Babu Ayindo
On 18 and 19 July 2005, very depressing scenes took place in the Central Business District of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. It was another wave of protests against parliament for what was widely seen as usurping the people’s role in drafting a new constitution. 19 July was the ugliest: about 100 activists staging a nonviolent march towards the Parliament buildings were met with the full force of armed police officers drawn from the anti-riot squad, the crack Para-military General Service Unit and top officers from the Criminal Investigation Department. The rest, as they say, is history. There were several very unfortunate ironies to the whole episode that resonate with lessons from George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm.
First, a good number of people in government now were part of the so called Civil Society when the campaign to remove former president Daniel arap Moi’s Kenya African National Union (KANU) from power gained momentum in the late 90s. Sadly enough, some of the people in government now were my professors at university. I can still remember their well articulated and inspiring lectures on freedom of expression, democracy and such other nice ideologies. A good number of the people in government now have first hand experience of what tear gas smells like, how heavy police boots can be and are well familiar with the architecture of torture chambers. It is spiritually wrenching that these same people – now in control of instruments of violence and suppression – are perfecting the formula that President Moi used to stay in power for 24 years. Like Moi, they have criminalized freedom of expression and display no shame in unleashing violence on women and men on a peaceful demonstration under the full glare of local and international media.
Two, the current leadership came into power primarily on the promise that they would provide alternative leadership to the dictatorial regime of Moi and would entrench this through the enactment of a new constitution within 100 days of ascending to power. Two and half years down the line, the primary occupation of this political class is to keep power rather than think futuristic. They now tell us the constitution is not that urgent; there are more urgent issues like poverty, HIV/Aids and poor infrastructure. Of course there are urgent issues, but by some strange logic, they no longer see link between a sound constitutional framework and other problems facing our society. For now, Kenyans must be prepared to contend with the perpetual hiccups that the constitution making has become.
Three, many will recall that the 2004 Nobel Peace prize was, for the first time, awarded to an Africa woman, Prof Wangari Maathai, who serves in the Kenyan cabinet as assistant minister. While she defied all methods of intimidation of the past regime – and was beaten up and tear-gassed by the same police several times – to ensure we retained an ecological balance of our environmental resources through aggressive tree planting, she now maintains a deafening silence even as police openly bludgeon her former comrades.
These are the disturbing realities of those committed to peace by peaceful means in Kenya. Indeed, if we do not deepen our analysis of problem, we could easily become disillusioned. Indeed, I have spoken to many friends who feel that those of us who can get opportunities for employment in private and public sectors should work to benefit from the “system” rather than engage in this social change business. Many well educated youth are queuing up for UK and USA visas – they would rather do menial jobs in western capitals than see their dreams quenched in their native countries. We must guard cynicism, particularly among the youth. In the following paragraphs I attempt to grapple with this new phenomenon amongst the political class in Kenya. I hope it can deepen out analysis of the problem and excite our imagination to evolve new creative solutions.
How comes those who led the movement for a more just and egalitarian Kenya during the late 90s are now so comfortable with the political structures to a point of elevating corruption, ethnic chauvinism and wanton use of violence against unarmed citizens to the status of a fine art? One participant at a workshop I co-facilitated in Zimbabwe in November 2001 provided an interesting “theory” on this question. Comparing the condition of the nation-state in Africa with that in Europe, he identified the apparent disconnect in the evolution of the nation-state in Africa.
He noted that at the feudal stage in the evolution of the nation-state in Europe, the State was backed by landlords. Currently, the nation-state in Europe and North America is primarily backed by capitalists. In other words, the property owners provide the economic backbone without which the nation-state would lack a semblance of stability. His conclusion? When one looks at Africa, we see a nation-state with neither capital nor capitalists. Indeed, instead of capitalists, we have primitive accumulators of capital!
Because they lack a sound economic base, the political class within the nation-state uses the only instrument of power – or powerlessness to be more specific – available to them: violence. When you combine a fragile political system with an insecure political leadership then you will most likely end with a recipe for domination, infantile paranoia and violence. The tragedy is that such political leadership will quickly recoil into the shell of ethnic jingoism; it will seek security in primitive accumulation of wealth; and is likely to unleash violence at the slightest threat to its fraudulently acquired position of wealth and previlage.
Without living in history, we need to remember, as the novelist Chinua Achebe would say, when the rain began to beat us. When the majority of the African states attained political independence in the 60s, very little was done to transform the inherently oppressive colonial political system. Africans tended to forget that before colonialism they had governance systems that were primarily driven by certain long established traditions and values of humanism, egalitarianism and devolution of power.
Instead of taxing our imagination and creativity to evolve systems that addressed our needs and desires, the post-independent political class warmed up to the colonial structures and political culture. The net result is that the spirituality of leadership and governance was whittled, or simply discarded. Power was now redefined in “zero-sum” terms. Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince became the principal reference in times of crisis. The unfortunate thing is that my former professors and former civil society actors now in government are very aware about this and seem unable to disentangle. If anything, they seem happy to be, as Neville Alexander would put it, privileged captives of unjust systems.
In his classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the Brazilian educator would help us explain the behavior of the current crop of Kenya political leaders. Friere tells us that the oppressed peoples develop an adhesion with their oppressor. At the moment of liberation, the image the oppressed have of a liberated person is that of their oppressor! Therefore, if no alternative thinking is evolved at the moment of liberation, the oppressed will adopt the same oppressive mental image and behavior of their oppressor. To be more specific, the civil society actors who worked particularly hard to remove former President Moi and KANU from power have only succeeded in recreating themselves in the image and likeness of Moi!
Sometimes we take for granted the impact systems and structures have on our behavior. Part of my work involves program design and evaluation with Community Based Organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations. It is quite amusing to see how the most vocal leaders within the NGO sector have modeled a leadership style and decision making process along the hierarchical nation-state. While they work to transform the hegemonic political structures of the wider society, they fail to model alternative systems that mirror the ideal world that they are working towards. I am prepared to believe that level of corruption and dysfunctional governance within the nation-state is not any higher than that within the NGO sector. It is not uncommon to find systems within the Civil Society that stifle imagination and creativity and whose only “software” is self-preservation. It therefore follows that when these NGO leaders ascend to political office they easily warm up to systems that thrive on domination and force.
Indigenous wisdom suggests that need to take great care in preparing people for leadership and positions of power. Africa has many examples where, right from infancy, leaders were identified and taken through rigorous education that such roles and responsibilities in society demanded, alive to the reality that decisions taken now would affect generations to come. One can argue that indigenous societies ensured communities were led by, well, leaders, rather than politicians. Remarks attributed to Ian Smith give some guidance on the difference between a leader and a politician. “A leader” Ian Smith asserts, “thinks about the next generation while a politician thinks about the next general election.”
With our creativity, imagination, commitment and spirituality we can resist the return to Animal Farm. At the moment of liberation, we should never operate under the superstition that a change of guard in a system is the final solution. I believe that we can strive towards an alternative world where, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote, “one’s cleanliness is not dependent on another’s dirt, one’s health on another’s ill-health, and one’s welfare on another’s misery.”
