No More Partying At State House

Earlier this week, President Uhuru Kenyatta summoned the press corps to State House to relay a message to the nation. However, he was addressing Kenyans, not in his capacity as the country’s CEO, but as a leader of one of 14 political parties affiliated with the Jubilee coalition.  The big news was, of course, that the parties had agreed to merge.

The choice of State House, the seat of the Presidency, as venue for what is plainly a partisan event was alarming. The constitution describes the President as “a symbol of national unity” but Kenyatta appears to be stretching the limits of this beyond what is acceptable. Party unity, even within the governing coalition, is clearly not national unity.

On the contrary, what the event highlighted is the creeping capture of the state by the party and the blurring of the lines between the two. And this is just the latest episode. The frequent and unseemly exchanges between the opposition Coalition for Reform and Democracy on the one hand and the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit on the other are legendary. They aptly demonstrate the latter's propensity to see themselves as more than just as civil servants working within the Presidency, but also as partisan agents of the Jubilee coalition.

One could also point to the curious case of Interior Secretary, Gen (RT) Joseph Nkaissery. I8 months ago, he was an opposition MP, having been elected on an Orange Democratic Movement ticket in 2013. Yet following his appointment to the Cabinet, he has been traipsing around his former constituency, pretending to be a member of the Jubilee coalition. So far, it seems, no one has asked whether he resigned his membership of ODM. It is almost taken for granted that going into cabinet automatically translates into joining Jubilee.

But why should this be of concern? Some on social media have suggested that the raging questions over the use of state assets were little more than just a storm in a teacup, a petty fuss over the use of microphones and presidential daises.  However, such thinking is dangerously ignorant of the lessons of Kenyan history. One of the reasons why the State House event left a bad taste in the mouth is the memory of the consequences of the fusion of the party and the state during the KANU era. That merger, which begun in the 60s under Uhuru Kenyatta's father and was completed under his successor, Daniel Arap Moi, was the foundation for a half century of abuses. As loyalties within government were steered away from serving the people and towards the party and its leadership, the state itself and the goods it held in trust for the people of Kenya were transformed into the personal property of the President.

In a very real sense, the cult of personality and the concentration of power in the person of the President that was engendered by Jomo Kenyatta, Moi and to a lesser extent, Mwai Kibaki, was essentially built on this fusion of party and state. Its legacy lives in the present day, when even nominally independent officials are loathe to go against the governing party line. The clearly partisan behavior of the police is a good example.

Further, as they say, the fish rots from the head. Other public officials will take their cue from the President. During the Al Shabaab attack on Garissa University, in which 148 people were killed, the elite GSU Recce Company was delayed in Nairobi as the police plane had apparently gone to Mombasa to fetch relatives of the Airwing commandant.

Separating the President’s personal and party affairs from that of the people is therefore no fickle matter. When asked about the appropriateness of hosting partisan political functions at State House, the President’s men are wont to point at US President Barack Obama's similar use of the White House. But while true, they neglect to mention that his party actually pays the US Treasury for the privilege, just as Obama pays for the daily meals, groceries and toiletries that he and his family get and use at the White House. Further, federal law prohibits federal employees and even elected representatives, admittedly excluding the President and Vice President, from conducting partisan business such as making fundraising phone calls, inside government buildings.

The Americans are certainly clear about the privileges their potentates are entitled to and go to great lengths to ensure public resources are not expended on party business. It is time we in Kenya followed suit.

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.