Kenya's Greatest Gamble Yet

Last Sunday, the Daily Nation bravely shone a spotlight on the gambling craze that is sweeping the nation. Sports betting has taken the country by storm. Since 2013 when the first online sports betting company, SportPesa, was registered, the Betting Control and Licensing Board has awarded similar licenses to nearly 30 other bookmakers. The industry today has a turnover of Ksh 2.1 billion which is expected to nearly triple over the next three years.

Yet, as with all gambling, this is not just a good news story about company profits. The fact is those profits are made on the back of broken dreams and crippled lives. While the touted image is the beaming face of a winner holding his big cheque, rarely seen are the millions of losers and the toll gambling addiction is taking on families across the country.

In February, the director of communications at SportPesa, Kester Shimonyo, told the Nation that people “should bet for fun but it should not be taken as a fulltime economic activity”. However, taking a chance on the wheel of fortune has been a national activity for a long time. 

Government has been turned into a looting machine which has destroyed the meritocratic basis of our political economy. Get-rich-quick schemes of the politically connected have undermined the utility of education, skills and character as guarantors of success has been severely undermined.

Today, in public affairs, what matters is the lottery of who you know, rather than the certainty of what. In today’s Kenya, where your last name can, in the words of Kalonzo Muyoka, “betray you”, and where values can be a liability, what does it matter the qualifications you hold, or knowledge or integrity you have?

The declaration earlier this week by Commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission that they were willing to resign office was also the culmination of yet another a high stakes gamble of the sort that all too frequently seem to be the preferred way to run public affairs. It has been obvious to anyone who cared to look that public confidence in both the Commission and its Commissioners, the bedrock upon which any credible and peaceful election would rest, had long since eroded away. Opinion surveys have shown that citizens across political and ethnic divides had an increasingly dim view of the IEBC with nearly half of respondents in one poll saying the body could not be trusted to handle the 2017 election.

Yet despite this and through weekly public protests called by the opposition beginning April in which several Kenyans died or were brutalized at the hands of the police, and in which many businesses were looted, the Commissioners sat put and refused to budge. Talk of their resigning was peremptorily brushed aside even when the inevitability of their removal became plain. It was clear, like the many other Kenyans staking their lives and fortunes on the turn of a soccer match, the IEBC commissioners were betting on the outcome of the political match between the ruling Jubilee and opposition CORD coalitions.

Like their fellow gamblers, they do not see their future as dependent on their personal performance (already soiled by the failures during the 2013 election), or on their integrity, but on the games played by politicians.

Now following their resignation, Kenya will now embark on her greatest gamble yet. For 3 years, we have ignored the need to comprehensively reform our electoral system. Everything is broken: from the voter register to the petitions system, especially as regards challenges to the Presidential election. We have done little to mitigate the weaknesses exposed by past elections, to acquire the requisite technology and making necessary changes to the law. Party nominations remain fraught with cheating and violence and attempts to regulate campaign finance have hit a brick wall. 

Now, with a year to go to the 2017 polls, we find ourselves forced to make fundamental changes. It is doubtful that there will be enough time for anything other than “minimum” reforms followed by a roll of the dice and many prayers for peace. 

This nation of inveterate gamblers, which has since independence placed similar wagers with disastrous consequences, will once again stake its future, not on its skill and knowledge, but on the games played by its politicians.

And just as with the sports betting, on election day the images of the election will be the beaming politicians and voters' purple-stained fingers, not the rage and disappointment resulting from an election with little public faith.

In many ways, Kenya has been playing with matches and riding her luck. Yet we are storing up terrible trouble for the day our luck runs out.

KOT Won The Battle Against Koffi Olomide But Is Losing The War. Here's Why.

Last week’s deportation of famed 60-year-old Congolese rumba star, Koffi Olomide, after he was filmed apparently kicking a female member of his band at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport has once again highlighted both the power and limitations of social media in Kenya.

A video of the incident went viral on the internet precipitating a furious reaction from the ever vocal Kenyans On Twitter (KOT) demanding action be taken against the singer. His arrest and deportation the next day was hailed as an example of how the collective voices of citizens can be harnesses through the internet to prompt governing authorities to move.

This is, of course, not unique to Kenya. Across the globe, activists have become adept at utilizing the internet and social media to power movements for political and social change. The so-called “Twitter revolutions” that swept through countries as diverse as Moldova, Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia and Iran demonstrated that the ability of ordinary citizens to communicate and share ideas can have real consequences. In fact, authoritarian governments have sought to restrict the availability of such technologies fearing that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight. A good example was the shutting down of social media by the Uganda government during the elections in March.

However, it is instructive to note that most social media revolutionaries have ultimately failed in delivering sustained political change. Across the Middle East, the dreams fostered by the Arab Spring have given way to the nightmare of civil war and state disintegration. In Turkey and in Egypt, authoritarian leaders were able to reassert their power.

The fact is much social media activism tends to focus on the visible and easily apprehended symbols of oppression rather than its hidden and deeply ingrained roots. This is partly because of the nature of the internet and social media. There is only so much insight you can stuff in to 140 characters. And the glut of information and causes demanding our attention mean that most can afford little more than a cursory acquaintance with the issues. Stripped of nuance and context, much social media activism attempts to reduce complex issues to pithy hashtags and to reproduce the world in superficial dualities of black and white, good and evil. It is thus not surprising that these utopian visions would disintegrated when exposed to the full spectrum of reality. As Ivan Kratsev noted in the New York Times last year, “you can tweet a revolution but you cannot tweet a government”.

The true value of social media lies neither in its undoubted ability to mobilize large numbers of people around a particular issue nor in its undeniable power to instrumentalize their voices to achieve specific short term goals. The real power is in creating a public sphere where conversations can happen. Just as the printing press helped democratize Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, so social media and the internet can foster change in the long term by building online communities that articulate, echo, challenge, shape and transform political ideas. As noted by Clay Shirky, Professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine, “access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation”.

The impact of social media in the case of Koffi Olomide should thus not be judged solely by his deportation, the cancellation of his concerts in Kenya and Zambia and his jailing in Congo, but by how conversations and attitudes towards gender-based violence, and in particular violence against women, are shaped in the coming days, weeks and months.

In 2013, online outrage at the rape and attempted murder of a teenage girl in Busia by six men whom police “punished” by ordering them to cut grass, led to the hunt, re-arrest, trial and subsequent jailing of three of the perpetrators. Yet, beyond this “quick win” the system that allowed the atrocity to happen remains unreformed and none of the officers involved appear to have suffered any consequences. More to the point, KOT discussions of this have vanished. 

Such must not be the legacy of social media.

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.