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The False Hope and Craze of the Digital Economy

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How digital capitalism, despite often being framed as potential growth engine, exploits the already marginalized and reproduces inequalities and power-relations between Africans.

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The False Hope and Craze of the Digital Economy

Digital technologies enable new ways of organizing the production of services, unconstrained by spatial distances. By making it possible to carry out a service from everywhere in the world, digitalization has facilitated the increased fragmentation and outsourcing of services that were previously constrained by the need for geographic proximity between buyer and seller. The digitalization of the economy is at the same time giving rise to new forms of work and new ways of organizing labor processes—across the globe.

In The Digital Continent: Placing Africa in Planetary Networks of Work, Mohammed Amir Anwar and Mark Graham explore the development and organization of digital labor—defined as “work activities involving the paid manipulation of digital data by humans through [information and communication technologies] such as mobile phones, computers, laptops, etc.”—in Africa. They argue that African workers are playing an increasingly central role in digital capitalism by training “artificial intelligence” and machine learning algorithms, tagging images, and performing customer services, design tasks, data management, and so on. Thus, Anwar and Graham argue that digital capitalism is—despite rarely being mentioned—increasingly “made in Africa.” The aim of their book is to make both African workers and Africa as a core location in the digital economy visible.

Based on extensive fieldwork in five countries—Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda—Anwar and Graham first argue that digitalization has made African countries lucrative destinations for offshoring services. They explore two such cases: “business process offshoring,” where a firm outsources non-core functions to specialized subcontractors, and the “remote gig economy,” composed of service tasks (such as writing, transcription, search engine optimization, and so on) mediated and coordinated by digital platforms and carried out by individual workers for customers who can be located anywhere. Second, they show how the African labor force is increasingly drawn into the digital economy, as workers who struggle to find employment in the “analog” sector of the economy turn to digital labor to make a living. This, Anwar and Graham argue, raises concerns for employment protections, social rights, and working conditions on digital platforms.

Anwar and Graham intervene in a prominent narrative promoted by governments, the World Bank, development organizations, and consulting firms that frames digitalization and information and communication technologies as “technological fixes” that will create jobs, reduce poverty, improve productivity, and lead to economic growth in Africa. Although digitalization and the fragmentation and outsourcing of production processes has integrated Africa into global production networks, Anwar and Graham argue that “Africa continues to be locked into a value-extractive position in the global economy.” Rather than a frictionless and “flat” global economy, Anwar and Graham’s analyses show how digitalization amplifies existing inequalities and power relations; in Africa, digital production is primarily characterized by poorly remunerated tasks at the bottom of the value chain that do not, in practice, represent economic improvements for workers.

For some segments of the population, such as university-educated workers unable to capitalize on their credentials, the digital economy provides an important lifeline. On the one hand, these forms of work provide a certain flexibility and autonomy. Workers are often able to, at least partially, set their own schedules. On the other hand, however, digital labor can also contribute to precarity, as contracts are usually short, working hours long, and social benefits and labor rights irregular or lacking. This is, Anwar and Graham argue, partially a result of workers being classified as self-employed independent contractors, the piece-rate model of compensation, and the ease with which digital firms can transfer tasks to another worker, company, or continent.

In addition, Anwar and Graham highlight the so-called “algorithmic management” used in these digital business models. Digitalization, they argue, is not only a tool for capital’s expansion into new localities, markets, and industries—digital technologies also enable managers to exert new forms of control over workers and labor processes. The authors term this form of management “digital Taylorism,” a digital manifestation of the Taylorist principles of detailed surveillance, meticulous control over labor process, disassembly of the production process, and “deskilling” every task to improve productivity and lower the costs of labor power. While the notion of “digital Taylorism” highlights platform capital’s control over workers and labor processes, it might neglect a key feature of “algorithmic management”: its strategic use of freedom and flexibility. While Taylor’s “scientific management” instructed workers on how each particular task should be performed, digital platforms usually allow workers to choose when they want to work, what tasks they want to do, and how they want to do them—partially in an effort to avoid being classified as their employers. Moreover, worker evaluation occurs through rating systems, with workers being sanctioned with moves like “deactivation” or firing if their average rating falls below a certain threshold. Thus, “algorithmic management” might be seen as representing a mode of management and control diverging from the core principles of Taylorism.

Furthermore, it is important to emphasize the ways in which workers assert agency and resist capital’s control, as Anwar and Graham do in detail. Drawing on the notion of “hidden transcripts,” they theorize labor agency not solely in organized and collective action, finding that digital workers in Africa exert individual agency through everyday practices and strategies of “resilience, reworking, and resistance.”

The Digital Continent is a very well-researched and well-written book. Anwar and Graham build on an impressively rich empirical material, mixing statistics and excerpts from interviews to give readers a proper understanding of workers’ lives, struggles, and aspirations. The presentation jumps eloquently between theoretical discussions, explications of labor geography concepts, and empirical investigations, producing thorough and thought-provoking analyses. This is particularly true for the final chapter, where the authors discuss measures for building a fairer global economy and world of work.

As a researcher studying platform work in the Norwegian transportation industry, the similarities between the working conditions, biographies, and experiences of the workers I interview in Oslo and the workers I met in The Digital Continent is striking. They are drawn from similar segments of the labor force and express the same ambivalence toward the real economic opportunities—combined with precarious working conditions—offered by the digital business models. Despite the field’s recent emphasis on how digital business models are being “embedded” in local social, political, and economic contexts, these models seem to create surprisingly similar outcomes in very different parts of the world. This puzzle might suggest that although digital labor platforms have to adjust to local conditions, regulations, and so on, they also function as technological and global capitalist machines, exporting the same employment model and “algorithmic management” from Silicon Valley (where they are usually designed) to every corner of the world, creating similar outcomes for workers regardless of their different contexts while also taking advantage of local specificities. This highlights Anwar and Graham’s conclusion that the fight for a fair digital economy has to be global.

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.

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Sigurd M. N. Oppegaard is a Doctoral Researcher Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo and Researcher, Fafo Institute for Social and Labour Research.

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International Women’s Day: Working Class Women Organising in Dar es Salaam

The Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA, unites women in Tanzania seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions. A recent meeting on International Women’s Day, was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up their demands for working women in a declaration. We post the English translation of the declaration and an introduction by Michaela Collord.

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International Women’s Day: Working Class Women Organising in Dar es Salaam
Photo. Members of the Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative (UWAWAMA) on 8 March 2022.

International Women’s Day “brings together all working women to discuss our struggle against exploitation,” declared Stella Mwasa as she invited working women and men to gather for a meeting on the 8 March in Manzese, a working-class area of Dar es Salaam.

Stella is a leading organiser with the Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA as per the Swahili acronym. UWAWAMA unites the savings and loan groups of petty traders and cargo porters, seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions.

UWAWAMA hosted the meeting in a rented space, dubbed Amy Garvey Hall, which the cooperative uses for both its economic and political activities. But the meeting was for all wanawake wavujasho, meaning all working women, or more evocatively, all “women who sweat”. It brought together not only the urban-based petty traders of UWAWAMA but a group of rural small-scale farmers, women members of the Tanzania Network of Small-scale Farmer Organisations (MVIWATA).  Other groups with representatives at the meeting included HakiArdhiJULAWATA, Kilosa Land Movement, and underground hip hop groups like Watunza Misingi, among others.

As with previous UWAWAMA gatherings marking International Women’s Day, this year’s meeting was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up these demands in a declaration, part of a “struggle to remind society that women’s demands differ depending on class” and to explicitly define these demands “for working women.”

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, and to “remind society” beyond Tanzania, here is an English translation of the declaration. The original Swahili version is available here.

*

Six abiding demands from working women for Women’s Day

We working women, urban and rural, including small business operators and smallholder farmers, have come together in solidarity to celebrate International Working Women’s Day today, 8 March 2022, in Amy Garvey Hall, Manzese. As women who face a variety of challenges under all oppressive systems, we realize that our interests are different from the interests of upper class women. Therefore, we decided to establish our alternative forum to celebrate Women’s Day. After a lengthy debate through this forum, we declare the following six abiding demands for working women.

1. Full economic freedom

Despite there being many campaigns for women’s economic empowerment, like microfinance initiatives, a large group of working women have ended up the slaves of financial institutions. Instead of being empowered, we are chained by debt that exacerbates our poverty. This is because the solutions offered to tackle women’s poor economic conditions do more to entrench an oppressive economic system than to liberate women.

Many initiatives for women’s economic empowerment benefit financial institutions more than they liberate us. Through these campaigns, we are encouraged to take out exploitative loans, and then to become selfish to the extent that we will do anything to pay them back, including exploiting and oppressing other women.

We working women are tired of being slaves. We no longer want deceptive empowerment initiatives that are useless to us. We have unanimously decided that we will continue to fight for full economic independence, and we want it to be known that such freedom will not be achieved if a large group of women continue to be enslaved by financial institutions. So we will continue to fight against oppressive financial institutions and against all systems of class exploitation until all women and all working people are free.

2. Freedom to own land and protection from land-grabbing

We working women are the major producers given that a large percentage of rural smallholder farmers and urban small business operators are women. Land is our main source of livelihood. Yet the patriarchy deprives us of our right to own land because of our gender, and the capitalist system robs us of that right along with working men because of our economic class. Because of capitalism, neo-colonialists have been given the name of investors and are protected by the state when they plunder our land.

Every time the government announces the arrival of investors in our areas, we are filled with grief and anxiety because, in our experience, we can expect nothing aside the loss of our homes and our productive areas. We are always told that investors are coming to bring us prosperity, wellbeing and development, but reality and experience have shown that they come to destroy us by depriving us of our land, which is the main means of production, and by turning us into labourers in their fields or factories.

Others come as investors then plunder our land. Yet later they end up fencing off that land without even using it for any productive activity. Whether in rural areas where our fields are stolen or in cities where our businesses are evicted, the cry of all working people is the same.

We unanimously say that we are tired of being turned into serfs on our own land, and of becoming producers without food or other basic necessities because our land is stolen. For us, land is our identity, our heritage, and our life. There is nothing more important than fighting for our lives. There is no greater right to defend than the right to life, and to separate us from our land is to rob us of our lives. Therefore, we will continue to claim that right and to fight land-grabbing in all its various forms.

3. Free social services

In this unjust system, everything is turned into a commodity for sale, including important social services like health, education, clean and safe drinking water, and more. Since the system itself has created classes of the haves and have-nots, the vast majority of the have-nots cannot afford such services due to lack of money.

When it comes to discrimination in these services, we working women are the main victims. We are the ones who lose our lives by failing to access quality health care during childbirth because we cannot afford the high cost in hospitals that provide good care, many of which are private. Even when we go to government hospitals, we still need to purchase medical equipment for maternity care, which are also sold at a high price. Maternity services start at a cost of TSh75,000 (US$30) rising to TSh200,000 (US$90) and up to Tsh3,000,000 (US$1300) depending on the type of hospital and the type of delivery, natural or caesarean section. These costs are in addition to the cost of purchasing medical equipment. In short, in this system where we are forced to purchase essential health care, working women are at greater risk of losing our lives or those of our children during childbirth.

The health sector is just one facet that shows how we live in a society that degrades human dignity by selling services. Since without these services we cannot live nor safely bring a new life into the world, for us women, our rights cannot be realized if the right to access these essential services discriminates against us and the whole class of working people. We are tired of living in fear of losing our lives and the lives of our children. Thus, we want a system in which our human dignity is given priority over money.

4. The right to the city for all, without discrimination

In urban areas, we working women earn our living by running small businesses in the middle of the city. Our dependence on such businesses stems from being the victims of an economy that fails to protect our livelihoods while concentrating the means of production in the hands of the few.

The economy fails to focus on production and thus ends up creating a nation of informal traders. Among us, there are victims of land grabbing that deprived us of our farms as well as a large group that could work productively in factories but that remains unemployed because there are no factories. Thus, our only option is the business of petty trading, and we cannot operate in areas where there are no customers as all our needs depend on this business.

In addition to relying on our businesses, we are also major service providers for people of all classes in the city. We are the cleaners and cooks in offices and other urban areas. In short, all the activities of upper-class people in the city depend in every way on our services. Yet, whether we can live and earn a livelihood in the city is at the mercy of the state and not a recognized or respected right. We working women – as well as men of the working class – have been called derogatory names to justify the abuse, humiliation and theft inflicted on us, including the brutal evictions from urban areas.

Since cities are built with our sweat and through our taxes, we want our right to remain and do our business in the heart of the city. We are tired of being harassed and robbed of our property under the pretext of sanitation and urban planning. We do not accept to be second class citizens in cities that thrive on our sweat and our labour. Thus, we want the relevant authorities to plan cities based on the needs of all citizens without discrimination. As the main victims of urban planning that discriminates against the majority of urban residents, we will continue to fight for a “right to the city” for all without exception until a revolution to establish a fully equal system is achieved.

5. Decent jobs for all

We working women recognize that the employment problem is systemic, and that it is not due to individual laziness or lack of ingenuity as we are told. We recognize that relations of production have been engineered such that a large group of able-bodied people are unemployed and turned into the slaves of a small group that monopolises the means of production. And that slavery thrives even more where the numbers of unemployed grow larger.

As working women, we are also affected by this problem, as we are educating our children with difficulty through our small businesses and farming. Sometimes we must sell everything we own to afford their schooling, which is also commodified in this system. Yet even after all that, our youth come back home and continue to be our dependents because there are no jobs.

As victims, we oppose all misleading ideologies that try to cover up these systemic weaknesses. We reject all ideologies that blame the victims for failing to find employment when it is the unjust system itself that has failed to create jobs. In solidarity with our children, we will continue to fight for decent jobs and to wish that all workers enjoy the fruits of their labour.

6. An end to gender-based violence in all its forms

We working women are the biggest victims of gender-based violence. Due to the patriarchal system, we have grown up experiencing beatings and harassment, among other forms of abuse. We recognize that all women go through this ordeal, but it is indisputable that we are the biggest victims. Due to the hardships caused by capitalism, working women are vulnerable to violence as they are victims of men’s stress and anger resulting from the cruelty of life. And since everything costs money, our economic situation deprives us of access to justice when we experience violence.

Given this reality, we will continue to fight to end gender-based violence, and beyond that, for full gender equality, which we believe will only be achieved when all oppressive systems are broken and a fully equal society is established, one that respects the dignity of each person.

Thus, we have decided:

(a) All of us present today will continue to create alternative organisations uniting working women wherever we are, raising our voices together to fight for these demands.

(b) We will continue to use these organisations to reach out to other working women and to encourage them to join forces and fight for our demands.

(c) We will continue to educate ourselves and to build class consciousness between us and working men to create strong solidarity that will enable us to bring about a revolution in the system and build a society with dignity, justice and prosperity for all.

This is a struggle to remind society that women’s demands differ depending on class. These six abiding demands are for working women and all working people, and we, working women, will continue to fulfil our revolutionary duty by leading the struggle for these demands.

Introduction and translation from Swahili by Michaela Collord. Collord teaches politics at the University of Nottingham and is active in labour organising both in the UK and in East Africa. 

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Drought in Kenya: Time to Shift from Crisis to Risk Management

Past drought mitigation efforts have been largely reactionary and have done little to influence preparedness for future droughts.

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Drought in Kenya: Time to Shift From Crisis to Risk Management

Drought is a global problem that affects an estimated 1.5 billion people, particularly those in the Southern Hemisphere. Between the 1970s and the early 2000s the percentage of the earth’s landmass affected by severe drought has more than doubled.

Drought has many unique identifiers that distinguish it from other natural hazards. First, drought is a creeping phenomenon whose onset and end are difficult to determine with precision. The residual effects of drought linger for a considerable period after the event’s end. Secondly, the absence of a standard definition of drought adds to the confusion regarding its recognition, classification, and the measure of its severity. Lastly, drought impacts are usually non-structural and spread over more expansive geographical space, mostly crossing frontiers uninvited.

Experience across Africa and elsewhere has shown that drought results in significant impacts regardless of the development level of a state, resulting in water and food insecurity, land degradation, agricultural losses, human migration, and conflicts.

However, the character of the impact differs profoundly. Drought affects the vulnerable regions of the arid and semi-arid lands of the world most because the social and economic support systems cannot withstand its effects, and the people have limited options and inadequate coping strategies during times of water and forage shortage.

This non-structural nature of drought has hindered the development of an accurate, timely, and reliable assessment of its severity, geographical magnitude, and ultimately the formulation of sound contingency plans by the government and its development partners. On the other hand, there is confusion in the scientific and policy community about the character and manifestation of drought. Drought management is primarily a policy question. Until we fully crystalize the status of drought policy and preparedness, proactive and effective drought management will remain a hit-and-miss endeavour.

The cost of drought

In Kenya, fifteen droughts were recorded between 1960 and 2016, with the 1970s and 80s being described as decades of lack. Six drought episodes (40 per cent) occurred after 2000, an indication that droughts are increasing in both frequency and severity.

The economic costs of drought in the 1998-2000 period were estimated at US$2.8 billion, while the post-disaster needs assessment for the extended 2008-2011 drought estimated the total damage and losses to the economy to be a staggering US$12.1 billion.

Part of the reason why previous droughts have caused considerable losses is because of how planning and interventions are conceptualized. Traditionally, drought is viewed as a one-off disaster that requires an emergency response focused on a few short-term activities like delivery of food aid and other life-saving humanitarian support, rehabilitation of boreholes, emergency vaccination campaigns, etc.

The understanding of drought and the logic of drought management have gradually shifted, however. Today, drought is viewed primarily as a cyclical process, and drought interventions are now structured along a cycle of four warning phases: normal, alert, emergency, and recovery.

This shifting view comes with some advantages. First, matching activities to a specific stage of the drought cycle improves the timeliness, appropriateness, and ultimately, the effectiveness of the drought response. Secondly, the common framework offers space where humanitarian, development, and advocacy work can be aligned to complement each other.

Although this fits in well with the programmers’ and the pastoralists’ own understanding of the drought cycle, and by extension with the improvement of the overall coordination of drought management in Kenya, we still have a huge gap in tackling drought impacts in the short and long term. In addition to high-cost short-term emergency interventions to save lives and livelihoods, the Kenyan government launched the Medium-Term Plan for Drought Risk Management and Ending Drought Emergencies (EDE) for 2013-2017. The EDE strategy committed the government to end drought emergency by 2022. However, a huge gap remains due to a number of factors. Despite improvements to early warning and contingency planning systems, drought management remains largely reactive, rather than being an anticipatory and preventive risk management undertaking. There is a gap between the information provided by the early warning systems about impending threats and the ability of the government to act to reduce those threats.

Until we fully crystalize the status of drought policy and preparedness, proactive and effective drought management will remain a hit-and-miss endeavour.

Moreover, although county drought management plans are well developed in a participatory manner, they largely contain pre-prepared “off-the-shelf” projects whose implementation is triggered by the early warning systems, but without sustainable funding for their execution. The availability of financial resources should be guaranteed, and the money held in a contingency fund mechanism that is operational at the community and county levels.

However, the National Drought Emergency Fund is yet to be operationalized, thereby delaying timely and appropriate emergency responses. The current drought management system remains centralized and lacks ownership, resources, and technology at the county level to pre-empt or minimize the magnitude of the losses that often follow the onset of droughts. Moreover, the drought management system is not strongly connected to county-level resource allocations.

Linking drought indicators and actions

Past drought mitigation efforts have been largely reactionary and have done little to influence preparedness for future droughts. This is largely attributed to a number of concerns: the unfavourable status of drought preparedness and, in particular, weak institutional capacity; the bottleneck in plans and policy development, especially the level of understanding of the policy and planning needs; and a weak drought warning system, among others. Assessments across African countries have identified problems common to some drought-affected countries including Kenya. These include low levels of interest in planning beyond the relatively short window of opportunity that follows successive drought cycles. Mostly, interest in drought contingency planning wanes in the post-drought phase as soon as precipitation moves to normal or slightly to above normal, whereas drought preparedness planning should be an integral part of development planning and the institutional structures necessary should be in place.

Responsive drought warning systems 

Currently, we have wide gaps between meteorology and hydrology and between hydrology and humanitarian need in most drought-affected counties in Kenya. We need to galvanize real-time planning that could potentially prevent drought from turning into a crisis. To this end, our weather forecasting should provide informative and operational data that characterizes the development of a drought. A robust system of indicators that can identify and diagnose anomalies and provide the basis for early detection of drought events is the basis of any drought management plan, with operational data used as indicators to trigger specific actions. Operational variables can be linked with activities in the drought plan. Indicator systems will allow for early warning of the drought events and time to activate the programme of measures established for the emergency. Local or indigenous weather condition indicators can also be integrated to complement other scientific indicators.

The current drought management system remains centralized and lacks ownership, resources, and technology at the county level.

Early warnings without proper data and mechanisms for utilizing the data could prove futile. For example, the poor rains in late 2010 in East Africa were successfully predicted, but the failure of the subsequent anticipated longer rainy season that led to severe drought in 2011 was not predicted. Although early warning systems gradually increased, we also need to develop a system that is multidimensional. For example, one could focus on climate and water conditions and the other on food security. We could borrow useful lessons from Canada, which has officially developed a monthly drought-monitoring portal, with an interactive map and narratives visualizing and describing drought conditions by region. If we emulate such a system, we could present the severity, spatial extent, and impacts of drought by county on a monthly basis and generate judicious choices of appropriate interventions that can be applied in a timely manner. This can done if more funding goes to research and strategic investments are made in building a superior drought monitoring system.

Reducing drought risk through land restoration

Nature-based solutions have significant potential to reduce drought risks in arid and semi-arid areas. Such an approach to drought management should be centred on at least two broad programme areas: reviving hydrological functions through rehabilitation and sustainable land management to reduce the severity of drought; restoring biodiversity to foster adaptation and diversification. Land restoration and conservation of water catchments will restore hydrological processes and reduce the overall frequency and severity of drought. In some places, lack of rain is compensated by access to underground water, artificial reservoirs or moisture stored in soils across watersheds. As such, programmes oriented towards land restoration and sustainable water management are important for the long-term recovery of the ecosystem.

The development of strategic water sources for sustainable rangeland utilization is also key to drought mitigation. Small-scale strategic water resources like sub-surface dams, sand-dams, water pans and limited duration boreholes that can be closed during certain periods and adjusted to the seasonal availability of adjacent pastures, are critical in boosting herd survival during drought and should be a key priority in drought mitigation.

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2022: Kenya’s First Ever Election About Nothing

Kenyans are going into an election believing in nothing, standing for nothing. The leading political formations are born of each other, the result of many profound compromises, and this in part explains the blankness.

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2022: Kenya’s First Ever Election About Nothing

It would seem that Kenya is going into an election this August that’s largely about nothing. No big idea, no galvanising issue. This hasn’t happened since the reintroduction of political pluralism in late 1991 and the elections that followed in 1992. That said, there are those who will be voting against either William S. Ruto or Raila A. Odinga come August. This group is committed and energised. It is seized by the election. Ironically, in the 2007 election Raila Odinga was the bogeyman of Kenyan politics – the man to fear, the master of chaos, etc. Today the very people who spewed that narrative are in wild reverse and the deputy president is the new bad guy in town. Unfortunately for him, Ruto has in the past seemed to embrace and project his darker side, to revel in the fear he engenders. As a bogeyman to the middle class, he has proven to be a good fit. That so many of his foes have met an untimely end adds to this dark myth.

Since 1992, and in 1997 and 2002 in particular, our elections have not lacked what some like to call “the vision thing”. We were voting against Moi’s authoritarianism and the one-party state, yes, but we were also voting for political pluralism, a new constitution and devolution. We were voting for good governance, anti-corruption, human rights, transparency and all those other nice woolly things that have created the open society we enjoy today. In the meantime, a host of new governance arrangements have come into being. In 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta and William S. Ruto sought the vote under a new constitution promulgated in 2010 and went to the polls under the heavy cloud of the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments. The “dynamic duo” promised to spend money, to spend on everything for everyone. They did the same in 2017 – no big idea, just spending – but this time round, the 2017 election failed dramatically after the Supreme Court annulled it, leading to a legitimacy deficit for the Jubilee government.

Prior to these two polls, there were clearly articulated political forces forged by Moi arrayed against the grand issues of the day and those who defined themselves for them – a mixture of the political opposition, media, civil society, the religious sector, etc. In 2022 this clarity is gone – emphatically so! The latter are in disarray while the former are resurgent.

As we head into the August polls what is striking is that, beyond the avowedly populist but ultimately hollow “hustler” narrative, there is as yet no other game in town in the contest of political ideas. There is no other big narrative. More importantly, there is no other compelling hopeful narrative. The chattering classes are appalled that so vacuous a narrative as the “hustler” and the “wheelbarrow” has gained enough traction with a wide section of, in particular, the youthful population. Indeed, for the first time in Kenya’s history, the sitting head of state apparently doesn’t command the electoral numbers in his own political backyard as a result of this trend. This could yet change but it has never been like this so late in the day. In the dark days of KANU, these inconveniences were fixed by simply rigging the polls. This habit has of course continued since the rigged polls of 2007.

The truth is that we are going into an election believing in nothing, standing for nothing. At best, we are searching. All the leading political formations are born of each other and birthed by many profound compromises, and this in part explains the blankness. At a slightly lower political level, those consumed by making money off the state, cutting deals, winning contracts and fiddling tenders can barely contain their excitement as August approaches and new snouts can dip into the trough.

*****

Kenyans love their politics. They obsess about it. Or rather they used to.

An entire generation below 35 years of age has grown up that finds watching our political leaders on the seven o’clock news boring and, some even argue, detrimental to mental health. They catch the outrageous highlights on Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram. The thundering statements of ministers, the head of state and his deputy have been reduced to fleeting minutes of entertainment to be taken as seriously as a Nollywood thriller.

This transformation is not too much unlike others we are witnessing around the world as younger citizens lose faith in their leaders and institutions. Still, I was struck that, with 150 or so days to the next election, our major political formations have split into two behemoths – Azimio, led by Raila Odinga and President Kenyatta, and UDA, led by Deputy President Ruto. Despite this, polls show the number of undecideds and those refusing to respond regarding whom they’ll vote for in August hovering around 30 per cent. Experts I spoke to this week also find this figure curious. Despite the giant political split, that a third of voters remain ambivalent should, on the face of it, be sufficiently polarising to seize the minds of most Kenyans.

Before the landmark election of 2002, about four months to the polls, the number of undecideds was under 10 per cent. In 2013, five months before the polls, the undecideds were around 3 per cent. Days before the 2017 polls, the undecideds and those who said they were not sure who they would vote for were at 8 per cent. The question is: Why does the number of undecideds remain high even though we effectively have a two-horse race going into the August 2022 poll? When I asked experts, they responded that a little probing by pollsters yielded responses from undecideds such as “We’re waiting for their manifestos”, “We’re waiting to learn more about their policies”, etc. Clearly, neither Azimio nor UDA has caught the imagination of the vast majority of Kenyans, allowing them making a clear decision. Either that or they don’t want to share their true views.

Why does the number of undecideds remain high even though we effectively have a two-horse race going into the August 2022 poll?

For our sins, we therefore find ourselves in a twilight zone of the kind Putin’s Grey Cardinal – Vladislav Surkov – manufactured for him. A situation where nothing was real or true and what seemed true could change. Where there was no difference between the opposition and the ruling party because Surkov funded both. Where public life was reduced to theatre, reality could be manufactured and all politics had become ornate thespianism and make-believe. Kenya is not Russia. We have a freer media and an even more widely open social media. Surkov, however, created a system that seemed open, engaged in campaigns and held elections but where the outcome was predetermined. Too much freedom, he argued, was destabilising, so he manufactured a fake Truman Show type of freedom that Russians, especially those who watched state-controlled TV, could participate in.

*****

And so, in our version of political Vitimbi theatre, we are confronted with confusing choices. Raila Odinga, the repository of progressive politics for the last four decades, has partnered with his former political arch-enemy and one-party progeny, Uhuru Kenyatta, to create the Azimio formation. It is rallied against Deputy President Ruto’s UDA party that hit the campaign trail in 2017 with a brilliant populist narrative of “us versus them”, of “hustlers versus dynasties”. The latter, however, lacks even the pretence of dealing with the major issues of the day. Indeed, UDA’s spokespersons have said that they don’t plan to deal with corruption at all! Raila Odinga has progressive pedigree – and here I admit I am subjective – and is clearly counting on both that and the trust of those who remember all he has struggled for to win the presidency. This is tempered by profound fears among progressives that our political victories – such as the constitution – are about to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, that the eating machine that has pushed our public debt to US$100 billion is the most organised formation of our political reality. The defining issues of yesteryear, such as the constitution, corruption, the very essentials of democracy, deepening poverty and the cost of living, are being handled far more gingerly by the political class this time round.

The eating machine that has pushed our public debt to US$100 billion is the most organised formation of our political reality.

This political mishmash and the lack of clarity could in part explain the resounding lack of genuine excitement in our politics among Kenyans. Add to this the impact of COVID-19, the dramatic deepening of economic inequality, increases in the cost of living and poverty, and it’s understandable that Kenyans seem just tired with it all. The con has been exposed as a con, an empty debe making noises that are incoherent and sometimes amusing, as they say. Still, it does not help that we have entered the most expensive campaign in the history of East and Central Africa with no grand issues to define it. The 2017 election cost US$1 billion and was a washout, shredding the legitimacy of the political elite. Now we find ourselves in the curious twilight zone of Putin’s Gray Cardinal – a lot money being spent, a lot of campaigning underway. For what? What’s the big change being promised beyond a reorganisation of the elite on the deckchairs of the Titanic? Kenyans are no longer being inspired with ideas but with things – we’ll build a stadium, a hospital, a road, a school, an airport, etc. And of course, the elite has these contracts “under control”, as they say. But it seems we haven’t the faintest idea what will be taught in those schools and what kind of Kenyans they will produce. Where the roads lead to and why. The era of big ideas would seem to have been put on pause for now.

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