It has been described—in some mainstream media—as “… the biggest concentration of firepower in Europe since the cold war.” This weekend, The Economist estimated that there were about 190,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, ready to invade. By Monday, it has tapered off, though some claim Putin may still invade. In the end, this will mostly be about a power play between Russia and the West, especially the United States, with the Ukrainian people as their proxies.

But what does all this mean for Africans?

Apart from the fact that there’s a large African diaspora in Ukraine, including Ukraine’s most popular evangelical Christian preacher, there are geopolitical questions at stake. Will African states side with the US or their European allies or with Russia? The assessment of last week’s EU/AU summit is that the relationship between Africa and Europe is largely smoke and mirrors these days. The writer Tsitsi Dangarembga summarized it: “For those who long to be welcomed and nothing more, standing on a platform for a photoshoot is a success.”

One key reason for the cool Africa-EU relationship is that Russia and China are bigger players on the continent now. So are the Gulf States, Iran and Turkey. All of these states have deep pockets and soft power ambitions. While the AU hasn’t officially taken a stance, we know that the AU and Russia just signed a massive business-focused partnership. As VOA reports today:

Trade between Russia and African countries has doubled since 2015, to about $20 billion a year, African Export-Import Bank President Benedict Oramah said in an interview last fall with Russia’s state-owned Tass news agency, cited by the Russia Briefing investment news site. He said Russia exported $14 billion worth of goods and services and imported roughly $5 billion in African products.

Voice of America cites historian Maxim Matusevich, who has written on Africa Is a Country’s about Russia’s increasing African focus, that Russians today “are not offering any ideological vision” to Africans. This is not your parents communism.

What they’re essentially doing is they’re contracting with African elites on a one-on-one basis. … They insist on the importance of sovereignty and contrast that with the West, which is trying to impose its values, such as transparency, honest governance, anti-corruption legislation. Again, I’m not saying the West is always sincere doing that, but that’s the official message – and they [Russians] are not doing any of that.

Russia’s presence on the continent is growing, especially militarily. Yes, that means mercenaries. AP recently published a map showing Russian mercenaries in nearly 20 countries on the continent where Russian mercenaries are operating. Those include Libya, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Zimbabwe and Botswana. And the Russians are bullish about this—mercenaries in Africa are the new thing for Russian cinema, in Russian Rambo-style movies.

Recently, the Financial Times ran a long feature on a film titled “Tourisme,” filmed in the Central African Republic:

Touriste portrays Russian mercenaries as selfless heroes saving a poor African country. Its plot at times hews closely to reality (Russian fighters agree to train the CAR army and then battle alongside them against brutal rebel groups) while at others conveniently distorting it (the rebels alone are depicted doing things — indiscriminate killing, torture, bullying the UN — that the mercenaries themselves are accused of by the EU and human rights groups) …

It is essentially a 1980s-style action flick. The plot is typical of the patriotic fare churned out by parts of Russia’s film industry during Putin’s rule. A young Russian police officer signs up to fly to the CAR to train soldiers amid a bloody civil war. (The movie’s title derives from his call sign, Tourist). This much is based in reality. In 2018, Russia signed an agreement with the CAR to send unarmed instructors to train the local army, which has been fighting a rebellion since 2013. Officially, the governments say that 1,135 military instructors are now in the country.

More recently, Russia has been implicated in the return of military dictatorships in West Africa. Case study: Mali.

We hope to take a closer look at these entanglements soonest, but in the meantime, Africa is a country archive offers an overview of the long-short history of this relationship.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

With just six months to go till Kenya’s general elections, preparations are in full swing. But the Kenyan authorities seem to be struggling at least in one area: voter registration.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has been trying to get young adults who have become eligible to vote since the last polls in 2017 to register. In October, the commission set an ambitious target of adding 6 million to the voter register within a month but only a quarter showed interest. In January, the IEBC tried again and today, near the end of the exercise, it has only netted 12 percent of the remaining 4.5 million potential voters it was targeting.

This has set off alarm bells among the political classes and commentariat. Politicians eying a run for office and their allies have been issuing increasingly strident calls for youth in what they consider to be their strongholds to go out and register. One county governor took the unprecedented step of giving all the county workers two days off to get family members and friends to register after only 5,500 out of 130,000 potential new voters in his region turned up to register. Another has illegally directed hospitals in his county to deny services to people who have not registered.

Among civil society types, the concern is also mounting with suggestions that by refusing to vote, the youth would be locking themselves out of the decision-making rooms where their future will be decided. “It is not elections that will bring change but, rather, the robust participation of the youth in these elections as both voters and aspirants (at all available levels),” wrote ARTICLE 19’s Eastern Africa Regional Director Mugambi Kiai.

I do not share in the angst. Quite the opposite, in fact. The fetishisation of elections as the primary vehicles for increased and effective popular participation in governance runs counter to evidence from around the world that elections primarily benefit politicians, not voters. Kiai acknowledges as much in his article when he asks: “How many times have we repeated to [the youth] that voting will change things – only for that promise to be promptly broken and translate into their hollow realities and futures?”

In Kenya, as elsewhere across the globe, the preoccupation with elections to the detriment of other more important forms of democratic participation is destroying democracy. And it reflects a crucial change in attitudes to state power that has intensified over the last two decades following the demise of the quarter-century dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi at the end of 2002.

Prior to that, resistance to the regime had focused on putting pressure on those in power in the Executive and in Parliament to implement reforms safeguarding the personal and political freedoms and free and fair democratic competition, including elections. It was about fixing the system rather than taking power.

Though the civil society organisations – the media, community groups, non-governmental organisations, faith-based entities – that formed the bulwark of that resistance, worked with opposition politicians, they remained, as a group, largely distinct from them. It is this struggle that ultimately birthed a new constitution in 2010.

However, the wave that swept out of power Moi and the KANU party – which had ruled for nearly 40 years reestablishing the colonial state that independence was meant to abolish – also demolished this Chinese wall between civil society and politics. After a quarter century of struggle, Moi and KANU had become the personification of all that was wrong in Kenya.

Coupled with a narrative coming out of the West blaming African problems on the lack of good leaders and good governance, rather than the systems of extraction inherited from colonialism, this seeded the idea that change required capturing state power. It was not enough to work for a system that protected Kenyans’ rights regardless of who was in power. State power was the solution, not the problem. And it needed to be wielded by the “right” people which meant Kenyans had to vote “wisely”.

So in 2002, Kenyans did indeed vote wisely, putting in power many of the opposition, civil society and media stalwarts who had been loudest in demanding change. It was a time of unprecedented euphoria. An opinion poll found Kenyans to be the most optimistic people on earth. On the streets, citizens were arresting policemen for demanding bribes. It seemed the country had been cleansed of the filth of Moi and KANU, and was now set for a new era of justice and abundance.

Of course, it did not turn out that way. Moi was gone, but the new crop of “good” rulers have, in the last 20 years, proved to be just as adept at running a corrupt, brutal kleptocracy as he was. Voting wisely, and even running for office, did not prove to be a protection against an oppressive system. As Kenyans once again prepare to cast ballots, the 2010 constitution continues to be more honoured in the breach than the observance, and the system of colonial plunder it was meant to undo continues to chug away.

In such circumstances, urging young people to register to vote is simply making them fodder for voter turnout machines and legitimising electoral contests that feed the winners into a colonial system that incentivises and rewards corruption. For more than 60 years, Kenyans have queued up to vote, and at every election, thrown out between half and two-thirds of “bad” incumbents. Yet their “good” replacements have proven little better. So rather than bemoan the fact that the youth do not want to play this game of musical chairs, we who have been playing should recognise that the problem is not who is sitting when the music stops. It is the game itself.

Public interest concerns usually and dramatically take centre stage in an election year as candidates exert themselves to demonstrate their intent and ability to “serve the people”, cultivating the seed of legitimacy to reap the fruit of re/election. Beyond the electoral-political reasons for the cumulative 33 per cent presidential price cut directive, offered on the 12th of December 2021, it was a welcome diversion from the seasonal empty rhetoric. A reduction in the cost of power would offer much needed inflationary relief to the majority, dealing with the COVID-19-catalysed economic fall-out.

Parallel to these public interest considerations, the cost reduction is aligned to the broader ease of doing business policy agenda, the manufacturing pillar of the Big Four medium term-plan and the overarching national development blueprint of Vision 2030. Lowering the cost of electricity is conspicuously coherent with the public interest and inter-temporal policy agenda of economic growth and development. Coherence however, is a multi-pronged concept that involves alignment between regulatory intent, design and effect. The gap between policy intent, implementation design, and effect is exemplified in the false start of the proposed price directive.

The power winks out (as it has every three hours) and I decide to take a break, stretch my legs and have a glass of sugarcane juice at the local grocery market. I find Sammy, of Sammy Sugarcane Juice, overwhelmed by orders as his miniature generator rumbles and chokes, drawing a crowd of customers. On cue, KPLC, the government and the constant disruptive power outages become the fervent topic of discussion. Reminiscent of a trauma survivors circle, the traders and customers animatedly recount the damages suffered from fluctuating electrical currents, surges, malfunctioning transformers and predatory KPLC agents. One trader laments her inability to quantify losses of electronics, perishable food products and customers, an angry tide of mutterings rising in support of her ire. As Sammy’s generator finally vibrates to a stop dispersing the grumbling crowd, it is clear that there is a surging collective contempt directed at the government, bubbling to the surface every time there is a power outage.

The clarifying cauldron of the COVID-19 pandemic re-affirmed electricity an essential service and the bedrock of Kenya’s post-pandemic recovery strategy. Fully aware of the centrality of reliable and cost-effective energy to societal functioning, the spectacular manifestation of KPLC’s energy inefficiencies during a pandemic and at the cusp of an economic slump is reverberating at the frequency of already simmering anti-government sentiments. Simply, people are beyond tired; they are disgusted at KPLC’s inability to provide the singular service for which it exists. The prevalent and intensifying energy inefficiencies hit harder on the ropes of the knowledge that Kenya has an excess of power generation capacity in the same vein as a frustrated, underserved population.

This inexplicable status quo means that the executive (GOK) is haemorrhaging legitimacy in the most competitive election yet. There is a compelling salience to the energy inefficiencies at KPLC that are causing the political mobilization of households and businesses. Now, every time the lights flicker, the generators of the rich rumble and the curses of the poor ring out, the government is the focus for our collective frustration. The reality of the government’s inability to regulate its subsidiaries is an important instruction on how the gap between regulatory intent and design can undermine the government and the public interest.

The implosion of the price directive is a blunt reminder that even on the rare occasion that the executive and public interest are aligned, not taking into account the distortionary effect of corruption leads to regulatory failure. The directive did not deliver the desired result, ultimately because of a weak regulatory design. Firstly, just as the crowd at Sammy’s Sugarcane Juice failed to make the distinction between KPLC and the executive, the executive took for granted that it’s interests and those of KPLC were allied. KPLC, which in theory is subject to the executive, has operated in an environment diffuse of responsibility, developing an operational baseline that is separate and self-interested. A moral hazard has arisen between the executive and the electricity distributor. Because of the natural monopoly it commands, KPLC will continue to act in its own interest until the incentives provided to it by the government change. Therefore, the first design flaw of the directive was the treatment of KPLC as an internal component of the executive rather than a regulatory target.

Secondly, a history of previous resistance to structural, policy and institutional reforms at KPLC did not inform the government’s regulatory approach.  The choice of regulatory tool should have maximized the coercive power available to the government in order motivate KPLC into compliance. The emboldened resistance that KPLC has demonstrated towards previous reforms is indicative that KPLC should be treated as a seriously disengaged regulatory target. KPLC is motivated not to comply with the presidential directive through the sticky state of rational-self-interest. If this is taken into consideration, the process of “unsticking” KPLC from its non-compliance would entail maximizing the government’s coercive power to apply escalated sanctions and criminal prosecution. Apprehensive of the above, the second design flaw of the directive was an under-estimation of the regulatory expenditure and coercive force needed to motivate compliance from KPLC.  

Because of the natural monopoly it commands, KPLC will continue to act in its own interest until the incentives provided to it by the government change.

Thirdly, perverse incentive structures from the prevalence of corruption mean that self-interested behaviour by institutions is rewarded with the proceeds of corruption. In the case of KPLC, the broader incentive structure favours non-compliance. Simply put, the lack of a simple, robust and coherent anti-corruption regulatory framework means that policy makers at KPLC have no credible threat against their non-compliance. Even if top managers are sent on a “60-day compulsory leave” and are charged with economic crimes, those who take their place are still subject to the same incentive structures that reward corrupt behaviour.

The clearest index towards the same economically destructive behaviour persisting at KPLC is the recent intensification of sabotage of KPLC infrastructure (allegedly by KPLC staff). The malignant cartel culture of corruption has created and sustained a regulatory lacuna that is now able to undermine the executive. As exemplified by the case of KPLC, without a considered incentive structure around corruption, the executive’s regulatory impotence will intensify. The final and perhaps most significant design flaw of the directive, is that the government has allowed a perverse incentive structure that rewards corrupt behaviour to dictate behavioural motivations in the public sector.

The observation that the 15 per cent presidential price directive is aligned to the public interest and would act as an infrastructural enabler to socio-economic development and legitimize the incumbent government, could not insulate the directive from a failure to launch. I attribute the directive’s false start to regulatory design flaws in the treatment of KPLC and the broader public service incentive structure. The failed price cut and the now frantic efforts of the executive in mitigating the Energy Inefficiencies at KPLC signal the onset of a corruption critical mass, the point at which the executive is incapacitated by the malignancy of cartel corruption. The next election cycle belongs to the executive that can keep its house in order. As the triple threat of the pandemic, it’s economic fallout and political uncertainty mobilize the electorate, the coherence of regulatory intent, design and effect will gain a political premium in this year’s election. The electoral candidates that can regulate within the context of corruption to achieve the public interest, will reward the public with competent regulation and provide themselves with security of tenure.