Netanyahu, Uhuru And The 30 Pieces Of Silver

Kenya media’s coverage of the visit by Benjamin Netanyahu, the first by a sitting Israeli prime minister in 30 years, has predictably focused on the “goodies” that he was supposedly bringing. There has been lots of discussion of what the country stands to gain from cooperation with Israel in areas ranging from security to agriculture but relatively little about the price Israel would extract for such cooperation.

It is undeniable that the Israelis have much to offer. As we have been constantly reminded over the course of the last few days, the visit comes on the 40^th anniversary of Operation Thunderbolt, the spectacularly daring Israeli commando raid on Entebbe Airport in Uganda which freed over a hundred hostages from a hijacked Air France plane. The rescue cemented Israel’s fearsome reputation in dealing with terrorist threats and such expertise will undoubtedly come in handy as Kenya faces up to terror threats of its own emanating primarily from the Somalia-based extremist group, Al Shabaab.

Beyond security, Israel is famed for its agricultural and water management innovations which have made the desert bloom as well as for its booming hi-tech industry whose goods and services account for half its industrial exports. Its disaster response capabilities have many times been on display whenever Israeli crews have lent a hand to their Kenya counterparts to extract people trapped in collapsed buildings. In these, and in many other areas, Kenya can derive substantial benefits from a closer relationship with the Jewish state. As the late Tom Mboya once remarked, “any African who turs Israel cannot fail to be impressed by the achievement made in such a short time from poor soil and with so few natural resources”.

There is, though, another side to this coin.  Netanyahu’s visit is also a charm offensive. “Israel is coming back to Africa. Africa is coming back to Israel,” he has declared. Israel’s overriding objective in its relations with the continent has always been to break out of its political and diplomatic isolation. But it is important that we do not lose sight of the reasons why that isolation exists in the first place.

Past ruptures in Africa’s relationship with Israel have been attributed to pressure by Arab states, particularly in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis and the Yom Kippur War (“The Arabs have the numbers, the space and the oil. In the third would they outweigh Israel” as Senegal’s first President, Léopold Sédar Senghor, put it) and Tel Aviv’s relations with the apartheid regime in South Africa.  However, these issues have for the most part been resolved and, by her own count, Israel today maintains full diplomatic relations with 39 of 47 of the countries south of the Sahara and has nine resident embassies on the continent.

The major sticking point has been the Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The African Union has repeatedly stressed its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state and condemned the “illegal and illegitimate” Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as well as her settlement policies which “contravenes International Law and undermines the two-state solution and prospects for peace”. African countries have also repeatedly blocked Israeli attempts to regain observer status at the African Union precisely because of this.

It is not surprising that nations on the continent, which have themselves experienced the horrors of racist colonial domination, would feel a sense of solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians. In 2014, South African icon, Desmond Tutu said the "the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces … is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."

Breaking this African consensus is Netanyahu’s declared aim. And he seems to have at least partially succeeded in winning over President Uhuru Kenyatta, who has now called for a “re-evaluation” of Africa’s relationship with Israel. In doing so, Uhuru has traded in our values – and sold out the Palestinians for thirty pieces of silver.

But perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, in the recent past, the Kenyatta administration has stood with North Korea, Myanmar, Iran and Sudan at the UN to oppose protections for human rights defenders and voted with China and Russia to remove references to freedom of expression in a resolution on online freedom. Let’s face it. Values are not his strong suit.

Lessons From Our Burning Schools

The wave of unrest afflicting secondary schools in Kenya has understandably elicited much public concern. Many have chimed in with their take on what is causing it, with most blaming panic over exams, drug abuse, an oppressive school environment, wayward parenting and incompetent government officials. Some have even suggested that the abolition of corporal punishment is to blame.

Given that this problem is not new, it is rather curious that there seems to be such confusion over its causes. According to a 1996 PhD thesis by Margaret Wangeci Gatimu of Portland University, disruptive unrest in the form of class boycotts and riots in secondary schools had by then been steadily increasing in Kenya since the mid-1970s. The study highlighted many of the same issues that are cited today.

So perhaps it is better to ask not just why unrest happens, but also why the problems said to cause it have been allowed to fester across generations of students. In a media interview earlier this week, the Cabinet Secretary for Education bemoaned the fact that recommendations from at least two task forces appointed by his predecessors as well as from many independent researchers, remain unimplemented.

This failure to effectively address the issue, despite the existence of such reports, is a manifestation of a wider systemic reluctance to employ evidence-based measures to solve problems. And this goes beyond schools. In tackling security and terrorism, Kenya has seemed to prefer knee-jerk solutions to what are complex and historical challenges. The desire has seemed to be to address the immediate crisis and move on rather than to proactively tackle the underlying and fundamental causes.

An example of this is the reaction to last week’s bombing of Elram village in Mandera by Kenya Defence Forces planes which killed at least 4 children. There have been few calls for the incident to be exhaustively investigated, for people to be held to account and, more importantly, for lessons to be learnt to ensure this never happens again. Similarly, the circumstances surrounding the January overrunning of a KDF base by the Al Shabaab group at El Adde in Somalia and consequent massacre of at least 141 soldiers are similarly shrouded in mystery. 

To these we could add the many terrorist incidents that have killed hundreds of citizens since 2012, including the attacks on the Westgate shopping mall and on Garissa University College. The many failures that allowed the atrocities to happen and that hindered effective response, appear to have been swept under the carpet. On the contrary, a Presidential promise to set up a public inquiry into Westgate failed to materialize and, as a senior police officer told The Nation last July, “there was never a review meeting on how we handled incidents”.

Earlier this week, in reaction to a terrorist attack on the Ataturk airport in the Turkish capital, Istanbul, which reportedly killed 41 people and injured more than 230, Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet ordered the beefing up of security at all Kenyan airports. But there have been few queries about what this actually means and even fewer indications that Kenyan security agencies are learning from and adapting to previous incidents. We rarely hear of our security agencies sending teams abroad to study how such attacks happened and how they are investigated. Meanwhile, domestic incidents are similarly studiously ignored. For example, reports on the August 2013 fire which razed the arrivals terminal at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and on the improvised explosive device that went off at the same airport 5 months later, have yet to be made public. It is unclear whether they have led to any changes.

A similar dynamic is at work when it comes to addressing the root causes of post-election violence. Three years after it was handed over to the President, the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission continues to gather dust in Parliament. The report exposed many of the deep-seated maladies that have fuelled blood-letting at election time but even as we approach another polarizing poll, there is little mention of it, let alone of implementing its recommendations.  The focus of the political class is on the urgent and important but largely superficial task of reconstituting the electoral commission.

This, more than anything, highlights the fact that as a country, we are obsessed with the problems of politicians, and not those of the people. In the end, this obsession is the real reason why the problems at our schools and the state of insecurity across the country will continue to fester once the immediate crisis has passed.

Jailing MPs Won't End Hate Speech. Here's What Will.

This past week, national attention has focused on 8 MPs charged with contravening hate speech and incitement laws, who suffered the rare misfortune of being denied bail and ended up spending all of three nights in jail. After their release, they confessed that the ordeal had precipitated a change of heart and that they are now transformed into paragons of tolerance and brotherly love. If only it were that easy!

Ethnic incitement is an ugly beast that rears its head in every election cycle and is a product of, paradoxically, our obsession with the politics of ethnicity and our concomitant fear of the place to which that road inevitably leads.

It is no coincidence that it is much more pronounced at election time. Elections themselves are primarily framed as zero-sum contests between tribes for a share of government revenues and jobs -the proverbial “national cake”- and not between ideas of how to improve lives of ordinary Kenyans. This framing privileges the problems politicians face in accessing national office and the opportunities for plunder that come with it, above those of the people, whose main interest is in securing government services.

It follows then that any serious attempt to ameliorate the dangers needs to address the basis of our politics and political competition.  Kenya is more than just a collection of feuding tribes. That is just one way of imagining the nation. If anything, the problems of ordinary folks, from unemployment to healthcare pay little heed to ethnic cleavages. And many of them are caused and exacerbated by the preying of a multi-ethnic elite. That the class inequalities within any particular ethnic community far outstrip those between tribes is testament to this.

This is neither to say that horizontal discrepancies between tribes in accessing government services do not exist nor that they are unimportant. It is clear that governing elites have perfected a system of patronage, effectively holding communities hostage to the political fortunes of self-declared “tribal kingpins”. The economic and political marginalization and exclusion of regions populated by ethnic communities that have no share in government reinforces the logic that to avoid a similar fate, tribes must have one of their own in power and consequently the view of communities as factories competing for the production of public officials.

Yet the concept of such officials essentially doing their dirty work on behalf of the tribe ignores the fact that the limited benefits accruing to their particular regions from the diversion of national resources are scant reward for the sacrifices they make. They do little to ameliorate the impoverishment caused by kleptocratic governance. The looting of taxes via scams such as Goldenberg and Angloleasing does not discriminate between tribes. Neither are the proceeds funneled to tribal funds. Rather, as the Kroll report demonstrated, the loot is secreted abroad into the personal accounts of the politicians and a small circle of family and friends.

Still, a little being better than nothing, such favoritism does help to cement the idea of elections as an arena where tribes fight for their turn at the dinner table, rather than as a means to discipline errant officials. It focuses energies on ethnicity rather than performance and explains the phenomenon of communities rallying around tribal "kingpins". Politicians become synonymous with "leaders" and all power is increasingly concentrated within the political sphere rather than dispersed across society.

A different conception of what Kenya is could turn this logic on its head. An understanding of class and ideological rather than ethnic affiliation would create possibilities of alternative basis for articulation of group interests and thus political mobilization. As opposed to parties that are little more than tribal enclaves, political entrepreneurs could create multi-ethnic coalitions composed of farmers or labor or social liberals to take on entrenched interests.

This is not an easy task but it is one that holds great promise. That it would require a greater focus on the bread-and-butter issues that matter to ordinary citizens rather than a fixation with power and patronage is just one. It would also incentivize inclusive rather than exclusive political platforms, and broaden rather than narrow the constituencies politicians would need to appeal to. It would transform party manifestos from mere rhetorical flourishes to actual instruments of accountability and raise the quality of political debate in the country.

More relevantly, people choose their weapons and tactics according to the fights they expect to have. When wrapped up in identity, issues and threats can seem intensely personal, even existential and concerned parties ultimately irreconcilable. Responses will tend to be extreme and violent. Hatred and incitement will almost inevitably follow. However, when framed as abstract ideological battles, as contests of wit rather than spit, the issues can appear far less threatening and responses can be far more rational and deliberative.

So while it is important to enforce laws against ethnic incitement, and to prosecute hate mongers, having politicians spend a few nights in prison will not end it. Only by shifting the basis of our politics from mutual fear to solving common problems can we reduce the incentives for ethnic mobilization and sustainably change behavior.