Commentary (by Mutuma Mathiu) - Kenya in danger of becoming a failed state

Ref: http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=121971
Story by MUTUMA MATHIU | Insight
Publication Date: 4/27/2008

Kenya is going to become dictatorship. We are going to have a dictator who abducts people at night and shoots them in Ngong Forest or “disappears” them — to the cheers of a population tired of massacres and political chaos.

Dictatorship is the natural consequence of the failure of democracy. It is the son of that brute called chaos and disorder; the natural heir of violence and destruction of property and livelihoods.

Complex social institutions are founded on thin filaments of psychology. Society is based on predictability of behaviour. The human person, I think, is quite incapable of dealing with chaos and uncertainty. The prospect of not knowing whether you will be around to harvest the crop you are planting is possibly worse than a ruler who will not allow you your freedoms.

THERE ARE MANY KENYANS WHO DO not know what tomorrow, or the day after it, will bring.

A failed state, in some definitions, is one in which the government is unable to provide its people with essential services, including security. It is also a state whose government is incapable of projecting authority across the whole of its territory. A government projects authority in two fashions: by the submission of its citizens to laws and so on, or by force when citizens exhibit a disinclination to obey.

One wonders to what extent the government of Kenya was in a position to project authority throughout the country where the roads were being dug up and folks massacred.

One also wonders to what extent the state’s instruments of coercion/force were united in terms of their allegiance at certain points in recent history and what that portends for the future, especially if our democracy continues to be chaotic and driven by ethnicity.

The source of Kenya’s political instability is an irresponsible political class and an uninformed, tribe-centred population.

The death of political institutions in Kenya has destroyed whatever little measure of control over politicians there used to be. At every election the political elite are fighting a no-holds barred fight for power and access to state resources. The country is at the mercy of the ambitions of our politicians.

And in that fight, they have mobilised and indoctrinated the population which views politics from a purely tribal prism. Sections of the population are also convinced that they will not survive, have access to government services and resources or find justice unless their elite get power by whatever means.

In the eyes of this indoctrinated and tribalised population, any measure, however illegal or immoral, to get power by its own elite is acceptable.

At election time, Kenya is a country without a boss, in the shape of a person, a set of values or principles. Anything goes in the vicious fight for victory. And therein lie the roots of our destruction.

Kenya is very different today from its neighbours Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. In Tanzania, the Chama Cha Mapinduzi keeps the Tanzanian ship steady, first, by being virtually unbeatable at elections with its candidates regularly returning more than 70 per cent of the vote.

Secondly, CCM is in charge of the country, its economy and its social life in ways very few parties have replicated in Africa. It also, through a series of committees, maintains tight control over the ambitions of politicians. Because it is such a powerful party, it is able to enforce defeat and force candidates to make way for others.

IN RWANDA AND UGANDA, THE RWANDA Patriotic Front and President Kagame and in the National Resistance Movement and President Museveni respectively, have such a tight grip on their countries that it is some matter of debate whether elections in those countries are open contests.

Many Kenyans would like to see the same kind of order and discipline here. And down that road lies the fate of dictatorship.

Speaking at one of the peace rallies in the Rift Valley on Friday, Agriculture minister William Ruto said there was something fundamentally wrong with Kenyan politics because every election year Kenyans massacred each other. The solution, he suggested, lay in a new constitution so that elections cease to be tribal contests and become a competition of policies.

It is possible that if the political class is afflicted by an epidemic of altruistic goodwill and patriotism and if constitutional review does not become an opportunity to fight the 2012 battles, then a new constitution might save Kenyan democracy.

But if the politicians behave true to form and violence recurs, then the country will either become a complete basket case — or a “saviour” in the form of an individual or group will emerge to “restore order,” to be met with cheers in the streets, and the Kenyan democratic experiment will be dead.

In my current pessimistic frame of mind, I think the latter is more likely than the former.



Imagine that your grandfather employed five people to work for him. Assume, for the sake of argument, that he was a good man who took care of his workers on the job and in retirement. Many of them retired and were entitled to a pension, which he was happy to pay. But rather than taking out insurance or putting them on a scheme, he paid their pension from his salary.

He passed on five pensioners and five serving employees to your father, who continued his father’s policy of charging their pension and salary on his own salary. Now your father has kicked the big bucket and has handed 14 pensioners (one has died) — aged but in sprightly health — and five workers. The pension bill is half of the wage bill and the two combined are 80 per cent of salary. What do you do (short of bumping off the pensioners and firing the workers)?

That is the same foolish policy the government of Kenya pursues. It pays pensioners from the budget and its bill has exceeded Sh20 billion a year — and growing fast. Very soon the pension bill will be one of the biggest items on the budget. What will it do then? What is wrong with civil servants saving for their own retirement, like the rest of us do?

Mutuma Mathiu is the Sunday Nation’s managing editor.