It is “Maandamano Monday” and the smell of teargas and tension lingers in Dandora, a slum settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi. As policemen pre-emptively “contain” protesting residents on the day of planned anti-government protests, there is a general feeling of helpless frustration. Here in Dandora and perhaps in several similar settlements in Kenya targeted by the Kenya police, the simmering disillusionment of the working poor—who are often singled out for state violence—with the government is boiling over into sustained civil unrest. Reeling from the effects of a global pandemic, a sluggish global economy, and the high cost of living, the mwananchi is rebelling against negligent governance and anti-public interest policies in an economic downturn.

The hopeful fever during the 2022 general election of having a “hustler”—a government outsider, a hardworking Kenyan from a humble background, and a champion of the people—take up the presidential mantle has been drenched in the ice-cold reality of a public debt projected to gobble up more than half of all future state revenue, the lived experience of corruption, unemployment, an out-of-control dollar and the increasingly tax-predatory patterns of behaviour exhibited by President William Ruto’s government that mirror those of the previous administration.

The outcomes of the hustler government are very different from the great expectations the working class had of Ruto; those who bought into the hustler narrative are carrying around their palpable discontent in the same empty purses depleted by the cost-of-living crisis. Specifically, the 2022 campaign period was inundated with the “hustler” vs “dynasties” narrative that painted Ruto as the valiant underdog and champion of the public interest fighting the “system/deep-state/power-elite” represented by Raila Odinga and his bloated benefactor, former president Uhuru Kenyatta; the narrative of David against the Goliath that is the machinery of the state was embedded in Kenya’s collective psyche. It is this very narrative that is now working against Ruto—another unmasked Goliath. The 2022 elections revealed that the social contract between an elected government and its electorate is changing in Kenya. Rather than blindly following tribal or kinship ties, the people, vested with democratic power, are increasingly interested and responsive to the services on offer by the body politic. In addition, political competence is fast becoming inextricable from the ability to understand, craft, and implement beneficial economic policies that visibly serve the public interest. A task it seems the Ruto administration is not up for.

A quick post-election survey of the policies, directives, and appointments that have characterized Ruto’s presidency makes evident that it is business as usual for the Government of Kenya (GOK). Business as usual (BAU) is characterized by political but unnecessary appointments that further add to the bloated wage bill, policies that are anti-public interest and pro-special interests, and government human resource policies that award unreasonable and immoral perks and concessions to those in the highest echelons of power at the expense of a progressively insolvent taxpayer. BAU is a pattern of behaviour that must be considered in context, to better understand why Ruto’s administration will suffer from the same poor governance path dependence.

History and incentive design 

The coercive intent of the British colonial administration in Kenya and beyond framed executive will as “the law”. This was to ensure that those who were in power (the colonialist and later their collaborators) could employ “legal means” to maintain power and control for a profitable status quo. Despite the devolution of power through the constitution promulgated in 2010, the original incentive design of the Kenyan government remains pervasive.

In the Western adaptation of democracy, policies, regulations, and processes are often subject to commonly held constitutional or precedent public interest criteria. This public interest criteria are universally understood and come with a host of checks and balances to review and evaluate policies, directives, and regulations against said criteria. By contrast, here in Kenya, and through no happenstance, the public interest is whatever the incumbent government wants it to be. Masked under feel-good word salads that often include “development”, “growth”, and “vision”, the ephemeral nature of what is the public interest in this country means that every political outfit has its own version of it. To illustrate this loose interpretation of the public interest, the Ruto administration has appointed 50 Chief Administration Secretaries—CASs with no constitutional basis and no parliamentary oversight—for the public interest.

The ephemeral nature of what is the public interest in this country means that every political outfit has its own version of it.

In intent and effect, the colonial administration was designed not to benefit the people of Kenya but to serve foreign interests, rewarding the chosen few collaborators with wealth and condemning the rest of the population to whatever those in power decreed necessary for the the maintenance of a profitable status quo. The prevailing special interests against the public interest (politicians, big business, foreign interests) is the foundational design element of the post-colonial government in Kenya. To understand why Ruto’s administration (like most of the governments before it) manifests the same outcomes as its colonial forefather, we must understand that it is a function of intentional design. Clearly, the reality of Ruto’s administration and most others that preceded it is that, as a decision-making entity, the Government of Kenya has been pursuing special interests for such a long time that it is unwilling or unable to deliver the public interest.  

The GOK organizational model

Fully aware that the enduring design purpose of the Kenyan government is to serve special interests, it is not difficult to imagine the skills and characteristics that are required to distinguish yourself and rise through the Kenyan political ranks or the civil service.

Those civil servants who knowingly or unknowingly serve the foundational intent of the first colonial government are incentivized and rewarded by a self-correcting system and organizational culture (pro-active corruption, apathy, and a relentless pursuit of special interests) whose noxious effects conspire to ensure that a critical majority of politicians and civil servants who reach the decision-making ranks of government are morally ambiguous, passive to the public interest, and motivated by the pursuit of personal gain. The countable notable champions of the public interest may be blips in the otherwise calcified system.

These personal characteristics and organizational culture, I argue, transcend political parties and formations. The abrupt and conspicuous cessation of anti-government protests following a “handshake” for dialogue is indicative that even the leaders who are orchestrating civil unrest are not front and centre trying to resolve the cost-of-living crisis and the rising inflation (public interest). They are in pursuit of their own interest; seeking a share in the spoils of the current government and pursuing electoral reforms that safeguard future electoral attempts. Even those champions of the people across the political aisle are holding the incumbent government hostage with the threat of disruptive violence for their own interests (moral ambiguity r the loss of life and property during demonstrations thrown in for free). It is a viscerally clear indication that every veteran politician, civil servant, or political faction has been born, bred, and is well matured in the toxic culture of poor governance, and will, given a chance, manifest the same poor governance outcomes.

They are in pursuit of their own interest; seeking a share in the spoils of the current government and pursuing electoral reforms that safeguard future electoral attempts.

A decidedly anti-public interest culture of governance that took root decades before independence is still dictating governance outcomes in this country. Characterized by prevailing special interests, no significant checks and balances over executive discretion, and a political class and civil service with the Pavlovian conditioning to pursue personal gain, there is nothing in my view, short of a miracle that will spontaneously change this path-dependency. The intentional status quo we find ourselves in must be dislodged by an equally intentional re-design of the intent and systems of governance in this county. In a kind of sad irony, however, the Kenyan electorate keeps hoping to elect a candidate who can change the status quo but instead, is faced with a choice between the exemplary products of a toxic political culture, expecting them to dismantle the very systems they have excelled in.

To manifest the public interest and to curb the prevalence of special interest in government policy, process, and practices, requires a self-awareness and political will to change that seems to be beyond the imagination of this current crop of politicians. Until the intent, practice, and enforcement of government policy align with the public interest, we can expect more of the same garbage can politicians, policies, and outcomes.

John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the USA, was killed in November 1963. A Commission of Inquiry found that he was the victim of a single shooter who fired his rifle at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. The shooter was himself shot dead two days after the assassination while in police custody without ever answering any questions.

This unsatisfying conclusion—that a frustrated “loser” was able to strike down the world’s most powerful man—spawned hundreds of books and dozens of theories that differed from the official findings. US legislation committees held hearings and one outcome was the John F Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992 which required that all government records about the assassination be sent to the National Archives and released to the public in 25 years.

This has been happening at intervals and in December 2022, another batch was released, this time of 13,000 documents from the archived 5 million-page collection. There is little new documentation about the actual assassination as most of those have already been released.

Dating between October and December 1963, most of the new documents are mundane human resources memos, reports, newspaper scans and other records, some of which have faded over time making the typed text illegible. There is a 1964 memo about the IBM company starting to use a computer system they are developing to “machine process” records at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of which relate to the assassination.

Still, there are some revealing documents about events around the time of the assassination. Did a wealthy drunk man in Sweden predict the assassination two weeks before it happened? Did a female agent drive with a team of assassins to Dallas? Did Cuban leader Fidel Castro order the assassination of Kennedy in retaliation after discovering that there was a similar plot against him? Did a Chinese diplomat write a confession that his country had orchestrated the assassination? These are all investigated through embassies and bureaus around the world and debunked in different intelligence memos.

Many of the pages are now available because people mentioned in the CIA documents are now deceased. There are secret reports from the desks of intelligence officers, some with names obscured, about events in the region that had a functional desk called the “Near East and Africa”.

They show increasing concern about developments in the Congo whose economic wealth was seen to be important to the USA. The CIA did not believe Africans could handle the situation in Congo, a country that could fall under the control of communists. US policy was seen as indistinguishable from that of the United Nations (UN), so the USA would support the build-up of UN troops, as a failure of the UN would reflect badly on the peacekeeping role of the United States.

Did Cuban leader Fidel Castro order the assassination of Kennedy in retaliation after discovering that there was a similar plot against him?

The Kennedy administration planned for a centralized government comprising all political factions as the only hope of averting a civil war. To enforce this policy, they were willing to withdraw their support to the military, a threat that so distressed army chief Joseph Mobutu that he drew his gun on the CIA officer who brought him the news.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Mobutu had become critical of the lacklustre leadership and indecisiveness of the country’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. The CIA would deny any role or support for Mobutu when he seized power in a bloodless coup two years later.

Another October 1963 memo notes increased tension in Kenya amid the constitutional talks taking place in London. The Kenyan opposition suspected that Britain would accede to Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta’s demand for easier procedures to amend the constitution and grant more authority to the central government which would weaken their minority tribes’ position. To force concessions, opposition leaders in Nairobi had threatened to secede before they were calmed by their leaders in London. In the meantime, British authorities took precautionary measures and deployed a special police force to the Rift Valley region with African troops also on alert.

Other memos note that, in November 1963, armed groups from the Somali Republic conducted well-planned raids from across the border into Kenya’s northeast and speculate it could be the start of a guerrilla campaign to show that the region’s Somali inhabitants are determined to secede. British police suspected that the rifles and grenades used in the attacks came from Somali police stocks. While the Somali government denied instigating the attacks, British officers predicted they would support more raids ahead of the Somali election in March 1964.

There are follow-up memos about how Somali attacks did increase after Kenya’s independence from Britain on December 12 and the Kenyan government soon declared a state of emergency in the region. Kenyatta vowed to deal decisively with the raids but said Kenyan forces would not undertake “hot pursuit” across the border since this would permit Somalia to internationalize the situation. Observers were sceptical that Kenya could control the situation by patrolling a dead zone along the 450-mile border. However, Kenya and Ethiopia worked out a defence pact to stop Somali insurgent activities in both countries.

Another memo notes a protest by 500 Ghanaians at their embassy in Moscow in December 1963 following the killing of a student named Edmund Assare-Addo. Soviet police claim he died of exposure while intoxicated but the protesters believe he had been killed because he wanted to marry a Russian girl. It ends with a suggestion to use wire services to show the protests in Moscow as evidence of racist attitudes towards Africans despite Soviet propaganda and tie them to other events like the expulsion of Soviet diplomats from the Congo.

Observers were sceptical that Kenya could control the situation by patrolling a dead zone along the 450-mile border.

The records also capture an event that happened long after the Kennedy assassination. In July 1972, members of the Black Liberation Army hijacked a Delta Airlines flight from Detroit. They collected US$1 million in cash from the airline before releasing its passengers and flew on to Algeria, a country they knew little about. Even though Algeria had close revolutionary ties with Cuba, which was not friendly to the USA, its authorities seized and returned both the plane and the ransom. The hijackers—one of whom was a female with a young daughter named Kenya—were allowed to remain in the country.

American officials later tracked reports that the hijackers may have moved on to either Switzerland, France, or Sweden, or that they were back in the USA. In January 1973, the Tanzanian government seized three people who they thought may have been among the hijackers. While Tanzania normally offered refugee status to disaffected American blacks, they were willing to surrender the “undesirable aliens” if the US Embassy asked for their extradition. They were later released as a case of mistaken identity and the CIA wondered if it had been a staged effort to cause confusion in the search for the real hijackers.

The next document review will be in May 2023 when the remaining assassination records will be released. Unless, of course, their release is perceived to potentially cause harm to US intelligence, its military, or the country’s foreign relations.

Kenya is at a crossroads. The opposition has called for demonstrations across the country twice a week. They have accused President William Ruto of stealing last year’s election and of failing to control the surging cost of living. The violence accompanying the demonstrations continues to increase. Senior government officials have made belligerent statements about the opposition demands. For their part, the opposition sounds equally resolute.

Public uncertainty is deepening as the economic and social consequences of the resistance mount. Prospects for any kind of political settlement currently seem remote and it is not clear to Kenyans what success for the opposition looks like.

Kenya’s middle-class progressives — the numerically small but tenacious civil society sector in particular — seem dazed by the current state of affairs. The recent invasion of former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s family property by apparently organized intruders seems to have flipped the narrative. I would like to argue that the very idea of Kenya as we have known it is being challenged. This leaves many of us bewildered. For now, Kenyans have taken to social media to articulate their angst and try to make sense of the current situation. Opining in this regard, former Nation Media Group’s Editorial Director Mutuma Mathiu wrote on Twitter on 27 March 2023 that the invasion was “a key moment in Kenya’s political development. Something has changed, forever.”

Some historical context

The colonial project in countries like Kenya was no small thing. The sheer destruction it wrought on property and livelihoods, the killing and enslavement of entire populations, and the cultural and social re-engineering — all served to distort social harmony in African societies. The establishment of a colonising structure was the vehicle for the extension of British social structures in the colonies they conquered. The socio-political constructs that the British created in their empire were primarily reflections of their own traditional, individualistic, deeply unequal and class–based society that existed, and continues to exist, in England. Responding to what they didn’t know with what they understood, the architects of empire sought to recreate the rural arcadia of England, where since the sixteenth century local government had been controlled by an established self-defined ruling class.

The autonomous communities the British systematically dismantled in Kenya were replaced by an approximation of English villages in the hands of the traditional lords, a gentry as it were, comprised of a white ruling class and their African collaborators and enablers. Out of this was born the infamous “indirect rule” system of government, with power devolved to an entire hierarchy of greater and lesser imitation “gentlemen”. This was both less expensive for the British and, as with the English system at home, it was run by complicit amateurs, meaning that there was no need to create a professional class of Kenyans who would wield and then seek to exercise political authority.

Kenya’s middle-class progressives — the numerically small but tenacious civil society sector in particular – seem dazed by the current state of affairs.

This arrangement re-invented the collaborating class of Africans whose loyalty was to the newly established colonial government. The mission schools and colonial civil service produced and consolidated the domination of colonial society by this class. This group of actors rose to political dominance in post-independent Kenya.

For the past 60 years, this elite network has remained well resourced and networked and is as a result both resilient and stable. This in turn has contributed to the peace and stability Kenya has enjoyed. Even when this elite has had internal squabbles, which have regularly led to episodic violence in the country, they have been mediated through elite “handshakes” — essentially boardroom deals. Like the English aristocracy of old, unwritten rules of engagement govern their game of thrones.

The Great African Depression

The late, much celebrated African economist, thinker and analyst, Professor Thandika Mkandawire once described the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed on Africa in the 1980s as the Great African Depression. The implementation of SAPs ravaged African economies, distorted social arrangements and restructured Africa’s public sphere in three fundamental ways.

First, the African Academy was impoverished as the continent’s universities were defunded and delegitimized as authoritative centres of knowledge production. Stripped of their epistemological raison d’être, a social and intellectual void was created that has been filled by, among others, a proliferating class of evangelical pastors across the continent who increasingly occupy what once was the academy’s central place in defining the narrative vis-à-vis economic, political, and cultural matters. Secondly, the “Structural Adjustment” of Kenya’s economy led to the disappearance of the old certainties of social mobility. To make ends meet, Kenyans were forced en masse into the informal or jua kali sector. All of a sudden, the primary indicator of an individual’s success moved from one’s skills, experience and personal virtues to the patronage networks one was able to exploit. Thirdly, the decoupling of politics from economics took power away from the politicians and into the financial institutions — global and local — creating a new kind of politics dictated by the logic of the market. Unable to change society though popular struggle and negotiation, the arena of politics transformed itself into theatre and spectacle, the most glaring indicator of this evolution in recent Kenyan politics being the Sonkonization of Kenya’s political culture — a reckless populism.

In this environment, a new moral political economy emerged whose ethos was undergirded by hyper-individualism, a protestant ethic and an evangelical socio-political religiosity. Here, hustling and deal-making is the name of the game and corruption is only considered a vice if inclusivity in the redistribution of the goodies by whatever means fails to conform to the dictates of patronage.

For the past 60 years, this elite network has remained well resourced and networked and is as a result both resilient and stable.

The actors within this fledgling moral political economy engage in activities of the intermediary type, scheming and hustling but firmly entrenched in the role of kazi ya mkono for the more powerful actors in the post-colonial order. Over time, combined with demographics, reforms in Kenya’s governance infrastructure and readily available global credit from China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Western monies that became available in the low-interest environment following the financial crisis in the West in 2008, the new moral political economy expanded by creating an aspirational consumerist class in Kenya’s urban areas — a prosperity-gospel-church-going, land-buying, highly articulate, well-educated class. The culmination of its success was presumably its political contestation against the old order in the August 2022 elections. This ended with the ascendancy of William Ruto and his hustler comrades to the presidency.

We are therefore encouraged to observe that the current political stalemate between the opposition and the government might not be the usual Kenyan intra-elite dispute but a more fundamental contest between two orders. The first, an order that over the life of the postcolonial state has entrenched itself and feels entitled to the spoils of the state. The second, a new order that feels that the old guard has had its time and should make way for it.

History is replete with instances of clashes over power. The Glorious Revolution, which took place in England from 1688 to 1689, changed how England was governed, giving parliament more power over the monarchy and planting the seeds for the beginning of a modern political democracy. In many ways, the moment we are living in has stark similarities with the British revolution. My angst at this stalemate, however, is that Kenya’s progressives seem to lack the intellectual and spiritual clarity to catalyse a progressive vision that inspires popular energy in order to restore the balance of power — social, economic and political — in society, especially for the marginalised, the alienated and the dispossessed. Will history absolve them?