Kenyans have known for some time that the 2022 presidential election would be a two-horse race between Deputy President William Ruto and President Kenyatta’s favoured successor and long-time opposition leader, Raila Odinga. What some might not have anticipated is that with just a few weeks to go till the 9 August polls, the election remains too close to call. So how did we get here, and what will determine who emerges victorious to take up their position in State House?

Barring any last minute shocks, the outcome will depend on three main questions. First, how successful will Ruto’s Kenya Kwanza and Odinga’s Azimio La Umoja prove to be in winning over the undecideds and potential swing voters, and at maximising the turnout of their supporters? Second, can George Wajackoyah, a surprise third candidate, succeed in getting enough votes to prevent either Ruto or Odinga from securing 50% + 1 of the vote in the first round, pushing the election to a run-off? Third, how even will the playing field prove to be?

Taking each of these points in turn suggests that this election is more uncertain than any since 2007 and that any outcome remains possible.

The presidential race

Ruto entered the campaign period with a healthy lead over Odinga in a number of opinion polls, but that has now evaporated. Almost every month, Odinga and his Azimio La Umoja alliance – whose campaigns have been invigorated in recent months by the selection of Martha Karua as Odinga’s running mate, the addition of new alliance members, and a more active meeting schedule – have added a significant proportion of votes to their tally. On the whole, Odinga appears to have done this, not by making inroads into Ruto’s support base, but by winning over some of the formerly “undecided” and “refuse to answer”. Thus, while 38 per cent of respondents said that they would vote for Ruto and 27 per cent for Odinga in TIFA’s February 2022 opinion poll, by the end of June 2022 this had shifted to 39 per cent saying that they would vote for Ruto and 42 per cent for Odinga. Over the same period, the proportion of “undecided” and “no response” fell from 20 per cent and 11 per cent respectively in February to 10 per cent and 5 per cent in June.

Ruto entered the campaign period with a healthy lead over Odinga in a number of opinion polls, but that has now evaporated.

Opinion polls always have some room for error – not all who say that they will vote are registered to, or will vote, and it is possible that some people change their mind at the last minute. Given Odinga’s marginal lead, this means that the election is too close to call. In such a situation, small things can make all the difference. So what might determine how the elections play out on August 9?

Getting the vote out

With everything to play for, Kenya Kwanza and Azimio La Umoja are focused winning over any remaining undecided voters and maximising turn out in their areas. In order to understand how they are doing this, it is important to recognize that there is not so much one national campaign as a number of sub-national battles taking place in the country’s former regions, each of which is shaped by local dynamics. In other words, while the state of the economy and the credibility of the candidates is significant everywhere, the balance of power, and the nature of the contest, is different in every area.

In terms of strongholds, while Odinga is dominating his home area of Nyanza, and Ruto has a lead in his Rift Valley backyard, the rest of the country will likely split their vote. While the majority of citizens in Nairobi, North Eastern and at the Coast appear to be backing Odinga, competition remains fierce in both areas. Similarly, while Ruto retains a lead in Central Kenya, the vote in Eastern is divided between the two candidates, and both alliances know that they can secure significant votes in all of these areas.

The difference this makes in the strategies candidates use is profound. Confident of victory in their homelands, Odinga and Ruto are relying on existing structures to mobilise a high turnout in these areas, and devoting more of their attention to key battlegrounds. This is demonstrated by the furious campaigning in Central Kenya. One of the most populous and economically influential regions, and home to the Kikuyu community of President Uhuru Kenyatta, Central is the region that appears to have been the most visited.

Despite Kenyatta backing Odinga, Ruto appears to have maintained the lead that he has held in the region for many months. His success reflects a combination of popular frustrations at the country’s current economic challenges and long-term planning, including sponsoring allied leaders in the region in the 2017 elections to build a strong base independent of Kenyatta’s influence.

Odinga’s failure to win over Central after many years in which the region’s leaders demonised the former opposition leader as a destabilising force is perhaps the biggest weakness of his campaign. Had Odinga secured a dominant position in Central, it would have been extremely difficult for Ruto to build a large enough support base to be a serious contender for the presidency. Much will now depend on whether Odinga, with Kenyatta and Karua’s backing, can eat into Ruto’s support base in Central, or whether continued economic difficulties will rally voters to Kenya Kwanza’s call for change.

The second most visited region appears to be Western, which along with North Eastern Kenya, is split fairly evenly between the two candidates. Thus, while both favour Odinga, the gap appears to be under 10% per cent. Western’s relatively large population, and the fact that Odinga has historically polled well here, while Ruto has co-opted prominent Western leaders in Musalia Muvadi and Moses Wetangula, means that the campaign is likely to be fierce right up to polling day.

Despite Kenyatta backing Odinga, Ruto appears to have maintained the lead that he has held in the region for many months.

Much will depend on which party has built the most effective infrastructure for getting the vote out. It is one thing to attract support in an opinion poll and another to get those people to the polls. While it is normally safe to assume that the ruling party has an advantage in this regard, given greater access to resources and state equipment, the situation is complicated in 2022 by two factors. First, there is no real “opposition candidate”, with Ruto, the “outsider”, having been Deputy President since 2013. Second, the effective mechanisms of political mobilization developed in traditionally “ruling party” areas such as Central Kenya may not benefit Odinga, even though he has the support of Kenyatta, because a majority of voters there are not planning to back Azimio.

What this suggests is that the election could remain extremely close right up until polling day, increasing the prospects for other factors to influence the outcome.

Will Wajackoyah spoil the party?

The presidential election has clearly been complicated by the late entry of George Wajackoyah, a 61-year old university professor. Minor candidates tend to struggle for media coverage and public attention. However, Wajackoyah’s manifesto, which calls for the legalisation of marijuana, the prioritisation of snake farming, the (clearly illegal) suspension of parts of the constitution, and (worryingly xenophobic) promise to “deport idle foreigners”, and his populist and unconventional style, have earned him significant media attention and captured the imagination of a significant number of Kenyans (mainly disgruntled young people in urban areas).

Wajackoyah – who polled 4 per cent of the popular presidential vote in TIFA’s June poll – has no chance of winning the election. His support base may also be exaggerated. Many of the young people to whom he is appealing may not even be registered to vote, and some who say that they will vote for him may decide not to “waste” their vote on a third candidate when they get to a polling station. Nevertheless, Wajackoyah – who is currently gaining ground – may seriously upset the election if, with say just 2 to 5 per cent of the vote, he prevents either of the main candidates from securing an absolute majority in the first round.

Wajackoyah has said that “a victory for either” Odinga or him would “be a win”, but it is unclear whether he would be able to direct his largely anti-establishment support base to swing behind Odinga in a second round. The current political uncertainty may therefore last for longer than many are expecting: Kenya has never before experienced a presidential run-off.

How “free and fair” will the election be?

The closeness of the race also means that the evenness of the playing field – from media coverage to the free and fairness of the election itself – will prove critical. This will place even greater pressure on the Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC) – at a time when the national press has cast doubt on whether this body is ready to manage these complex elections. In the run-up to the 2022 polls, there have been questions raised both about the IEBC’s handling of the thorny question of whether leaders accused of corruption and criminality should be allowed to run, and about important decisions about how the elections will be run. In particular, the IEBC’s decision to only produce an electronic voters register – with no “manual” copy – and not to have a “live” tally of overall results available online for all to see during the counting process, has led to controversy.

Public concern has been amplified by a damaging war of words with the Director of Criminal Investigations that – puzzlingly – has been escalated by the IEBC itself. Following the arrest of Venezuelan nationals at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, apparently on the basis that they were carrying election materials in an unconventional manner, had out-of-date passports, and were not met by IEBC officials, Chebukati released a statement highly critical of the police, alleging that they were harassing IEBC contractors working for Smartmatic, a multinational elections company helping the IEBC to manage election technology. This triggered an ongoing public spat that has seen the DCI raise serious questions about IEBC protocols and credibility, accusing the “the elections agency of misrepresenting facts, lying and laxity in the management of this year’s General Election”.

Such public spats are particularly unfortunate given that the IEBC was already struggling with a significant credibility challenge due to the fact that its chair, Wafula Chebukati, presided over the 2017 general election that was nullified by the Supreme Court. The IEBC also faces the challenging task of running high-tech elections across the country for six elective posts – President, Senator, Governor, Women Representative, Member of Parliament, and Member of County Assembly – on a single day. In a close contest, any logistical issues, intentional or not, could quickly be interpreted as manipulation by a mistrustful electorate.

The current political uncertainty may therefore last for longer than many are expecting: Kenya has never before experienced a presidential run-off.

These concerns mean that the ability of both coalitions to protect the vote by deploying party agents comprehensively across the country will be particularly important. Here, too, there will be a difference with previous elections. When one coalition or another was dominant in most of the country’s regions, it was very hard for the less popular coalition to post party agents. They would often be intimidated or quietly co-opted by the much larger coalition in that area. In 2022, there are far fewer “one-party zones”, with both Kenya Kwanza and Azimio competitive, if not winning, across much of the country. This means that it will be more feasible to deploy party agents consistently across the country. That should mean that malpractice is less likely, although it might also mean that – if there are attempts to rig the ballot – we see more explicit and blatant evidence of this than in the past.

It also seems clear that the closeness of the election and the fact that both candidates have been ahead in the opinion polls at some point, means that both Ruto and Odinga are confident they will win. Given that they have already also raised concerns about the performance of the IEBC, and in Ruto’s case the “deep state”, this means they are likely to dispute the outcome if they lose by a small margin – especially if there are logistical problems. In turn, this will make it harder to persuade all Kenyans that the electoral process was free and fair – even if it was – which in turn will have implications for the legitimacy of the resulting government.

Close elections, it turns out, create particular headaches for everyone involved. Only by watching how these three issues develop can we understand how they are likely to play out.

The Poverty of Low Expectations

There is a peculiar, if predictable, malaise that afflicts many African postcolonial societies and the mindsets of institutions and individuals: an unsettling sensation of being less than, combined with a desperate yearning to become like them—the former colonial masters—that generates perpetual mimicry and underperformance. This is what underscores the imperatives of existential, epistemic, and economic decolonization.

I commented in an earlier reflection on USIU-Africa’s duality, as a Kenyan and an American university, which is as seductive as it is debilitating, a source of both innovation and inertia. It engenders a perpetual search for a cohesive identity, a precarious institutional culture characterized by uneven expectations, the warring demands of Africanness and Americanness, in which their respective perils, rather than their possibilities, tend to be accentuated.

I frequently encountered and countered the proverbial “African time” by participants and invited speakers turning up late at campus meetings and events, and students complaining about lecturers who came late to class or not at all. I was often surprised by the poor quality of annual reports from some departments and divisions, and delays in the work of several institutional committees and projects. The University Council didn’t acquit itself well either: its committee meetings were often cancelled due to lack of quorum, and in many meetings, it was clear to management that some members had not read the reports we painstakingly prepared.

I repeatedly made it known that I valued timeliness, rigorous standards, robust deliberations, and adherence to high expectations, ethical behavior, and exceptional performance. It was gratifying to see some met the demands of institutional excellence, but many others did not. As is often the case, the laggards were the loudest complainants, who sought to fuel a culture of intolerance, incivility, and illiberalism that reflected the dysfunctions of the larger national polity.

At stake was a battle against the culture of mediocrity evident in all manner of spaces and organizations. The brilliant, young Kenyan journalist, Larry Madowo, incisively captured the culture of low expectations in an article in The Daily Nation of November 15, 2016, titled “Why do Kenyans accept such low standards in everything?” He called it “the at least mindset.”  It is worth quoting at some length.

“This ‘at least’ mindset Kenyans have is just an apology for low standards…. When we are surprised that anything begins on time, we unconsciously allow the organizers of future events to be tardy because we’ve already made it acceptable. We are not outraged when a notorious politician does objectively horrible things because “at least” he cares for the people.

We make excuses for bad behavior because “at least” they haven’t killed anyone. We make excuses for grand corruption even in the face of incontrovertible evidence because the other side is just as bad…

When you criticize anything in Kenya, there is never a shortage of people who will tell you to be positive and stop being so pessimistic. The argument is always that “at least” something is being done.

We accept bare minimums when we are entitled to so much more. Optimism cannot, and should, not be a substitute for a solid critique… You can’t build a merit-based society if any effort demands to be applauded, however little. We scrape the bottom of the barrel so many times, come up with almost nothing and are still pleased that ‘at least’ it’s not entirely empty.”

The following year, in his commencement address at USIU-Africa, the Chief Executive Officer of the Commission for University Education (CUE), Dr. Mwenda Ntarangwi, quoted Madowo’s article above. He implored the graduating students to eschew the “at least mindset.” “Does patriotism mean accepting low standards?” he asked. “Should it not be the other way round, that patriotism means we love this nation so much that we accept nothing but the best from it and that we also give it the best? As you leave here today let me ask you to please change this culture of ‘at least’ and model and expect excellence in all that you do.”

I was troubled by the culture of authoritarianism and discretionary decision making I found, in which the vice chancellor made all decisions even on petty matters. I commented in previous reflections on the debilitating cultures of xenophobia, sexism, and unethical research practices.

The Seductions and Sanctions of Ethnicity

The biggest elephant in the room was ethnic chauvinism, dubbed “tribalism”, a colonial construct that reduces Africans to members of atavistic “tribes.” It is a sad commentary on the endurance of colonial civilizational conceits that many in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent uncritically embrace the term “tribe” for their ethnic groups or nations. I told my students not to use it in my classes for its racist origins and offensiveness to describe African identities that elsewhere are dignified by terms such as ethnicity or nationality and are not mutilated by suffix “tribe” after the name. Who would describe an Englishman or Englishwoman a member of the English tribe?

There is a large literature on the colonial invention of “traditions” and “tribes” that many contemporary Africans swear by to invoke some imaginary precolonial cultural authenticity. A distinction is often made between moral ethnicity (ethnicity as a sociocultural identity) and political ethnicity (ethnicity as a political ideology). As an identity ethnicity is not the problem, it acquires its disruptive poison through political mobilization in contestations for power and privileges.

Such is the pervasive and perverse conceit in constructions of cultural and political hierarchies that the marshaling of ethnic identities in national and institutional life is seen as an African pathology. Yet, in the United States and other multicultural societies in the global North ethnicity is substituted by race. As the Trump presidency made it abundantly clear to those who had drank the kool-aid about American democracy, white supremacy is alive and well. Racist politicians routinely mobilize racial difference for the lethal concoction of discrimination, inequality, and disenfranchisement for racialized minorities. As the latter grow, political revanchism escalates, as evident in Trump’s and post-Trump America.

In an online essay posted in late December 2007, written during Kenya’s descent into the abyss of post-election violence, titled “Holding a nation hostage to a bankrupt political class,” I commented on the destructiveness of the country’s politicization of ethnicity. So, I was not surprised by the distractive and disruptive power of ethnicism when I was vice chancellor at USIU-Africa.

As is the case at the national level, the politics of ethnicity at the university reared its ugly head over appointments, promotion, and representation. The higher the position the more fraught the internal contestations and grandstanding. One of the most contentious was for the appointment of an acting Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs. Two substantive appointments had turned down the offer.

A cabal from one ethnic group held secret meetings to push the candidacy of one of their own, who had applied but was rejected by the search committee that included members of the faculty, staff, student, and university councils, as well as some members of management and the deans’ committee. An influential member of the University Council pushed for his own favorite candidate who was not qualified for the position.

Fortunately, the appointment of the DVC and other members of management was my prerogative as vice chancellor based on recommendations from the search committees. I used the appointment of the vice chancellor as a template in which as candidates we went through various stages concluded by on campus meetings with several groups of the university community. This search was novel in Kenya but common in the United States where I relocated from.

Management and I instituted a transparent process of appointments and promotions for senior administrative and academic positions. As I noted in an earlier reflection, each academic department and school formed an appointment and promotion committee. For heads of key administrative departments, management interviewed the candidates as well.

In 2018-2019, we embarked on a staff redeployment exercise in which about three dozen people were transferred to other departments. Human resource experts recommend such periodic redeployments as an effective tool of talent retention and management. It helps re-energize employees by offering them an opportunity to learn new skills and even assume higher positions and saves employers the high costs of redundancies and recruitment of new employees.

In our case, through the Tuition Waiver Program many employees had earned bachelor’s or master’s degrees ill-suited for the positions they occupied. Management was also keen to break the ethnic enclaves that had emerged over the years in various administrative divisions and departments that were often dominated by members from one or a couple of ethnic groups.

This was initially met with some resistance, but many of the individuals involved increasingly expressed satisfaction with their redeployment. We manage to loosen the stranglehold of ethnic cabals, but they were by no means broken. The ethnic chauvinists looked for every opportunity to attack members of management. Revealingly, they focused their ire on the highly accomplished and effective women in management who were in their early 40s. In my case, this was overlaid by xenophobia, which underscores the fact that layers of bigotry cascade and overlap.

The Blinkered External Gaze

Despite popular mythology, universities have never been ivory towers splendidly isolated from their societies and the wider world. Their values, missions, and institutional cultures reflect their times and locations. The few colonial universities that were established in Africa sought to reproduce the colonial order, while the explosion of universities after independence reflected the expansive dreams of development. Similarly, in the United States it is now widely acknowledged that many of the country’s most prestigious universities were built with enslaved labor, or benefitted from the proceeds of slavery, and laid the intellectual and ideological foundations of American racism.

Prior to my time as vice chancellor, I had written extensively on the entangled, complex, and conflicted relationship between African universities and various external stakeholders. The honeymoon of the early post-independence years wilted as the drive for Africanization or indigenization of the public service was achieved, and as the unforgiving conditionalities of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed with fundamentalist zeal by the international financial institutions wrecked African economies and tore asunder the independence social contract.

At a conference of African vice chancellors in 1986, the World Bank baldly declared the continent didn’t need universities; some architects of the Washington Consensus had discovered social rates of return were higher for primary than higher education, voilà! Beleaguered African states facing mounting struggles for the “second independence” arising out of the collapse of the nationalist promises of development and democracy, often led by workers, the youth and university students, were only too happy to dismantle universities as viable spaces of critical knowledge production. So, began the slide towards underfunding at the same time as the number of universities expanded to meet rising demand.

By the time I joined USIU-Africa in January 2016, the hand of the state over the higher education sector had loosened considerably. The president of the republic was no longer chancellor of all the public universities. Regulatory authority rested on an increasingly professional agency, CUE. Private universities were allowed to operate, although doubts about their quality lingered in the public mind and among their alumni as I observed. Moreover, as we experienced at USIU-Africa, the Kenyan regulator was more authoritarian than our American regulator, although that began to change under Dr. Mwenda’s leadership.

Institutional leaders on my campus including members of top governance organs had drunk deep in the autocratic well of the one party state, now overlaid by often misguided corporatist injunctions for profitability and efficiency. Above all, the levels of public funding per student continued to decline, which left many public universities virtually bankrupt when the pipeline of privately sponsored students dried up from 2017.

As I noted in an earlier reflection, the private sector and the rapidly growing class of high net worth individuals did not pick up the slack. Some of Africa’s wealthiest people gladly make generous contributions to exceedingly wealthy universities in the global North rather than those in their own countries. This is not surprising given the fact that these elites send their children to the global North. It’s a vote of no confidence in the academic worth of their local universities, where many of them received their education before the ravages of SAPs.

There’s a long tradition, crystallized in Frantz Fanon’s trenchant critique, The Wretched of the Earth, of depicting African elites as a comparator bourgeoisie, as the least patriotic among their global counterparts. In a paper titled “African Universities and the Production of Elites” delivered at a conference on African elites organized by the University of Toronto in January 2021, I argued for a more nuanced understanding and differentiation of African elites.

However, the fact remains they are the source of the huge illicit outflows of capital from the continent, estimated at $60 billion in 2016 by the UN Economic Commission for Africa High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa.“This is twice the amount of money flowing in as aid annually. Often, money leaving developing countries illicitly ends up right back in banks in Europe and the U.S.”

Our interest as management in engaging the private sector went beyond financial resources. I’ve long believed principled and mutually beneficial partnerships between universities and business are essential for two other reasons. First, in so far as research and development (R&D) is essential not only for national economic development, an area in which Africa performs abysmally (accounting for a mere 1.0% of global R&D), it is imperative for the growth and competitiveness of African business. The multinational corporations they compete with conduct the bulk of their R&D in their home countries often in collaboration with their research universities. How many African businesses conduct R&D, let alone in partnership with their local universities?

Second, universities are valued by society for their capacity to produce high quality human capital. Historically, business has invested in buying talent, rather than building talent. On their part, universities pride themselves as oases of advanced knowledges production and critical contemplation unsullied by the vocational preoccupations of lesser tertiary institutions. This incongruity in expectations has sometimes resulted in mismatches between university graduates and the needs of the economy and labor market.

In much of Africa, graduate unemployment and underemployment is higher than for those with lower levels of education. In East Africa, according to a story by Gilbert Nganga in University World News of June 2020, 2018, a study by the Inter-University Council of East Africa “shows that Uganda has the worst record, with at least 63% of graduates found to lack job market skills. It is followed closely by Tanzania, where 61% of graduates were ill prepared. In Burundi and Rwanda, 55% and 52% of graduates respectively were perceived to not be competent. In Kenya, 51% of graduates were believed to be unfit for jobs.”

In 2016, the British Council produced a report, Universities, Employability and Inclusive Development covering Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, which our management team found quite alarming as USIU-Africa was ranked lower than its competitors for the employability of its graduates. It prompted us to commission an internal study on the subject. The team consulted existing research and literature, gathered extensive data on the global, regional, and local contexts, carried out a survey of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and employers, and made several recommendations.

They found that employers expected technical, subject, and soft skills. Among the soft skills valued in the current job market, the following stood out: communication and interpersonal skills, problem solving skills, using own initiative and being self-motivated, working under pressure, organizational skills, teamwork, ability to learn, numeracy, valuing diversity and cultural differences, and negotiation skills. For the future, employers identified the skills that would become more critical included the following: literacies in various media, scientific literacy, ICT literacy, financial literacy, curiosity, persistence and grit, adaptability, service orientation, leadership, and social awareness.

Following the survey, the university enhanced its support systems for student employability preparedness. Existing programs for life and soft skills training were strengthened or new ones established. This included reforming general education, improving career training and job fairs, internships, and community service, and creating youth boot camps. The university also sought to infuse innovation and entrepreneurship in its academic curricula and extra-curricular activities by setting up an incubation and innovation center and introducing an assessment system for extra-curricular activities.

Also, we worked hard to enhance partnerships with the private sector, both international and local companies. We enjoyed modest success. Examples include the establishment of an apprenticeship and innovation program by a major local company, an AppFactory by Microsoft, the only one then in Kenya and 14th on the continent. We soon established a presence as an institution that was serious about employability that enabled us to attract the African Development Bank to select our university as one of four for a coding center of excellence and win a competitive bid by the World Bank to provide employability training for more than 30,000 young people in six counties.

As gratifying as these efforts were, it rankled that we failed to attract local companies to support research including those owned or run by members of our own board and council. Similarly, as I noted in a previous reflection, we were unable to crack the door to philanthropic giving from high net worth individuals locally.

Together with the Director of University Advancement and some members of his team we also put considerable efforts to forge partnerships with several embassies from the G20 countries and others that had sizable numbers of students at the university. We were able to secure funding from the US Embassy in Nairobi to establish a state of the art social media lab that produced highly regarded reports on the social media landscape in Kenya. Two of our most entrepreneurial faculty members got a multi-million dollar grant from USAID jointly with an American university for a project on youth employability and empowerment.

Management also put efforts in building external partnerships abroad. For example, the Director of University Advancement and I undertook a six week partnerships development and fundraising trip to the USA between April and May 2018. The trip presented an opportunity to promote the interests of the university to numerous constituencies including universities and research associations, foundations, our alumni, Kenyan and African diaspora communities, government agencies, private corporations, individuals, and potential friends. The visit covered 10 cities namely, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Detroit. Nearly 90 engagements took place.

We returned with four main takeaways that were summarized in a detailed report shared with the university’s academic and administrative leaders. First, we found a strong desire to engage with Africa in general, and African universities. Second, USIU-Africa enjoyed a strategic advantage because of its dual accreditation in Kenya and the USA. Third, we noted that all the universities we visited both big and small, research intensive and teaching oriented, were almost invariably better resourced than we were, and they seemed to have stronger cultures and systems of governance, management, and fundraising that provided us opportunities to reimagine our future. Finally, we were often urged by our interlocutors to actively engage American companies and organizations based in Kenya.

In the report we noted that to take full advantage of the partnership and fundraising opportunities we had cultivated it was imperative we needed to build our capacities, raise our visibility and value as a partner institution. First, we needed to strengthen the capacity of the Advancement division in terms of personnel, skills, and IT infrastructure.

Second, the establishment of an office of Global Affairs led by a senior academic with extensive private and public sector experience was essential to shepherd and oversee international academic partnerships. Third, in many of our conversations it became clear that we could position USIU-Africa as a research and policy hub in East Africa in collaboration with American institutions by establishing specialized institutes and centers that they could partner with and support.

Finally, it was necessary to review and strengthen our systems and processes to make them more effective for international engagements. Specifically, we needed to expand student accommodation to attract more foreign students. During the trip we repeatedly heard complaints about the slowness with which African institutions conduct business including responding to basic communication, negotiations and signing of MoUs, following up on agreements, and where necessary timely reporting on resource utilization.

We urged the divisions and the schools to work closely with University Advancement to pursue the various opportunities the trip had opened. Save for a few inter-institutional partnerships that were established, by the time the Covid-19 pandemic broke out there was little follow up.

Some would say there were “at least” some follow ups. In my book that was not good enough.

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.

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 

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.

–

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.