happens, to the tallying centres where results are ultimately announced.

If such a manual system is what is contemplated, it is not clear whether it would be different from the system that was in place prior to 2013. In essence then, the law would not be proposing a backup but taking the country back to an era where elections were routinely stolen. In his presentation to the Senate, Royal Media Services proprietor, SK Macharia, noted that of the five general elections held in the multiparty era, in only one had the candidate for President receiving the most votes been declared the winner.

In fact the move to an electronic system was in response to these repeated failures, which were the trigger for the 2007/8 post-election violence. In a 2010 paper, the immediate former chair of the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission, Ahmed Isaack Hassan, declared that “based on the recommendations of the [2008 Kriegler Report], the Commission was determined to have a fully automated electoral process, from e-registration, e-voting and finally e-transmission of results.“ While the system the IEBC eventually settled on had both manual and electronic components, it is nonetheless clear that the latter was introduced as a cure to the former. The amendments seek to reverse this and now present the discredited manual system as the cure.

And remembering that the electronic system was meant to deal with specific problems in the manual system, it is notable that there has been little articulation by the amendment’s proponents of what has been done to fix those. That the experience of the 2013 elections where the IEBC was forced to revert to a completely manual system has not featured prominently in the debate is also telling.

But what is most galling is the fact that the entire debate is conducted without benefit of an understanding of how the electoral system as a whole is meant to function and where gaps and opportunities for mischief exist. There is also much conflation of issues which leads to confusion. For example, the case for a “complementary mechanism”, not as a backup, but as a check on abuse of the electronic system is much stronger when dealing with transmission of results than with voter identification.

In transmission, the two systems could function together simultaneously, each as a check on the other, as the IEBC had apparently intended in the 2013 election, with the instantaneous results transmitted via the electronic system being provisional until verified via the physical delivery of the form. The idea was to discourage the practice of election officials disappearing en route to transmission centres and eventually turning up with doctored forms. With the information having been already sent ahead via the electronic system, any discrepancy would immediately raise a red flag and the ultimate back up would be the ballot boxes and the ballots contained therein.

Since there is no dispute about biometric voter registration, the identification of voters via a physical printout of part the information contained in the electronic register has much less appeal. The requirement for the biometric registration was designed to solve the perennial problem of ghost or dead voters, first by ensuring the register is populated with details of real, living voters and secondly to ascertain that the person who turns up to cast a ballot is the actual registered person. It also eliminated opportunities for mischievous electoral officials to “vote” on behalf of registered voters who didn’t show up.

If the electronic voter identification system was to break down entirely, as it apparently did in 2013, any credible “complementary mechanism” would have to be robust enough to handle these challenges. A physical printout simply does not cut it.

Further, the lack of an audit has meant that we are reduced to putting out sporadic fires instead of addressing the system as a whole and dealing with root causes. We fail to see the wood for trees. Yesterday we were fighting over IEBC commissioners. Today it is voter identification and results transmission. All are important to fix but are only a small part of our dysfunctional electoral system which requires a complete overhaul. Everything from ID issuance to security to disposal of petitions needs to be looked into. 

For example, there is little discussion about the weaknesses shown up by Raila Odinga's 2013 petition against the election of President Uhuru Kenyatta. The Supreme Court had only 14 days to deal with it. The IEBC essentially ran down the clock by refusing to provide him the documents he needed to make his case until compelled to by the courts. As a result, was not heard on its full merits. In fact, as reported by George Kegoro, one Supreme Court Justice openly admitted that he might have ruled differently if he had had more time.  Yet we still have no law compelling the IEBC to hand over documents to petitioners nor are we contemplating changing the constitution to give the Supreme Court more time as recommended by former Chief Justice, Dr Willy Mutunga.

Clearly, the current debate has been held hostage to the narrow interests of politicians as opposed to those of Kenyans in general. The manner in which the Jubilee coalition has bulldozed the amendments through Parliament, despite its own Senators acknowledging that the Bill contains unconstitutional provisions, amply demonstrates this. In fact, the entire discourse on electoral reform has been polarized by politicians seeking advantage rather than attempting to reason out and fix the problems with the system. What they want is to win. Whether that win is secured in a fair and open manner is of secondary importance to them. 

Yet it is a matter of life and death for the rest of Kenya. Thus the passage of the amendments and their imminent signing into law by President Uhuru Kenyatta should not be the end of the matter. We still can and must free ourselves from the tyranny of numbskulls and insist that needed reforms are not left to the whims of politicians but are discussed and agreed in for a that include a much wider array of stakeholders and interest groups including but not limited to academics, professional associations, media, civil society and religious leaders. The reforms must also be about resolving the historical problems that have plagued our elections and ensuring a transparent, free, fair and credible vote, rather than a win for particular candidates.

To Eat Or Not To Eat: The Cost of Kenyan Politicians

Of all the revelations that have come out of the inquisitions into the fiasco that accompanied Kenyan authorities’ preparations for the Rio Olympics, perhaps none is as significant as the fact that nearly Sh2.2 million in tax payer money was used to book rooms aboard a cruise ship for use by President Uhuru Kenyatta.

A cruise ship. Sh2.2 million. Let that sink in.

The figure was part of a Sh5 million that was wasted on rooms for politicians and bureaucrats that were left unused while athletes and team officials were in some cases abandoned to fend for themselves. According to sprint coach John Anzrah, who was subsequently expelled from the Games after being caught using an athlete’s accreditation to access the dining area, he and fellow trainers “were taken to a residential three-bedroom house and dumped there by National Olympic Committee of Kenya officials without basic amenities including food.” All the while, cruise ship rooms for the President and five-star hotel accommodations for Parliamentary committee chairmen lay idle.

But enraging as this is, it should not be surprising. Not from a jet-setting President who prefers to watch a Formula One race while his citizens are massacred as happened in November 2014. Not from an administration which in its first month in office was already steeped in scandal over allegations that Deputy President William Ruto had spent Sh100 million in taxpayer money to hire a luxury jet. Not from a government that in 2006 started building a house for the Vice President initially budgeted at Sh179 million, whose cost had ballooned to Sh453 million by 2008 and which five years later apparently required a further Sh100 million in renovations before its first resident could move in. Especially not from a governing coalition that treats State House and its accoutrements as private property.

The flagrant abuse of public resources for the private comfort of politicians knows no limits. From the obscene wages we pay Members of Parliament to the even more obscene “retirement benefits” we are forced to fork out for politicians who may or may not have “retired”, Kenya has become a country where mali ya umma (public property) has been converted into mali ya kuuma (property for nibbling).

Even in death, politicians continue to take a chunk out of us. When visiting to condole with the family of the recently deceased former cabinet minister, William Ole Ntimama, President Kenyatta had no qualms about pledging public funds to offset funeral expenses for a multi-millionaire who had been implicated in corruption and in fanning ethnic violence which claimed the lives of thousands. In July 2008, he was even caught on camera in an unguarded moment apparently admitting responsibility for the killings of 600-1000 people and inviting then Chepalungu MP (now Bomet Governor) Isaac Ruto to "bring his people" for an all-out battle over the Mau Forest.

Similarly, the state funeral for former First Lady, Lucy Kibaki, illustrated just how cavalier the government is with our money. It came despite the fact that her husband, in his last year in office, had already awarded himself and his predecessor, Daniel Arap Moi, tens of millions of shillings in retirement benefits which, as of November last year, continued to be paid in violation of a court order declaring them unconstitutional.

As First Lady, a designation which appears nowhere in our laws, Mrs Kibaki was herself quietly paid an annual salary of Sh6 million a year, fuss only being kicked up when similar salaries were in 2008 proposed for the wives of then Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka and then Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Till today, it has never been made clear whether Margaret Kenyatta, or indeed any of the wives of the 47 County Governors, draw public salaries.

Even Cabinet Secretaries, who by law are not meant to be politicians, have gotten in on the act. Sports CS Hassan Wario’s antics in Rio aside, they apparently continue to draw a public salary of over Sh1 million a month even after they have been relieved of duty. An unnamed government source reportedly told the Daily Nation that this was “to cushion them from falling prey to enemies of the State”. But former Labour CS, Kazungu Kambi, when asked about whether he was still being paid pointed to what may be the real reason: “I’m a politician remember.”

In May, the immediate former Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission chief, Philip Kinisu declared that over Sh600 billion in public funds was stolen every year. 600 BILLION. If you spent Sh16 million a day, it would take you over a century to spend what the government loses to corruption in one year. Yet as crazy as that figure is, it does not include the many millions we are legally and routinely forced to cough up to keep our politicians and their families in the manner to which they have now become accustomed. All this at the cost of much needed schools, teachers, hospitals, medical equipment, infrastructure and, yes, even accommodation for athletes and their coaches at the Olympics.

Quitting On Integrity

It came as no big surprise. “I will not resign”, declared the new chair of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, Philip Kinisu, regurgitating what has become a stock phrase in the vocabulary of all Kenyan public officials. Barely six months after he was appointed to head the country’s premier public ethics agency, Kinisu has been accused of ethical violations of his own, after his family-owned firm was found to be transacting business with entities he was meant to be investigating.

There is nothing new in his claim that “resigning would be setting a terrible precedent because any person can fabricate a claim against a public official”.  It is the same excuse we have heard before most notably from the embattled commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. The defiant language is reminiscent of similar statements from cabinet ministers such as Anne Waiguru and Amos Kimunya, who memorably declared that he would rather die than resign. In fact, there is a long and unsavory history of refusal to resign, or to step aside, whenever the integrity of public officials is questioned.

Professor J. Patrick Dobel, of the University of Washington in his article entitled The Ethics of Resigning published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, states that “resigning from office is a critical ethical decision for individuals. Resignation also remains one of the basic moral resources for individuals of integrity. The option to resign reinforces integrity, buttresses responsibility and supports accountability.”

The impetus for resignation flows from the understanding that public office is held on trust, the belief that what matters more is safeguarding the faith that the public has in the mechanisms and systems of democratic governance rather than the individual culpability of office holders. In fact, a principled resignation is paradoxically a reflection of the abundance, not of the lack, of personal ethics among such officials.

Kenyans yearn for such displays of integrity from the folks they pay to manage their affairs. But sadly for a country where the abuse of public office for private gain has been elevated to an art form, personal interest has always seemed to trump public interest. Whether it is as a result of principled policy disagreement or because of allegations of wrongdoing, politicians and bureaucrats alike have been loath to let go of their jobs, many time preferring to be pushed rather than to jump.

One can take lessons from the resignation of the immediate former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, over the loss of the Brexit referendum. It did not require the hullaballoo of street protests or parliamentary committee decisions to force him out. The decision was personal, the stinging rebuke delivered by the electorate sufficient. Contrast this with the actions of then President Mwai Kibaki, who after losing a referendum on a new constitution in 2005, chose to fire those whom the public had sided with. It is clear that he did not think his mandate to govern was in any way affected by the fact that the people in whose name he claimed to do so, had disagreed with him on such a fundamental issue.

On the other hand, one could also question the actions of the “rebels” in Kibaki’s cabinet, led by Raila Odinga, who, despite their disagreement with the official government position on this most basic of all issues, would themselves not contemplate principled resignation, but rather, opted to hang on till they were fired.

The fact that resignations from office are so rare in Kenyan history is thus a telling indictment of the logic that permeates our pretend democracy where government is divorced from the consent and will of the governed. As Kinisu’s explanation demonstrates, it is a system that privileges the position of officials above the credibility of the institutions they lead; one that is less concerned with what the public thinks than with the private tribulations of the elite that lords it over them. This is the real and far more terrible precedent that Kinisu seeks to preserve by his refusal to jump.

Why Kenya's Hate Speech Legislation Is Not Really About Hate

Every once in a while, Kenyans love to get into a tiff over the preponderance of hateful and bigoted messaging that forms the subtext of our national politics. While the idea of the nation as, in David Ndii’s words, “a marriage of tribes”, of ethnicities that compete for chunks of a “national cake”, appears to be taken for granted, the seemier side of that supposed competition intermittently captures national attention.

This week, the news has been dominated by the arrest and incarceration of 8 MPs from across the political divide on charges of ethnic incitement and hate speech. Amid all the ink that is spilt decrying (and defending) what was said, relatively little is dedicated to examining how our history, our understanding of what Kenya is and the structure of our politics conspire to fan the flames of ethnic bigotry.

In a sense, the furore over hate speech is not really about hate but about tribes. The Kenyan political scene is wholly tolerant of ill-informed and detestable statements about categories people identified by race, gender, sexuality and class. Further, the fuss is not about the existence of ethnic prejudice per se, but about the public expression of the whispered views that citizens are encouraged to hold by politicians.

Even our laws specify this ethnic basis for proscribing hate speech. Section 13 of the National Cohesion and Integration Act under the title “Hate Speech” only criminalizes “threatening, abusive or insulting or involves the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour … if such person intends thereby to stir up ethnic hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances, ethnic hatred is likely to be stirred up.” This is despite the constitution describing its protection of free expression as not extending to hate speech based on “race, sex, pregnancy, marital status, health status, ethnic or social origin, colour, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, dress, language or birth.” Thus the fairly common, and abhorrent, statements about gays, women and refugees are perfectly legal provided they say nothing about their victim’s tribe.

In fact, in order to qualify as hate speech, speech must not necessarily be intended to cause hate. That it is likely to do so, whether through recklessness or ignorance on the part of either the speaker or the audience, is enough. Neither does hateful talk about individuals count, unless such will incite tribal hatreds. This essentially protects politicians, but not their supporters from personal abuse (rather similar to the colonial era law in the penal code which criminalizes “obscene, abusive or insulting language” against ones employer but not against one’s employees!). These are quirks born of the wholly understandable preoccupation with preventing ethnic based bloodletting such as was witnessed in the aftermath of the bungled 2007 elections.

It is perhaps not surprising that a nation taking umbrage only public expressions of ethnic bigotry fundamentally sees itself as an arena of existential tribal competition. The idea of politics as managing and exploiting ethnic relations is one the ruling class is happy to peddle as it not only disguises their class-based exploitation, but also allows them to portray the fruits of this exploitation as a benefit to at least some of their victims. So instead of the reality of an elite class stealing from everyone else, we are presented with the illusion of tribes vicariously having a stake in the fortunes of their elites.

The current government “crackdown” notwithstanding, the governing elite and their rivals in the opposition are unlikely to want to fundamentally change this state of affairs. In fact, that President Uhuru Kenyatta has not once stood up to condemn Moses Kuria’s regular outrages, is only outdone by Raila Odinga’s defense of George Aladwa’s equally loose talk. As we approach the 2017 election, it is much more likely that politicians on both sides will continue to whip up ethnic divisions with the tacit approval of their principals.

Who Will Pull Kenyans From The Rubble Of Their Collapsing State?

As I write this, rescue operations are still ongoing at the site of a collapsed 7-storey building in Huruma where at least 37 people lost their lives, and 136, including a seven month-old baby girl, have been pulled out of the rubble. 70 are still listed as missing.

Sadly, such building collapses are far from a rare occurrence in Kenya. According to one study, between 2006 and 2014, 17 buildings collapsed, killing 84 people and injuring nearly 300. These disasters are all predictably followed by public howls of outrage, government threats of retribution and politicians’ promises of “Never again”. Then it all quietens down, and nothing changes till the next tragedy.

This script is being followed in Huruma, right down to the VIP visits (though the police teargassing of opposition supporters accompanying Raila Odinga to the site was a new twist). Recriminations have already begun in earnest and after initially stressing the futility of finger-pointing and playing the blame game, worried public officials are busy scouting for scapegoats.

Already 5 people, including the building owners and 3 public officials have been arrested but not yet been charged. But even when criminal charges are eventually preferred, history holds out little hope for justice. Two days after the collapse of another 7-storey building in the same neighbourhood which killed 4 people in January last year, Governor Evans Kidero, suspended 18 county officials for failing to enforce the law. It is unclear what followed. No prosecutions appear to have been instituted and at least two, Rose Muema, Chief Officer in charge of Planning, Urban Development and Housing, and Justsus Mwendwa Kathenge, Director of Enforcement and Compliance, appear to have been reinstated once the public outcry passed.

Mr Kathenge is today one of the 3 officials arrested in connection with the latest collapse. He is however, no stranger to our courts. Following yet another building collapse, this time in Embakasi in 2011, which killed another 4 people and injured 14 others, Mr Kathenge and the building owner among others, were charged with manslaughter. However, Mr Kathenge moved to the High Court and obtained orders prohibiting his prosecution.

As with the latest disaster, it is instructive that two years prior, in 2009, the then Nairobi City Council had tried to stop construction of the Embakasi building after finding that it had been illegally erected. However, the developer obtained a court injunction restraining the Council. This is another feature of these tragedies: constant complaints by government officials that the judiciary is standing in the way of enforcement of building codes and of prosecution of negligent officials.

But, like the cases they file, this contention falls apart on closer scrutiny. For example, when stopping Mr Kathenge’s prosecution, Justice Isaac Lenaola said it was “baffling” that the state had not presented any evidence tying him to offences. It seems, as with the half-hearted suspensions 6 years later, there was little will to actually prosecute these cases to the fullest. What is presented as a judicial roadblock to effective executive action is in reality an abuse of the judicial system by an executive that is keen to assuage public anger while shielding its officials from the consequences of their failure to act.

Another Kenyan ritual that follows in the wake of such tragedies is the declaration of knee-jerk and poorly-thought out reactions. President Uhuru Kenyatta set the ball rolling with his illegal order for the arrest of the building owners. He followed this up with what one Twitter wag described as his “let-them-eat-cake moment” when he ordered the immediate eviction of persons living in unsafe residential housing.  Of course, the President did not bother to explain where he proposed to resettle the millions whom this order would render homeless given that an audit by the National Construction Authority that he himself ordered last year found that 58 percent of buildings in the capital were unfit to live in.

Many others have proposed remedies from demolitions to beefing up the capacity to enforce building laws. Few though, are speaking of the need to address the root causes of the economic marginalization that leads people to live in decrepit and dangerous buildings. Even fewer are talking about mitigating the inevitable increases in rent that enforcing building codes would visit on the urban poor. Or of how the massive increases in property prices and rents over the last two decades, driven partly by the laundering of illicit proceeds through the real estate market, are pushing decent housing out of the reach of many city households. As before, the government's tough talk seem designed not to solve the problem, but to get the public to move on by delivering the impression, and not necessarily the reality, of serious action.

It is clear that the dead and injured in Huruma are more than just victims of a collapsed building. They, and indeed all Kenyans, are buried in the rubble of a collapsing state, one built on the shaky foundations of officially sanctioned robbery and impunity. And there is none to pull them out.

Can We Share The Kenyan Space?

In the 1970s, Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, came up with the concept of “shared space” after being asked to reduce the speed of traffic in a village in north Holland. He eliminated all forms of regulation on the street and to his nervous surprise, found that average speeds fell by half. According to this 2006 article by Emma Clarke, John Adams, professor of geography at University College London, whose research laid the foundation for Monderman’s work, argues that when protected from hazards, human beings readjust their risk threshold. ‘You fit a car with better brakes, people don’t drive the same way as before and enjoy an extra measure of safety, they drive faster and start braking later.”

This behaviour is based on an assessment of the risks they incurred during their commute, which risks are often ameliorated by the traffic rules and norms. The solution, then, was to remove these rules that work by mainly separating drivers from oncoming traffic and from pedestrians, and by doing so, increase drivers awareness of risk to themselves and to other road users. “Once the tools are taken away and you put some uncertainty into the street in terms of who has right of way, drivers and pedestrians naturally become more attentive and engaged... You redistribute the burden of risk, giving pedestrians more control,” says Adams.

One can learn a lot about the problems of Kenya by observing the behaviour on our roads.

Like the government that built them, they are hideously expensive but rarely in good shape. Everyone is in a hurry to get on them only to idle away many hours in the seemingly endless traffic jams. As everyone hurries up and waits, enterprising individuals freed from the constraints of law and conscience are getting ahead. These days it seems that everyone who is anyone - from diplomats to County Governors to Cabinet Secretaries- enjoys life on the fast lane courtesy of the Kenya Police, sirens, flashing trafficators or just plain old bad manners.

The rest of us middle-class nobodies can wait after all. It’s not like we are on the way to do anything important. So what if we have to spend three hours to get to the office or home just because the President is in a hurry to get somewhere? Members of County Assemblies have also argued that they should also be exempt from traffic rules because they have weighty matters to attend. This is, of course, unlike the rest of us whose petty concern is trying to earn enough to pay their obscene wages. We have to make way.

The other interesting thing about our roads is those who are actually not on them. There’s a kind of apartheid system where the poor who cannot afford cars or get car loans to buy cars they cannot afford are considered a nuisance. They die in ever larger numbers and are blamed for it. Even the pathways and pedestrian crossings supposedly built for them are not safe courtesy of the previously mentioned, morally challenged drivers. 

The roads tell us a lot about the hierarchies at work in Kenya and the relative values they place of the time and lives as well as the fortunes of the various classes of people. At the very top is the political class and those riding on their coat tails, from government officials to the wannabe county potentates. Everything stops for them. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of their dash to riches. Ours is a system that rewards the unscrupulous and punishes those who follow the rules. To ascertain this, one need only look at the records and bank accounts of the Honourable men and women in our houses of Parliament.

Our middle classes are often too busy trying to stay on the road to nowhere in particular and too busy trying to get ahead to make any noise about the state of affairs. They are grateful for any crumbs they get, any gaps they are allowed in the snarl-up that is life in Kenya even as their prospects of actually making it recede. So, for example, they will cheer the rise of property prices, much of which is driven by the money-laundering of the elite, even as that very rise ensures that their dreams of one day owning their own home will remain just that. Accept and move on, they say. Don’t complain too loudly and if you do, do it on Twitter. There’s no point in resisting the predations of the political and economic roadhogs, those of matatu-esque dispositions.

Of course, at the very bottom of the pile are the poor, whose presence on the Kenyan road is barely tolerated despite their vastly superior numbers. We prefer that they keep out of sight, stick to the places we have prepared for them. It is they, not the road that is the problem. And when the system crushes them, they die unmourned, blamed for their poverty, for making poor electoral choices, for supposedly not working hard enough or being more enterprising. Only by grouping together and expressing their power through sheer force of numbers can they force their way across. And when periodically their anger spills over in riots and “mass action” they can even take over the streets entirely.

Like the police on our roads, our institutions of accountability simply serve to keep everybody in their proper place. They are there to police the citizens, to clear a path for our betters. While they may express umbrage at the toll that the system takes both in blood and in treasure, the fact is they are its enablers and foot soldiers, constantly on the take, either openly fleecing the citizens or in more subtle ways, pocketing massive salaries for doing little work.

The inequalities on the Kenyan roads, as in Kenyan political and economic life, and the rules and norms that have developed to enforce them, need a radical rethink. We need to redistribute the “burden of risk” across our entire political and economic system.  Today, it is the poor who shoulder the largest proportion of it. The current rules and norms conspire to insulate the wealthier classes from the consequences of bad political and economic choices. During the post-election violence of 2008, for example, I remember the police lining up on the road that separates the gated middle-class housing estates where I live from the Kibera slums. Their overriding objective, it seemed, was to insulate us from the violence of the poor, which violence was a direct consequence of the frustrations and deprivations visited upon them by the system we were all so eager to uphold in the name of peace.

Just as they are on our roads, our high and mighty are protected from suffering the consequences of their theft and incompetence. They are, generally speaking, safe from the anger generated by the meltdown of the education system, the soaring inflation, the rising insecurity. Our system allows them to proceed with their lives in happy-go-lucky fashion, oblivious to the misery they continue to inflict. And it tells us that we should be horrified when someone breaks the mold to take a cane to Raila Odinga or throw shoes at President Uhuru Kenyatta. We think it unbecoming. Our rulers should only see our happy faces as we dance for them and pretend everything is hunky-dory.

When the ugly violence that the poor have to navigate on a daily basis suddenly and unexpectedly appears in an upmarket mall, we mourn for the victims. But even then, we continue to be blind to other deaths. Who laments the dead of Mpeketoni or the murdered of Garissa? Where are the monuments to mark the victims of Bungoma? Why are these not as deserving of remembrance as the victims of Westgate? As we return to our malls in supposed defiance of the terrorist assault on our way of life, do we see the suffering of those who cannot afford to indulge in the illusion of safety, for whom poverty, violence and death continue to be the stuff of everyday life? What would we do different if we did?

A village in the Netherlands that had a problem with speeding traffic passing a primary school decided to solve this, not by erecting larger fences, but by extending the playground across the street. Suddenly confronted with the risks of their behaviour, drivers spontaneously reduced speeds. We too similarly need to dismantle the system of privileges and entitlement that keeps us separate from and oblivious to the risks of our political and economic behaviour. We need to re-imagine and recreate Kenya as a “shared space” where everyone, not just the poor, takes their fair share of the risks and everyone, not just the powerful, enjoys their fair share of the benefits.