Europeans love to start the day with a little piece of Africa. Coffee for mum, tea for dad, chocolate for the little one and a banana pocketed on the fly by the teenager for the bus ride to school. Europeans know that their prosperity is built on the work of others. They know that without the oil extracted by workers in Nigeria, the coltan supplied by traders in Congo, and the uranium produced by miners in Chad, their cars wouldn’t run, their phones wouldn’t work and their homes would soon go dark. Yet, how many Europeans are able to locate the capital of Nigeria, Chad or Congo on a map? A kindergarten child can easily name several African mammals, but few would ever suggest the child memorize the name of an African language, society or personality. How can a civilization that thrives on labor in the Global South be so indifferent to these societies?

The literature provides three answers to that question. The first says roughly: It’s capitalism. Capitalism masks social relations. In order to live, workers must produce goods or provide services. But the market-based exchange of commodities transforms relations between workers. Social relations are primarily experienced as “relations between things.” This is what Karl Marx calls “commodity fetishism.” Relationships of production disappear from the field of vision. We end up treating commodities as if they had an intrinsic value, independent of the labor that produces them. Hungarian philosopher György Lukács adds that capitalism reifies social relations. Social relations are objectified, while individuals are plunged into a contemplative stance. Passive, apathetic, depoliticized: the consumer is a spectator.

While Marx and Lukács explain very well how one can use a product every day without knowing anything about the worker who produced it, they don’t tell us why certain workers, certain societies or certain groups are particularly obscured in the culture of capitalism. The economist Samir Amin would answer that capitalism only extends globally through “unequal exchange.” Colonial domination cut the world into two types of capitalist development: the self-centered capitalism of the center, with market growth, rising wages, and consumption. And the extroverted capitalism of the periphery, export-oriented and therefore without significant wage growth. This unequal division of labor logically leads to unequal awareness. While workers in the Global North may be indifferent to the fate of workers in the Global South, the reverse is not true. You can bet that a random Senegalese can name far more French cities than a random French person can name Senegalese cities.

Another form of response however would point less to capitalism and more to the state. In “The Social Production of Indifference,” the British anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows that bureaucracy treats individuals not as persons but as “cases.” Following Max Weber, Herzfeld shows that the centralization of state power drives a rationalization of practices and a division of bureaucratic labor. The accumulation of knowledge, the creation of specialized services and the professionalization of expertise follow suit. But bureaucratization also increases social distancing. Individuals are no longer linked to each other by face-to-face relations, but by all sorts of “invisible threads:” legal categories, statistics, formalities. French sociologist Béatrice Hibou adds that, contrary to what is often thought, neoliberalism does not debureaucratize. On the contrary, it adds new forms of distancing: numerical indicators, benchmarking, and management techniques. Here again, the problem is more general than the relationship between Europeans and Africans. But colonization has also left its mark on the bureaucratic trajectory. Post-colonial bureaucracy is indifferent to the fate of peripheral populations. Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembé calls this “government by neglect.” It’s the exercise of power through abandonment, relegation, and invisibilization. We end up relying on experts and specialists, rather than considering problems for ourselves. Eventually, we hope, someone in charge will take care of the looming problem for us.

A third type of response of course is racism. Racial theory and the dissemination of technologies of division (apartheid, segregation, border closures, encampment) have separated emotional communities. White people do not feel concerned with Black issues; they live in the comfortable quietness of what the philosopher Charles W. Mills calls “White Ignorance.” But indifference also comes from a denial of race. For US-American sociologists Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis, indifference is a new form of racism. While earlier racism was explicit, contemporary racism is less so. When asked about the plight of non-white people, white Americans used to justify their misfortunes on the grounds of biological or cultural inferiority. Today, Forman and Lewis explain, they are content to just ignore it. Pretend to see nothing of the differences so as not to have to worry about them: “Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race)”.

Of course, the question of Europe’s indifference to the fate of the rest of the world is an old one. But this question is particularly acute today. The gap between the rapid flow of information and the indifference shown to certain population groups has never been wider. The number of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean (several thousand), the number of people suffering from hunger in Somalia (several hundred thousand), or the number of direct victims of the war in Ethiopia (more than half a million) are all widely ignored. When Europeans read in the newspapers that the war waged by the government of Ethiopia has killed more people than the war in Ukraine, their reflex is to compartmentalize by relegating it a war far away in an exotic place. Chances are they will close the journal before ever realizing that the coffee they are drinking is from there.

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

In an article on this forum on 15 July 2022 titled Why Ruto is Unlikely to Succeed Uhuru, I strongly argued that given historical precedent in Kenya and the dictates of the laws of the dialectics, William Ruto was unlikely to win the presidency in the August 2022 elections. I nevertheless concluded that whereas historical precedent and dialectical odds dictated that Ruto was absolutely destined to lose the election, there was the slim chance that he could win, but that a Ruto victory “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”.

Since the announcement of the election results and the declaration of William Ruto as winner of the presidency, I have received many messages asking when I am going to “rethink and retheorize” Kenyan electoral politics in light of my strong arguments of 15 July 2022 that did not come to pass as anticipated. This article is a brief attempt at a response to these inquiries. A substantive coverage of Kenya’s experience with electoral politics under the multiparty system, complete with the shenanigans that go with it is contained in a full chapter in my forthcoming monograph, Kenya and the Politics of a Postcolony. In this article, I frame my rethinking of the 2022 presidential election results in terms of four factors as follows.

First, I clearly misinterpreted the law of the negation of the negation with reference to the fallout between then President Uhuru and his Deputy Ruto with which, I argued, the country seemed to have spiralled back to the fallout between President Jomo Kenyatta and Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Despite Kenya’s democratic advance, I concluded that, “Just like Jaramogi before him, it is highly unlikely that Ruto will succeed Uhuru come 9 August 2022, the new political dispensation notwithstanding.” Yet in the same paragraph, I noted that despite the fallout between Uhuru and Ruto, given the democratization process in the country, we are at a higher level of social and political development, complete with a new constitutional dispensation: “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.” This is what should have informed my conclusion.

Given the authoritarian political dispensation of his time, President Jomo Kenyatta orchestrated the marginalization of his vice president, Jaramogi, from power once they fell out over matters of policy and ideology in 1966. Jomo went so far as to put Jaramogi under house arrest in 1969 following the riot by Jaramogi’s supporters on the occasion of Jomo’s official opening of the “Russia” (New Nyanza) Hospital in Kisumu. In other words, Jomo completely neutralized Jaramogi, politically speaking, for the rest of his presidency.

For his part, given the new political dispensation of Kenya’s Second Republic, Uhuru could not sack Ruto even after they fell out following the Uhuru-Raila “Handshake” of March 2018. All President Uhuru could do was to be heard in public rallies pleading with his deputy to resign his untenable position so as to allow him pick someone who could help him execute his political agenda. In other words, although the country seemed to have spiralled back to the days of Jomo and Odinga, given the political developments occasioned by the democratic reform movement, we were at a higher level of social development, which rendered President Uhuru incapable of neutralizing Deputy President Ruto.

This leads to the second factor, which Deputy President William Ruto fully exploited to advance his way to the presidency. Despite the return to multiparty politics, the Kenyan electoral process is structurally rigged to the advantage of the incumbent president and political party through the use of public resources, mass media, and control of social disinformation. Ruto took great advantage of this reality. Once he was marginalized by the “handshake”, and given the constitutional context in which the president could not sack him, Ruto ended up having a field day campaigning for the presidency for the entire second term of Jubilee’s tenure in power. Utilizing state resources and largesse, Ruto began traversing the country as early as March 2018, campaigning for the presidency, taking credit for the positives of the Jubilee government and blaming its failings on the “Handshake”. His presence and recognition in every nook and cranny of Kenya was a function of this factor, which served him to great advantage.

Despite the return to multiparty politics, the Kenyan electoral process is structurally rigged to the advantage of the incumbent president.

Third, and as a corollary to the foregoing, the Azimio grouping succumbed to what one could call the “mantra of politics as usual”, at least in the Kenyan context. Their erstwhile thinking was that their figurehead, Raila, had been rigged out at the previous three elections by incumbent heads of state. Now that he had partnered with the incumbent government (the so-called deep state), and secured the president’s support, his victory was assured. Accordingly, the Azimio people did not bother to aggressively campaign and even secure their vote in “hostile” territory, imagining that the “deep state” had already done it for them. Meanwhile, Ruto and Kenya Kwanza propagated the populist myth of Hustlers vs. Dynasties, which was music to the ears of the majority voters whose generation, born in the age of democracy, has no idea of the sacrifices of blood, sweat, and tears that went into enacting political reform in Kenya, and who the main political activists were.

The fourth factor that secured victory for the “hustler nation” was ballot rigging at the grassroots, particularly in the Kenya Kwanza strongholds of the North Rift Valley and Central Kenya. During the elections, the Azimio people ran off to secure the votes in their own strongholds, without caring about the votes in their disadvantaged areas. There were literally no Azimio agents in the entire Central Kenya voting region and nor was there a strong presence of Kenya Kwanza agents in Azimio’s Nyanza region. As Zaccheaus Chesoni, then Chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya once quipped following the 1992 multiparty elections in response to a question by Nation Media’s Kamau Ngotho, “Look at it this way, the opposition had no agents in many of the far-flung Kanu zones. Neither were there election observers in many areas where Kanu had support. So, what could have stopped Kanu from exaggerating its figures?” In acknowledging this in 1995, Chesoni inadvertently indicted the Electoral Commission of which he was Chair. There is no way KANU agents could have exaggerated their votes without the collusion of the ECK personnel who were in charge of the electoral process.

The disagreement within the IEBC in the run-up to the declaration of presidential results in 2022 that saw four commissioners – Juliana Cherera, Irene Masit, Justus Nyang’aya, and Francis Wanderi – disown the eventual results is ample testimony of the shenanigans that are usually perpetrated at the electoral management board in the name of processing election results.  The great question here, perhaps, is why, after the nullification of the 2017 presidential election on account of the IEBC having “failed, neglected, or refused to conduct the presidential election in a manner consistent with the dictates of the Constitution”, the incumbent Chair of the IEBC was left in his position and once again presided over the 2022 elections whose results were disowned by four of his commissioners.

One big lesson can be drawn from Kenya’s electoral experience. This is that as a country, we may have accepted democracy, but we are no believers in democratic elections, particularly our political actors. The latter are committed to winning elections by hook or crook. The blatant last-minute theft of the 2007 presidential election; the manipulation of the 2013 presidential election in which the ICT systems deployed by the IEBC to tally results “failed”, forcing a return to manual tallying that gave Uhuru a slim victory of 50.52%; the assassination of the IEBC’s ICT Manager, Chris Msando, and the subsequent manipulation of computer algorithms that kept President Uhuru 10 percentage points ahead of Raila in the 2017 elections irrespective of where the vote tallies were coming in from; and the fallout within the  IEBC in the run-up to the announcement of the 2022 results are ample testimonies of this reality of democracy without democrats. Indeed, the manipulation of the results in 2017 was so blatant that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice David Maraga nullified the outcome and ordered a repeat, the first in Africa.

In the final analysis, just like those who took power at Kenya’s independence were mainly home guards and sons of colonial chiefs and not the real freedom fighters, the election of President William Ruto and his Deputy, Rigathi Gachagua illustrates this unfortunate reality in the history of Kenya’s politics that those who fight for political liberation never directly benefit by ascending to power. Whereas Azimio’s Raila and Martha Karua are icons of the struggle for Kenya’s second liberation, Ruto and Gachagua were strong supporters of KANU’s authoritarian system who fought against multiparty political activists. There are already signs that their tenure in office may portend a return to the old authoritarian days of the 1980s. Herein lies the paradox of Kenya’s political development, characterized by advances and self-inflicted retreats.

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This publication was funded/co-funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of The Elephant and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Law arises from human values measured against lived experience. In the beginning, all values were similar in their basic respect: the organization of reproduction, and the production necessary to support it. Recent activities in the court system in Uganda — and in Kenya — show how far we have deviated from that. There have been a few notable changes on the question of divorce, or more accurately, on the matter of how property should be shared out between a divorcing couple.

The first change, in 2012, saw a new court position which was that such property should be split on a 50-50 basis. The second was a clarification to the effect that what you came with into the marriage is what you left with once it was dissolved, and what was acquired during the course of the marriage was what was to be split equally.

This seemed fair enough. However, some things acquired in the course of the marriage may not have been jointly acquired. For example, a married person may become heir to one of their own relatives. Sometimes such inheritances are culturally bound, whereby the heir/heiress is technically a custodian.

A third new position is that an equal split is not automatic. Instead, whatever has been jointly acquired in the course of the marriage must be measured because one’s entitlement to a share goes only as far as the extent to which they contributed to its acquisition. How this is to be quantified is where the whole mystery began.

Dissatisfaction has ensued, all of it rooted in the story of how feminism became law, and is now increasingly trapped there.

The first step was to secure the principle of gender equality before the law. The second was to broaden the concept of the family standing. For example, technically the matrimonial dwelling is recognized as the family home, as opposed to it being (traditionally) the home of the head of the home (deemed to be the man) in which the spouse and the children also lived. One practical effect of this has been that the new laws have curtailed the ability for the person whose name is on the title to simply sell it off from under their family’s feet, or bequeath it to other persons having left behind a widow.

This, I repeat, was when the assumed head, assumed formal title deed-holder, and assumed potential culprit was the man in the house.

The third step was the effective acceptance that there could and would be ways, some non-monetary and even intangible, in which a person could contribute to the development of family or matrimonial prosperity.

Some commentators have now held fast to the “intangible contributions” concept and say that much as these exist, they cannot really be measured. So the safe thing would be to maintain the 50-50 split.

Others miss the point entirely by going down the road of how property is valued. But it is important because it brings out the underlying issue with this legal practice and its client base: it is really a problem for the petty bourgeois social group and their (in real terms) petty-property holdings. But along with this, the thinking behind these complaints is misplaced; it is a product of a cut-and-paste culture on both sides of the debate, which is itself a product of the importing of the basis of law, and then the importation of the evolution of that law, building confusion upon confusion upon initial confusion. Each development does not cure the preceding problem, but only exposes more of the fault in the overall thinking process. And so, one generational idea of feminism is now in conflict with another, and the judicial system has become the site of that contradiction, exposing the gap in the initial thinking.

The sociological origins of much of this are to be found in the multiple betrayals (or at least the tales of them) that became standard fare in the gender debate between the late 1950s and the 1970s.

The typical tale was of the young African couples studying abroad in the first steps of their journey to cement their belonging to the emerging post-colonial middle class. Some went abroad as couples, others met and struck up relationships having arrived there independently. Upon return, it was quite common for the male spouse to invoke both (then) Western and (presumed) African notions of marriage and try to relegate his wife to the role of a suburban housewife: tending the home and managing the children. This involved weaponizing a superior earning power as well as back-up from the then official legal and cultural thinking. Often, this also involved the male spouse exercising his “right” to overtly or covertly acquire a second wife and family, while still insisting that his first spouse remain financially dependent on him, overriding the fact that they were both now educated to basically the same level, and that the emerging countries needed as many educated Africans as possible in the workforce.

The result was a permanently in-built sense of imbalance and resentment in many a relationship that continued all the way to its dissolution through the death of the male spouse. Divorce is simply a variation on this theme; all that is happening now is that a lot more marriages are ending before the demise of the (male) spouse. This is because there are fewer causes of premature death among the property-owning classes, and also there is a lot less of the social stigma attached to divorce that in the past forced many a wife to “tough it out” to the bitter end.

A first wave of post-independence feminism basically therefore wanted the widow (now divorcee) to take everything. These are the ones bringing up the “intangible contributions” idea. The two are one idea, but with the marriage dying first, not the man. Had he died, then the standard social argument that arose was that the widow was now entitled to the entirety of the man’s estate, partly because she would naturally be entitled to part of it anyway, and partly because of the need for restitution against the earlier sacrifice and mistreatment.

The result was a permanently in-built sense of imbalance and resentment in many a relationship that continued all the way to its dissolution through the death of the male spouse.

It was essentially a moralistic argument, a kind of gynocentric revenge for growing up witnessing their mother’s pain and frustration at being a housewife, while the husband (their father) got to leave for yet another (presumably) fulfilling day outside the home. It was as though they had made a vow that they would never allow themselves to be trapped in that situation, and also that they would rescue their mothers from it.

But this thinking has now been overtaken by other developments. Not least due to donor-fed affirmative action, there is now a rising demographic of women in the petty bourgeois class living and earning “like men” in the manner of the 1950s-1970s small patriarch. They are thus increasingly capable of acquiring petty property of their own. Suddenly, the “intangible contribution” and 50/50 split idea is not so attractive anymore because (again given the assertion of equal treatment before the law) this could now go either way.

This means that, following the proverbial Law of Unintended Consequences, it can no longer be assumed that the net loss will be on the side of the male spouse. And this, in my view, is where this legal conundrum is now coming from; there is suddenly a need to be very precise about what is split, and how what is to be split is to be measured.

Under the “original” thinking, the settled approach was for the widow of the deceased — with the support of trusted lieutenants among some of her children — to corral control of the deceased’s estate under the Estate Administration laws and then keep this situation locked in place for good.

As said, this was a safe assumption because the tendency was for the male spouse, often older, to die first. So, following on from the grim tales from the 1950s — where the wife/fiancée/girlfriend basically tended the student apartment, cooking, cleaning and ironing for this man as he worked on acquiring his uber-degree only for her to be thrown over for someone he took an interest in on their return from abroad — the challenge was how to get around any obstacles to achieve full control-in-practice.

It was essentially a moralistic argument, a kind of gynocentric revenge for growing up witnessing their mother’s pain and frustration at being a housewife.

But beyond the drama, all this ignores the reality of the economics of the situation. It again goes back to the point of law being an expression of human values. We are witnessing what was initially conceptualized as a feminist issue morphing one into one of class. It is yet another area of law that is ideologically dominated by the petty bourgeois class in their own interest.

The problem is rooted in the transposing of one legal outlook on another place, bringing with it an overemphasis on the rights of the individual, an obsession with petty property, and a loss of social memory for the working of an agricultural economy. To this is added the universalisation of Western European thinking, where one way of doing a thing is taken to be the standard, if not the only way of doing it. So, European/English versions of the law are taken to be the law as a whole.

In fact, this 50-50 fixation, and the derivative argument it has spawned, is rooted in an British court case (Campbell vs Campbell 1969) cited by the Ugandan judge, in which a couple argued over the amount left over from the sale of their former matrimonial home, after expenses were deducted.

But when a house is sold so that its former owners can feel it was equally split, it nevertheless remains a house. Selling a farm, and selling it whole may be an entirely different matter. Splitting a farm (as was done in another case) becomes a real reality, but with different practicalities. In terms of species suitability, water supply, road access and the like, no two areas of farmland are the same, it is no longer the same farm.

Policy and law should distinguish between petty property (the 50×100 “mansion”, the vanity “farm” project, etc.) and actual production property (factories, actual working farms including smallholdings, etc.)

In Vietnam, for example, land is defined by its use, and permission to switch from agricultural to other use is not easily obtained. There are even by-laws about what kinds of dwellings are permitted on land set aside for agriculture. This is an example of law following existing social values; Vietnam is a country with a long history of peasant agriculture.

Most “liberatory” legislation in use here arose from the progressive agitations originating in the Western industrial workplace and even divorce focuses a little on workplace earnings. Yet even today, the average person’s home may also be their workplace. Therefore, to split up and sell off the home is to dissolve the workplace.

We are witnessing what was initially conceptualized as a feminist issue morphing one into one of class.

The petty bourgeois are the exception: like industrialized Westerners, they leave home to go to work. The problem now arises because they want to take their minority existence and experience and universalize it. They are basically using the state and European law to solve their own inter-class problems, dumping the consequences on the rest of society.

The law needs to become more discrete. We need laws and rulings that reflect our realities, not somebody else’s historical ones. A key one is the importance and centrality of being productive in an environment where there are no state benefits to apply for. So the proper management, sharing and disposal of the resources used in production is critical.

We cannot simply propose the chopping up of productive farm homesteads because former Mr and Mrs Chapman did so to their little house in some British town we shall never visit, way back in 1969. I will repeat what I said to the 2017 Commission of Inquiry into Land headed by Justice Bamugemereire:

“In a word, land means stability. Clans [known broadly as the extended family system here] form the actual bedrock of Ugandan society. They have been the basis upon which economic activity — primarily agriculture — is organized and sustained, and also where the country’s human resource base is created.”

The state of Uganda, and its various economies down the years, has long enjoyed a parasitic relationship with these clans. It seizes their land, consumes their children, and taxes their produce without really giving anything back.

A classic example can be found in the standard government advert for recruitment into the armed forces. Generally, they want persons of 18 years and above, able-bodied and in good health, able to speak English, with at least an “O” level education, and of good moral character.

If one were to examine which of those qualities are present in our youth as a direct result of government planning and action, you may find that none of them are.

They are basically using the state and European law to solve their own inter-class problems, dumping the consequences on the rest of society.

In fact, the government has no business in assuming that such people even exist, having done little or nothing to help create them, given the state of our public health and education services, as well as the poor moral example set by very many of our public officials.

Hundreds of thousands of Ugandan adults — and some children — are caught up in the task of raising children who are not their own. Virtually everyone here will know someone doing this, if they are not also doing it themselves. Yet the government takes credit for the existence of these “citizens”, and even seeks to make use of them.

The last forty years have brought this extended family system to near breaking point. People are not even offered something as basic as a tax credit for each child that is not theirs, but which child they house, pay fees, transport and meet medical bills for.

In this context it should be clear, therefore, that it then becomes very reckless — and I use the word very deliberately — to begin tinkering with the workings of the one thing the extended family system still has, that it is struggling to hold on to, and upon which so many other things depend: land.

In conclusion, we can be sure that the petty bourgeois class will continue to fight over petty property, using the law or not (being essentially a thuggish social formation), no matter what the law says.

The government has no business in assuming that such people even exist, having done little or nothing to help create them, given the state of our public health and education services.

The real concern should be the risk of adding to the mounting disorganization of the extended family system, creating more production decline, and more social dislocation, as these legal principles are applied beyond the confines of middle-class dramas.

The problem is not this or that tweak to the law; it is the thinking and the assumptions behind the concepts of property, of justice, which are compounded with the law. And also, therefore, the overall jurisprudence tradition under which we operate, which is a reflection of those concepts.

The bottom line is that there can be no meaningful “liberation” for either women or men within capitalism, and based on capitalist-founded concepts of property relations.

However, if the middle-class want to continue with their post-death and post-marriage petty property wrangles, we should leave them to it. What we should oppose and resist, is their sense of entitlement in which they seek to universalise their interests and value system by having it enshrined in law. Because the effect is to impose their confusion on the rest (and actually on the more productive areas) of society.