Two years on from the explosive and exhilarating Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin. This was the biggest social movement in American history. Millions of people took part in protests, marches and local rallies that spread across every state in the United States (US). In the US and the United Kingdom (UK), where the movement was biggest after the states, it was not just the big cities that answered the BLM rallying cry. Even predominantly white rural towns with little history of anti-racist struggles, such as Bethel, Ohio, a town of 3000 people or Haverford West, a Welsh market town, experienced protest.

Moreover, the international dimension of the movement meant that the banner Black Lives Matter was not only raised in white majority countries but also in the Global South. The biggest BLM protests in Africa were seen in Kenya and South Africa, while smaller yet significant mobilisations took place in other countries like Ghana and Uganda. So much so did Black Lives Matter resonate in Africa in 2020 that when the chairman of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat spoke out against the murder of George Floyd, he provoked widespread criticism against himself due to the brutality of police forces across the continent.

Despite all of this, two years on, a debate has emerged as to whether BLM achieved anything. For Elaine Browne, the former head of the Black Panther Party in the US, the movement is barely a movement and certainly isn’t worth celebrating as people weren’t willing to sacrifice their lives as her generation had in the Black Power movement. Cedric Johnson, author of The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now, instead has argued that BLM was a bulwark for neo-liberalism. Others are disheartened at the lack of concrete outcomes the movement produced. I disagree with these positions because BLM has had a massive impact on society.

Black Lives Matter Transformed How We Fight Racism 

The movement achieved one of its primary aims – getting Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed George Floyd, locked up on the charge of murder. While this is only the beginning of challenging police racism, we must remember that there was nothing automatic or inevitable about Chauvin’s charge. We know how rare it is to have police officers charged and sentenced for racist violence and murder, both in the US and the UK. Additionally, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has radically transformed the terrain in which people understand and talk about racism, as well as making people feel more confident in challenging it. And this is the impact we have continued to see roll out two years on.

Let us remember the powerful response to the Child Q case. When news spread that a fifteen-year-old black female student was pulled out of an exam to be strip-searched by male police officers in Hackney, London, hundreds from the community, activists and crucially students, marched on two different days to the local police station. Among their demands for justice, they asked for the involved officers to be sacked. The widespread anger at the treatment of Child Q is in part what has forced the Met Police, alongside five other police forces in the UK, to be put under special measures at present.

The radical response to the Child Q case is not unique though. We have seen several spontaneous anti-racist mobilisations since Black Lives Matter that showcase the new layer of society radicalised against racism, as well as a new layer of activists within the movement. From the student protests and walk-outs at Pimlico Academy (South London) and City and Islington College (North London) to the anti-deportation protests in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Hackney and Peckham over the last two years, it’s evident there is a new and bigger layer of people confident and prepared to challenge racism. If the movement had no impact – to put it simply, the ruling classes wouldn’t be working so hard to undermine Black Lives Matter, something that happened from the very start of the movement and continues today. And we’ve seen this backlash in two ways: the ideological backlash and the backlash with repression.

The Black Lives Matter Demonstration in Whitehall, London

Accommodation and Repression of the Movement 

In the US, Biden has both openly opposed defunding the police and intensified his rhetoric of being tough on law and order, a green light to the right who treat protestors as violent, just as they did with the movement in 2020. This slander goes alongside the repression of Black Lives Matter activists. In the UK, we know that the Tories have been relentless in undermining the movement. They have produced the Sewell report, which denies the existence of institutional racism. Their education secretaries have dismissed calls to decolonise education and instead pushing for the positives of the British Empire to be taught.

As in the US, the UK’s Conservative party’s (The Tories) ideological attacks on the movement’s gains go hand in hand with their drive to ramp up the repression with the increasing of police powers through the expansion of Section 60, which allows police officers to stop and search anyone in a specific area without needing to have reasonable grounds. When we look at the vicious backlash of the ruling class to and since the Black Lives Matter movement, it becomes urgent that we not only celebrate the movement that threatens them so much, but that we also learn lessons from it to move forward.

The backlash from the ruling class and the other external pressures and challenges BLM faced meant that inevitably, debates emerged within the movement. Many of these debates continue today and are crucial to how the movement goes forward. Now, I talk in greater detail about these debates in my article in the International Socialism Journal, which I hope people will read, but I’d like to draw on a few of those debates briefly using the space I have here. While the issue of police violence toward black people was the igniting issue of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists proposed a plethora of solutions for dealing with police racism and brutality.

Firstly, even though ‘defund the police’ became a mainstream slogan of the movement, most people think we still need the police and so reject getting rid of them. Secondly, the slogan ‘defunding the police’ has proven to mean different things to different people. For some, it’s cutting police budgets or diverting funds away from the police into other areas. For others, the slogan is about abolishing the police. For example, in the wake of the 2020 protests, 77% of Americans understood defunding to mean changing the way the police operate, only 18% saw it as meaning abolishing the police.

Now, in some cities, the movement did succeed in beginning attempts to defund the police. But two years on, most cities that did so have largely reversed this process. More than that, where cities did reduce or divert sections of police budgets, this had no impact on the way the police operated as they were able to mitigate those cuts. In other words, we can see that it is meaningless to cut police budgets without thinking about wider changes to the police as an institution and wider challenges to institutional racism and inequality.

Flowing from that, we must look at the role of the police in society. The police have the function of suppressing ordinary people, working-class people to uphold a system where a tiny minority have privilege over us. That system has racism hardwired into it to divide and rule, that’s why it’s inseparably embedded into the police, which has the task of upholding that system. That’s why we need strategies that confront the police, not reconcile with them.

As with previous black liberation struggles, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 faced enormous pressures to be incorporated into the state and respectable politics, mainly by the Democrats. Because the Black Lives Matter movement began under the Obama administration many looked to Joe Biden, who was a presidential candidate at the time of the protests, with suspicion. This suspicion often underpinned a more confrontational stance with the state and establishment for people within the movement: more protests, more occupations, more street protests.

Despite this, sections of the movement in 2020 did get pulled into throwing their weight toward Joe Biden’s election campaign against then-President Donald Trump. Moreover, Biden’s making Kamala Harris his vice-president was met with much enthusiasm by many. For that section of the BLM movement, the fact that Kamala Harris could become the first black female vice-president was enough to warrant its support.

However, as mentioned before, lots of people within the movement were wary of the Democrats and their tendency to co-opt and tame movements. And rightly so, people pointed out that Kamala Harris’ politics were dangerous to the movement. She failed to support independent investigations for police using deadly force, stood against the use of body cameras on police and recently opposed defunding the police. The divisions between those pulled behind the Democratic party and those wanting to continue confronting the state exacerbated the decline and fragmentation of the street movement. For revolutionary socialists, both here in the UK and in the US the Democrats are no friends to the movement. They are a political party of the ruling class. Their interest is to demobilise and deradicalise the movement. Any movement pushing forward means resisting this pressure.

The question of co-option versus confrontation with the state and establishment relates to how we organise, which we shall now consider here. In rejection of big parties and organisations, the ‘structurelessness’ and ‘leaderlessness’ of the BLM movement are often celebrated as a strength of the movement. And to a large degree, this is fair enough – these qualities helped enable the movement’s creativity, which in turn produced a whole new layer of activists.

But, as the writer Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor discusses in her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, strategies that seek to be structureless and non-hierarchical have the limitation of being unable to formulate clear, united demands, nor make decisive moves for the movement at key junctures. This in turn allows for fragmentation, as had happened to some degree in 2020 and an even greater degree in 2016. And while debates can be had on social media, through blogs and so on as to how the movement goes forward – this doesn’t mean these are effective ways for conclusions and decisive action to be decided.

I go into more depth in my article as to the question of how the movement should organise and whether it should be leaderless or structureless, but it’s worth noting here that this debate isn’t unique to the Black Lives Matter movement – it emerged within the recent climate movement, as well as in previous movements like the anti-capitalist movement.

Multiracial Character of the Movement 

The Black Lives Matter movement protest in Britain

Now a big debate that I’ll just mention is the debate around the role of white people within the BLM movement. This question has come up in one form or another in every anti-racist movement. What was different about BLM was that the multiracial nature of the movement and its spread (to predominantly white towns) has meant that more people are asking whether white people can play more than just a peripheral and passive role in the fight against racism. This is a positive development because the fight against racism can’t just be left to black people – if racism is systemic, ending it will take the energy of more than just the people who face racism.

The multiracial character of the movement links to how the question of class featured strongly within the BLM movement. COVID-19 exposed the depth of systemic and structural racism, as well as where the real privilege lies in society – with the 1%. Many people saw for the first time how most of our lives are disposable for the good of profit, but racism puts the lives of black and brown people on the sharp end of that. That is the context that BLM emerged from as a powerful mass multiracial uprising in 2020. Class demands for Personal Protective Equipment and decent housing for all were at the centre of the protests and online discussions surrounding the movement. I was at the protests in London, chanting with thousands of others for ‘justice for Belly Mujinga’, a black women rail worker who died after being spat at by a man claiming to have coronavirus.

Significantly, the movement highlighted the intersection between race and class. That’s an important step towards the recognition that racism does not affect us all the same. The death of the railway worker Belly Mujinga, a Congolese woman working at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, did not just happen because she was black. It happened because she was a black worker, like many others often in frontline work which put them at greater risk of contracting Covid. The disproportionate deaths in general of people who are black and of other global majority backgrounds were not simply down to race, but the intersection between race and class – whether to do with work, overcrowded housing, poorer health rates and so on. Class shapes our experience of oppression, including racism.

As Marxists, we think class ultimately gives us the power to end oppression, including racism. Racism has been hardwired into capitalism from its infancy. It was born out of the Atlantic slave trade, persisted through the era of empire as a mechanism of dividing and ruling and extracting resources abroad and continues today to scapegoat migrants and refugees as a way of deflecting anger from the ruling classes (that is, the bosses and politicians, who squeeze most of us to make their profits and maintain their privilege in society).

At the same time, the ruling classes’ reliance on labour makes it vulnerable. Workers who form most of society are the source of its profits and crucial to the functioning of the capitalist system. So, when workers collectively fight back by using their ability to withdraw labour, they can bring the system to a standstill and the ruling classes to their knees. Being part of the working class gives black and brown people the power to end the system, which maintains itself through racial divisions. With Black Lives Matter in 2020, we witnessed a glimpse of the potential impact that working-class action could have on the scale, breadth and radicalisation of the movement. The high points of that movement included the 2020 Longshoreman strike on Juneteenth, where thousands of dock workers shut down the ports up and down the West Coast to protest police brutality and institutional racism.

We welcome this process. But for the movement to achieve fundamental change and raise a challenge to systemic racism, it must consistently base its strategy for change on the power of the working class. We have a huge opportunity to do this now – the recent railway strike in the UK led by black, migrant, and white workers, was an inspiring example. It has rocked the Tories. We must connect the radicalism of BLM with the power of the organised working class if we are to win fundamental change and stamp out racism across the world.

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Click the link to read Nadia’s article online: “More than a moment: what did Black Lives Matter achieve” International Socialism Journal Issue 175, 2022.

This article was first published by ROAPE.

The availability, low cost, and functionality of single-use plastics in Kenya has crescendoed into the country’s most significant solid waste management challenge. By 2017, Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi reportedly produced a cautious estimate of 480 tonnes of plastic waste a day with conflicting estimates of how much of the waste was recycled (anywhere between 2 and 8 per cent). Fully aware of the growing plastic pollution and its effects, the then Environment Minister, Prof. Judi Wakhungu, declared plastic pollution a “national disaster”, one that required a paradigm shift in our attitude and behaviour towards plastics.

In a bid to address the problem, a ban on the use, manufacture and importation of plastic bags used for commercial and household packaging was instituted on 28 August 2017 by the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA). Less than two years later, the ban was extended to include non-woven polypropylene bags, which retail outlets such as supermarkets had been using to replace plastic carrier bags, after NEMA, which is charged with enforcing the prohibition, found that manufacturers were producing poor quality non-woven bags that could not be reused. The 2017 ban allows for companies to apply for exemptions where they can demonstrate that plastic packaging is necessary to preserve product integrity and alleviate health concerns.

The strictest of its kind globally, the ban is in line with universal calls for decisive action to combat the destructive effects of plastics on health and the environment. In Nairobi, a follow-up to the fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly focussed on the role of nature as a cornerstone of environmentally sustainable socio-economic development and its resolution on plastic pollution echoed the intent of Kenya’s ban on plastic bags. Further, the ban aligns with Article 42 of the Constitution of Kenya 2010 which guarantees the right to a clean and healthy environment and extends this right to future generations. Moreover, reducing plastic pollution is consistent with Kenya’s overarching policy plan, Vision 2030, and its mid-term configurations which depend on restoring and maintaining the natural systems that support agriculture, energy supplies, livelihood strategies, and tourism.

The plastic ban is a form of social regulation, catalysed by public interest concerns. NEMA has partnered with the police to ensure widespread enforcement but the disproportionate impact on small and medium-sized enterprises led the agency to refine its strategy to target larger importers and distributors through an inter-governmental enforcement task force whose members are drawn from the National Police Service, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Customs Police, Kenya Revenue Authority and the Anti-Counterfeit Authority.

NEMA reports a self-evaluated success rate of 80 per cent compliance, which indicates a commendably high return on regulatory investment. To illustrate this, in response to a 2018 petition by the Kenya Association of Manufacturers challenging the constitutionality of the ban, the Environment and Land Court agreed with NEMA that the ban had legal merit, did not violate any rights, was centred on the public interest and that its communal benefits outweighed its concentrated costs. Success in the secondary objective of ensuring compliance with the ban, however, must not be conflated with success in the primary objective — the policy goal of eradicating plastic pollution. While there has been a reduction in plastic bag waste, single-use plastics, such as plastic water bottles, are still firmly in circulation, causing the same environmental challenges and bringing new ones.

Firstly, not only is single-use plastic litter an aesthetic nightmare, its proliferation is jeopardizing the “Magical Kenya” brand and the narrative of Kenya as a clean and idyllic tourist destination. With tourism accounting for an estimated 8 per cent of GDP in 2019, single-use plastic pollution is still a visible economic risk.

An example of this is to be found beneath the dense canopy of Karura Forest in the heart of Nairobi, a portal into the lush past of the Green City in the Sun. With a misty waterfall, caves with a pre-colonial history and a meandering river walk, this illusion of paradise is periodically shattered by the harsh reality of plastic waste. The rivers in the forest reserve that Nobel-prize winning Wangari Maathai fought so hard to protect are often laden with plastic bottles, interfering with the resident wildlife. Despite a presidential directive banning all single-use plastics in protected areas such as forests, the boundaries of these special zones have proven porous to the plastic pollution beyond them.

There are therefore legitimate questions about the efficacy of the 2017 ban, and its surgical focus on plastic carrier bags, given the proliferation of other single-use plastics. The proliferation of discarded single-use plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) may demand the amputation of the plastics industry as a whole. Simply put, a partial ban as currently constructed is an effective first step, but it is inadequate in scope. Given the scale and gravity of the effects of plastic pollution, a full ban on single-use plastics would be a much more coherent policy.

In the same vein, a confusing framework consisting of a single set of regulations, three clarifications, an exemption process and a partial ban creates uncertainty and reduces legal clarity. It introduces regulatory fatigue, reducing long-term prospects for compliance and creating opportunities for corruption.

Secondly, the lack of robust plastic waste management systems leads to the informal incineration of single-use plastic waste which releases toxic fumes into the environment. From the dumpsites of cities and rural towns across the country, informal waste pickers commonly referred to as chokoras pick through plastic waste to distinguish what has resale value and burning the pickings that do not make the cut.

Given the scale and gravity of the effects of plastic pollution, a full ban on single-use plastics would be a much more coherent policy.

Thirdly, plastic pollution comes with a rancid medley of negative externalities. The Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi is a dystopian world far away from the Karura Forest. The 30-acre expanse of mounds of varying shapes and colours of discarded plastic reveals the true scope of a plastic pollution problem that cannot simply be burned away. For the residents of Dandora, the dumpsite is in defiant breach of their constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. It is not just the aesthetic gap that matters here; the mounds of plastic waste provide a breeding ground for harmful organisms and disease. Moreover, the distressing number of children — who should be in school — picking through the often dangerous and contaminated rubbish is a stark illustration of the child-labour implications of plastic waste.

It is important to note that while the partial ban has successfully mobilized the public around the indiscriminate use of plastic packaging, it does not address the issue of Kenya’s weak solid waste management systems. NEMA’s National Solid Waste Management Strategy (2015) proposes a normative culture shift toward a 7R-oriented society — Reducing; Rethinking; Refusing; Recycling; Reusing; Repairing and Refilling waste. The strategy prioritizes prevention as the preferred option which in the case of plastics would imply a preference for elimination rather than minimisation and management, which address the symptoms and not the cause. The correct order should therefore be Rethink (before going for plastic), Refuse (using plastic bags), Reduce (avoid generating plastics or use alternatives), Reuse (reuse plastic containers), Recycle (what can be recycled), Repair (before throwing away a plastic item) and Refill (waste site).

With the long-term feasibility of recycling plastic in question given that, unlike glass, the recycling process for even the most robust plastics compromises functional quality, weakening the structure of the plastic with every cycle, lobbying by the private sector to keep the ban partial takes on a more sinister hue. A partial rather than a full ban on single-use plastics was predicated on the plastics industry self-regulating the recycling of exempted single-use plastics through PETCO. With only 9 members out of a potential membership of approximately 170, it is clear that this voluntary body is unwilling or unable to cater to Kenya’s plastic waste management needs. The volume of plastic waste demands a more concerted regulatory response.

As long as the cost of producing (and dumping) a new single-use plastic bottle is significantly lower than the cost of recycling an old one, all recycling attempts by PETCO remain performative. The cost of recycling a bottle versus making a new one varies, depending on where the bottle is and the international price of oil. According to PETCO Country Manager Joyce Gachugi, “a rise in the crude oil market also determines as a rise in crude oil prices increases demand for recycled plastic”. However, in 2021, the low value of scrap and the high costs of recycling, coupled with low oil prices, meant that in many parts of the globe recycled plastic cost more than manufacturing virgin plastic. Thus, conceivably, a scheme that forces producers, importers and distributors to reflect the true cost of plastic waste, including the debilitating social cost of pollution at the point of purchase, could incentivize recycling and dissuade production of new plastic.

As long as the cost of producing (and dumping) a new single-use plastic bottle is significantly lower than the cost of recycling an old one, all recycling attempts by PETCO remain performative.

The real cost of plastics has been externalized to the public space where we have to deal with the collection, disposal and negative health effects of plastics. Ideally, this is a cost that should be reflected in the price of each piece of single-use plastic packaging. Actualizing the true cost of single-use plastic would entail designing a tax on plastic production, importation and distribution that would incorporate the cost of collection, aggregation, and recycling of plastics in a co-regulation scheme with NEMA.

However, since even highly-recyclable plastic such as that used in water bottles will degrade in quality over time, becoming unusable after just two to three recycling cycles, this would only be, at best, a stop-gap measure since the recycled plastic would inevitably end up as waste. The ban fails to provide incentives to current plastics importers to switch to more eco-friendly alternatives to prevent plastic production in the first place. No incentive programmes exist to subsidize and scale-up eco-friendly alternatives to single-use plastics. The ban was thus a missed opportunity to catalyse the creation of a robust eco-friendly packaging industry, one that has the potential to provide Kenya with a first-mover advantage. The synergy of phasing out single-use plastics, reducing pollution and creating eco-friendly packaging industries with global potential, may present Kenya with a production competitive advantage.

Finally, NEMA’s self-declared 20 per cent non-compliance with the ban was mainly a result of the challenge of borders that are porous to contraband plastics. This is an important reminder that plastics are a global, transboundary issue, and any regulation aimed at curbing plastic pollution must adopt a regional and perhaps global advocacy strategy. The dynamics of a shifting world order in a world reeling under plastic pollution coalesced with the negotiation of a free trade agreement between Kenya and the United States where Kenya has reportedly been under pressure to reverse the ban.

The ban fails to provide incentives to current plastics importers to switch to more eco-friendly alternatives to prevent plastic production in the first place.

As the re-distributive effects of globalization re-shape the world, countries like Kenya must guard against the extractive intent of corporations and governments willing to externalize their plastic waste problem. Kenya may have to align with like-minded global partners to protect the integrity of her “end-plastic pollution” stance. Similarly, Kenya’s position in the East African Community, the African Union and the world stage requires a level of committed international advocacy for the phasing out of plastics.

Kenya’s stance on environmental protection is likely to lead both to opportunities and threats and, in this regard, the goal of eliminating plastic waste from her borders must be coherent in regulatory intent, design and effect in the ways highlighted here. It is however encouraging to see that Declaration 3 of the Nairobi UNEA meeting highlights the decision of the Environment Assembly to establish an intergovernmental negotiating committee to develop an international legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. Kenya’s global leadership in curbing the proliferation of plastic may be one step towards the global push-back against plastic production.

More than three years ago, on 1 November 2018, I wrote an article on this forum titled Man in the Mirror: Echoes of Jomo in Uhuru. In that article I concluded that, just like Oginga Odinga helped facilitate Jomo Kenyatta’s ascendancy to the presidency but he himself never became president, William Ruto may have helped Uhuru Kenyatta win the presidency but he himself was unlikely to become president. Developments in the country in the countdown to the 9 August 2022 elections seem to buttress my argument of three years ago that kingmakers never become kings themselves, or, more precisely, they never succeed the kings they make. In my public lecture at Kenyatta University on 23 June 2022, entitled “The Uhuru-Ruto Administration and Electoral Politics in Kenya: A Dialectical Perspective”, I developed my argument further and buttressed my conclusions of three years ago using the three laws of dialectics.

The fallout between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto is so complete that the incumbent president has thrown all his weight behind the de facto opposition leader instead of supporting his second-in-command to succeed him. This is a most rare development in the practice of democracy anywhere in the world. It, however, is not new to Uhuru. In the 2007 election, Uhuru was the official leader of the opposition. But instead of rallying the opposition forces against the incumbent, President Mwai Kibaki, Uhuru chose to cast his lot with Kibaki in a case wherein, perhaps, ethnic loyalty trumped democratic sensibilities. This time round, he is the incumbent casting his lot with the opposition and working hard to ensure his deputy does not succeed him. The six-million-dollar question is: why? Why did the UhuRuto duo fall out so badly given their brotherly closeness following their 2013 electoral victory?

If you ask Deputy President Ruto and those close to him, the issue lies in the Hustler vs. Dynasty saga. The argument is that those who belong to the dynasty – Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila Odinga, and Gideon Moi – have regrouped to ensure a Hustler – William Ruto – does not ascend to the highest seat in the land. This narrative has garnered quite some movement in the country, but it does not actually explain the fallout between the president and his deputy, nor the fact that the deputy president is unlikely to succeed the president. The explanation lies squarely at the feet of the deputy president – his hubris, raw ambition, lack of humility, and generally taking his succession to the presidency for granted.

Whereas the 2010 constitution secured the office of the deputy president from the arbitrariness of serving at the pleasure of the president, still the occupant of that office needs to demonstrate some level of humility and deference to the president. Indeed, the current institutional arrangement in Kenya is modelled on the American system. Yet even in the latter system, vice presidents tend to demonstrate utmost loyalty and deference to the president and are always keen never to be seen to upstage the president or hog the limelight. Hubert Humphrey, the vice president to Lyndon Johnson noted, “You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty.” Nelson Rockefeller, vice president to Gerald Ford said of his duties: “I go to funerals, I go to earthquakes.” John Adams, the first vice president of the United States, said, “I am vice president. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.” Indeed, he became “everything” when he was elected the second president of the Unites States in 1796. Similarly, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Thomas Marshall said, “Being vice president is comparable to a man in a cataleptic fit; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on but has no part in it.” Mike Pence, vice president to Donald Trump quipped: “You shut the door; you tell the boss exactly what you think. But when the door opens, the job of the vice president is to stand right next to the president and implement the policy that he’s decided.”

This level of loyalty and humility has completely been missing on the part of Deputy President Ruto. Indeed, Ruto failed to learn from Moi, who loyally served as Jomo Kenyatta’s vice president for a decade and endured many humiliating moments but eventually acceded to the presidency after the death of Jomo Kenyatta in 1978. Instead, Ruto has demonstrated raw ambition, acted as if he was co-president with Uhuru, and began campaigning as soon as the 2017 elections were over. At public events with the president, Ruto has tended to hog the limelight, enunciating government plans and policies even before calling upon the president to speak, a practice oddly inconsistent with all other vice presidents in the country and elsewhere in the democratic world.

A dialectical perspective

In my public lecture at Kenyatta University on 23 June 2022, I sought to demonstrate why Ruto is unlikely to succeed Uhuru in 2022 using the three laws of dialectics. These laws include the law of the unity and conflict of opposites; the law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative change; and the law of the negation of the negation. In the following sections, I discuss each law and how it applies to Kenya’s electoral politics, with particular focus on the August 2022 presidential election outcome.

The law of the unity and conflict of opposites

According to Vladimir Lenin and Friedrich Engels, the law of contradiction (the unity and conflict of opposites) in phenomena is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Our world is a paradoxical terrain characterized by a unity of contradictions, a unity of opposites. We have birth vs. death; above vs. below; wealth vs. poverty; capital vs. labour; sale vs. purchase; boom vs. bust; Light vs. darkness; rulers vs. ruled, etc. These contradictions are universal in all intellectual disciplines. In mathematics, there is the integral and the differential (plus and minus). In mechanics, there is action and reaction. In physics, there is positive and negative electricity (by which we can boil water and freeze it). In chemistry, there is fusion and fission of atoms (combination and dissociation). In social science, there are the haves and the have-nots (the foundation of class struggle and the basis of the apparent popularity of the “hustler-dynasty” narrative in the current electoral politics in Kenya). In war, there is defence and offense, advance and retreat, victory and defeat. Even the human individual is made up of opposites, the spirit and the flesh which, the Bible notes in Galatians 5: 17, are always at odds with one another – “For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”

Ruto has tended to hog the limelight, enunciating government plans and policies even before calling upon the president to speak.

The essence of the dialectics is that gradual changes in either of the contradictory forces create crises within phenomena. These crises reach turning points in which one force quantitatively grows in strength and overcomes its opposing force, resulting in qualitative change. How does this law apply to the Uhuru-Ruto saga in light of the political history of Kenya?

First, prior to rising to power, Jomo and five others were imprisoned by the colonialists, allegedly for masterminding the Mau Mau rebellion. These are now popularly known as “The Kapenguria Six”. Similarly, prior to assuming the presidency, Uhuru and five others were indicted by the ICC, allegedly for masterminding and financing post-election violence. They have since come to be known as “The Ocampo Six”.

Second, Jomo and Jaramogi found common ground in the fight for independence, Jaramogi arguing the case for “uhuru na Kenyatta” and refusing to form government while Jomo was till imprisoned. Yet the two fell out over ideology and policy differences soon after independence. On the other hand, Uhuru and Ruto started off on opposite sides of the 2008 post-election violence, but found common cause once indicted by the ICC and partnered to save themselves by acquiring political power. Yet the two have now fallen out and become sworn enemies.

Third, whereas Jomo and Jaramogi were icons of the anticolonial nationalist struggle, Uhuru and Ruto are protégés of former President Moi, created, perhaps, in the image of the latter, Ruto particularly more so than Uhuru. Ruto is a natural politician who has perfected the ruthlessness of his political mentor. Uhuru, on the other hand, is a reluctant politician who seems more at ease in private social life than in the hustle and bustle of the political world. In essence, the initial UhuRuto bromance that propelled the duo to power and the final fallout that spells doom for Ruto’s presidential ambition is an exemplification of the law of the unity and conflict of opposites that is constantly at play both in the physical and social worlds.

The law of the transformation of quantitative change to qualitative change

According to Engels (1973) and Trotsky (1994), for us to fully understand the essence of change, both social and physical, we have to grasp the law of the transformation of quantitative change to qualitative change. Change, development, or evolution is not unidirectional, unilinear, and nor does it occur gradually in a straight, smooth line. There are long periods of time when nothing seems to be taking place with regard to change, development, or evolution. Then, out of the blue, something seemingly miraculous happens: a major social revolution, a physical catastrophe, a breakthrough in scientific discovery, an innovative discovery. The point here is that at moments when nothing seems to be happening, there are small quantitative changes taking place that eventually add up to a major qualitative change that we then view as a major leap forward.

According to Trotsky, this law of the transformation of quantitative change into qualitative change, from quantity to quality, has an extremely wide range of applications, from the smallest particles of matter at the subatomic level in chemistry to the largest physical and social phenomena known to humans. Note the quantitative changes that lead to baldness: Does loss of one hair lead to baldness? No. How about loss of two, three, four hairs? The answer remains no. But constant loss of one hair at a time (quantitative change) leads to baldness (a qualitative change).

The notion that under certain conditions even small things can cause big changes finds expression in all kinds of sayings and proverbs: “The straw that broke the camel’s back”, “Many hands make light work”, and “Constant dripping wears away the stone”.

How does this law of the passage of quantitative changes to qualitative change apply to the case of Kenya? This law’s implication is that, at the social level, change, development, or progress is not unidirectional and unilinear, nor does it occur gradually in a smooth straight line. Sometimes one step forward is followed by two steps backwards and vice versa. Note the convoluted and messy decades-long process of democratization in Kenya: the concerted struggles that led to the repeal of Section 2(A) of the constitution to return the country to multiparty politics in 1992; the “No Reforms, No Elections” movement in the run-up to the 1997 elections that led to the Inter-Parliamentary Parties Group compromise on expanding representation to the electoral commission; opposition unity and victory in 2002 followed by constitutional reform acrobatics; the 2008 post-election violence and the momentum towards a new constitutional order in 2010 that created a devolved system of governance and established the Supreme Court of Kenya, among many other democratic achievements.

At moments when nothing seems to be happening, there are small quantitative changes taking place that eventually add up to a major qualitative change that we then view as a major leap forward.

Even when nothing seems to be happening, small quantitative changes are usually taking place that eventually add up to a major qualitative change. Note here the seismic ruling of the Supreme Court of Kenya that nullified the August 2017 presidential election. This was preceded by periodic changes in the personnel of the Supreme Court: the retirement of Chief Justice Willy Mutunga brought in Chief Justice David Maraga; the dismissal of Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Barasa brought in Kalpana Rawal whose retirement brought in Philomena Mwilu; the retirement of Phillip Tunoi brought in Isaac Lenaola.

Without these little quantitative changes (not to mention the protracted changes that led to the new constitution that provided for a Supreme Court), it is impossible to expect that the celebrated landmark ruling nullifying the presidential election, the first in Africa, would have come to pass. Remarkably, the Supreme Court has emerged as the most important countervailing power to the executive and the anchor for rule of law and democratic governance in the country. The role of the legislature in this regard remains dismal, the democratic gains of the country notwithstanding.

The law of the negation of the negation

According to Engels (1973), Hegel (1991), and Marx (2002), the law of the negation of the negation explains the repetition at a higher level of certain features and properties of the lower level and the apparent return of past features. In the development of social and physical phenomena, there is a constant struggle between form and content and between content and form, resulting in the eventual shattering of the old form and the transformation of the content. This whole process, according to the three dialecticians, can best be pictured as a spiral, where the movement comes back to the position it started, but at a higher level. For instance, when a grain of maize is planted, it germinates into a plant. The original maize grain is negated. The plant grows, flowers, and produces even more and better grains, which are harvested and processed in the making of flour; the negation is thereby also negated!

At the social level, historical progress is achieved through a similar series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negated, this does not represent its total elimination. The new stage does not completely wipe out the stage that it supplants.

The UhuRuto fall out represents an interesting case of the negation of the negation, dialectically speaking. First, the two are protégés of President Daniel arap Moi – Ruto a natural politician, Uhuru a reluctant one. Note here Uhuru’s apparent “absence” during his first term compared to Ruto’s robust presence, scheming, and political strategizing. Indeed, as demonstrated by the audio now doing the rounds on social media, and confirmed by Deputy President Ruto himself in a KTN interview on 7 July 2022, President Uhuru Kenyatta was willing to leave office and retire to his Ichaweri village after the nullification of the August 2017 elections, but Ruto wouldn’t countenance it, going so far as to think of slapping the president for suggesting that they quit the presidency!

Remarkably, the Supreme Court has emerged as the most important countervailing power to the executive and the anchor for rule of law and democratic governance in the country.

Second, Uhuru and Ruto were on the same side of the political divide in the 2002 elections. Uhuru ran for president while Ruto supported him to succeed Moi. They, however, soon fell out and, in the post-election violence of 2008, Uhuru and Ruto were on opposite sides of the divide. Third, when the two were indicted by the ICC, they found common ground and became bosom friends. They successfully campaigned to acquire power to save their skins. However, the two fell out immediately after their second-term inauguration in 2017. By March 2018, Uhuru was with his “enemy” Raila and not with his “bosom friend” Deputy President Ruto.

In so doing, Uhuru emerges as a very strange political animal, perhaps an exemplification of the law of the negation of the negation. As pointed out above, as Official Leader of the Opposition in 2007, he cast his lot with the incumbent President Kibaki instead of teaming up with fellow oppositionists to run for the presidency. Apparently, the force of ethnic ties trumped political principle. Now, as the incumbent president in 2022, he has cast his lot with the opposition instead of mobilizing his ruling party to retain power under his deputy, as political norms would dictate.

What are the implications of the Uhuru-Ruto saga for the 2022 electoral politics and for democratization in Kenya more generally?

Three implications

Three implications can be drawn from the Uhuru—Ruto saga from a dialectical perspective. First, every individual is a bundle of contradictions imbued with positive and negative forces, forces of both good and evil. It is what force is in ascendancy within us that determines whether we are called good or bad. Hence, no one political actor is inherently bad or inherently good. Ruto may have been stringently against the enactment of the 2010 constitution, yet he stood against the BBI that sought to amend the constitution even before its full implementation. This is a plus for constitutionalism in the country. Similarly, Uhuru may have won an illegitimate second term in October 2017 and promised to “revisit” the judiciary that nullified his August 2017 “victory”, yet his current support for Raila may open up the presidency to another Kenyan community beyond the Kikuyu and Kalenjin who have occupied the presidency since independence. This is a plus in the overall democratization of the country.

The second implication is related to the popular saying that there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics, only permanent interests. Political enemies can easily become political friends and vice versa, another exemplification of the law of the unity and conflict of opposites. Uhuru and Ruto were on opposite sides of the bitter post-election election violence of 2008. They soon became bosom friends after their indictment and partnered to win power in a close relationship described by the media as a “bromance”. They have since fallen out so bitterly that they no longer shake hands that they once clasped in a show of tuko pamoja, we are together. Similarly, in 2002 Raila became a Njamba in Mount Kenya for his Kibaki Tosha declaration in the elections of that year. By 2005, to Mount Kenya, Raila had become “a hyena from the West” because of his opposition to the 2005 constitutional referendum. Raila is now “climbing the mountain” with the firm support of Uhuru and Martha.

The two are protégés of President Daniel arap Moi – Ruto a natural politician, Uhuru a reluctant one.

The third and final implication of the Uhuru-Ruto fallout is that kingmakers never succeed the kings they create. The Kenyan political scene is replete with evidence of this reality. Jaramogi may have contributed to making Jomo president, by refusing to form a government while Kenyatta was still in prison when KANU won the internal self-government elections of 1961. Jaramogi insisted on demanding for “uhuru na Kenyatta”. Although he became vice president to Jomo, Jaramogi never succeeded Jomo. Barely two years after independence, they fell out with each other over matters of policy and ideology and Jaramogi was marginalized from power never to recover. Similarly, Charles Njonjo contributed to making Moi president back in 1978, but he was himself soon hounded out of politics ignominiously. Even Raila contributed to making Mwai Kibaki president, but they soon fell out and became bitter enemies. Raila did not succeed Kibaki.

Deputy President William Ruto repeatedly says he made Raila Prime Minister and, more particularly, that he made Uhuru president. Will he succeed President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 9 August 2022 elections? As the foregoing exposition illustrates, historical precedent and dialectical odds are stacked against Ruto. Raila is favoured to succeed the son of Jomo. In any event, the choice between the Azimio and Kenya Kwanza presidential tickets could not be more stark, even dialectically speaking. Even as the Azimio duo of Raila and Martha were on the forefront of the second liberation that yielded multipartyism in 1992, the Kenya Kwanza duo of Ruto and Gachagua were deeply ensconced in the bosom of the authoritarian Moi regime – Ruto as a prominent member of the Youth for KANU ’92 and Gachagua as the system’s favourite District Officer in Molo chasing around and harassing pro-democracy advocates.

Uhuru emerges as a very strange political animal, perhaps an exemplification of the law of the negation of the negation.

In the final analysis, the Uhuru-Ruto fall out perfectly captures the dialectical law of the negation of the negation in matters of social development. With it, the country seems to have spiralled back to the fallout between Jomo and Jaramogi. However, given the democratization process in the country, we are at a higher level of social and political development. Indeed, had it not been for the new constitution – born of this process – Deputy President William Ruto would long have been sacked and rendered into political oblivion. He is the greatest political beneficiary of the 2010 constitution even though he was its chief opponent. Nevertheless, just like Jaramogi before him, it is highly unlikely that Ruto will succeed Uhuru come 9 August 2022, the new political dispensation notwithstanding.

Does this mean William Ruto is absolutely destined to lose the August 2022 elections? Historical precedent and the dialectical odds dictate so. However, as Thomas Kuhn demonstrates in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), there are moments of anomalies where the established paradigm is shuttered leading to a methodological and theoretical rethinking within the scientific community. In other words, a Ruto win in August 2022 is possible, but it would be such an extraordinary accomplishment given historical precedent and dialectical dictates, that it would lead us to rethink and re-theorise our political realities and possibilities.