Politics
Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Authoritarianism
6 min read.The hyperinflation that was the hallmark of Robert Mugabe’s twilight years is back and wreaking havoc even as the central bank and the ministry of finance continue to deny the collapse of the local currency.
The general picture that emerged on the 23rd of August 2023 was very simple: in urban areas that have traditionally voted for the opposition, polling stations delayed in opening, voters had to sleep in queues, ward borders had been tortured to accommodate gerrymandering, and ballot papers were missing. In the rural areas, the story was different. Voting materials arrived on time, voting went on “smoothly”, but not without the menacing presence of a ruling party-deployed semi-militia group called Forever Associates of Zimbabwe (FAZ) outside polling stations and an alarming number of voters who claimed “illiteracy”. It is this organisation – that were claiming to do “polling surveys” – that the SADC Observer Mission identified as the “shadowy organisation” outside polling stations.
This trajectory of coercion and irregularities had been afoot in the pre-election season. For the past five consecutive elections, and more (2005, 2008, 2012, 2018), and now the August 2023 general election, the opposition has struggled to get an updated voters roll that they can audit or use for planning voter mobilisation. In each of these elections, the opposition has had to seek the intervention of the courts, and this has been described by some as “lawfare”, a scenario where justice institutions are deliberately captured to obfuscate the electoral process and keep the opposition lawyers busy.
The current military-backed party-state elite have gone further to make democracy very expensive, the cost of being a candidate has gone up (US$20,000 for president and US$1,000 for members of parliament). The political landscape in Zimbabwe has barely changed and the ruling party is back to its default settings – combining law and coercion to try and subdue the opposition. The SADC Observer Mission made some scathing remarks just after the election:
In conclusion, the Mission observed that the pre-election and voting phases, on 23–24 August 2023 Harmonised Elections were peaceful and calm. However, for reasons outlined above, the Mission noted that some aspects of the Harmonised Elections, fell short of the requirements of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, the Electoral Act, and the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections (emphasis mine).
Before making this bold conclusion, the Observer Mission noted a litany of irregularities ranging from access to the voters roll, delimitation, freedom of assembly and expression, independence of the judiciary, nomination fees, biased state media coverage, voter materials and participation of women. In an interview on Newzroom Afrika, Dr Nevers Mumba, the head of the Observer Mission, went further to say, “Our goal is to authenticate the process and if the process is flawed the result cannot be legitimate.”
But even long before the election, the region had mandated the former president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, to be in Zimbabwe as an “elder”, most likely to cool down the polarisation. President Chissano visited Zimbabwe as part of “debt negotiations” but when one looks closer, there was some shuttling going on beyond the “debt”. This is to be found in Dr Adesina’s statement on Zimbabwe, saying, “We have institutionalised a platform for regular, constructive, and open dialogue that is key for trust and confidence building among all stakeholders,” adding that the issues to be addressed included “governance, rule of law, human rights, freedom of speech, political level playing field, electoral reforms that will assure free and fair elections”.
Currency Fluctuations, Hyperinflation, and ‘Gold Mafia’
Somewhere, in history, a writer intelligently warned that “history does not repeat, but rhymes” and nowhere is this more evident than in the incessant economic and currency meltdowns in Zimbabwe. In the twilight of the collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar under Robert Mugabe, the central bank, was printing money to fund government and hyperinflation became the stuff of legend. On Amazon and other platforms, the $ZW is still an object of ridicule and a collector’s item, one can still buy a $ZW 1 trillion note. That hyperinflation is back again and wreaking havoc, and true to form, the military-nationalists are blaming “sanctions” and “saboteurs” in equal measure and their solution has been a raft of Bills and Acts to legislate “patriotism”. Professor Steve Hanke, who tracks Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation, has estimated it as the highest in the world, at a whopping 685 per cent, having topped 1332 per cent in March 2023.
On the 24th of May 2023, former Finance Minister and opposition stalwart Tendai Biti had this to say about the currency collapse:
Only 2 weeks ago the rate was US$1 to ZW$1,000. US$1,000 was a flat ZW$1 million. Now the rate is at US$1 to ZW$4,000. This means in a mere ten days working people and pensioners have lost 400% of their wages and pensions. Truth is the kakistocracy has failed and failed in absolute terms –.
These currency fluctuations are bad news for business, but worse news keeps rolling in. The Minister of Finance has had to use presidential powers to issue statutory instruments forcing business and service providers to only use the “foreign exchange rate that is prevailing at the RBA-controlled auction rate”. This rate is an artificial rate, not linked to the market demand for foreign currency. Zimbabwe becomes a puzzle; for example, it has one of the biggest sources of remittances – US$1.8 billion plus and rising per year – and yet the currency continues to collapse. Part of the explanation is to be found in the collapse of trust in the local currency and the unwillingness of citizens to trust banks in Zimbabwe. This explains the billions of US$ circulating informally outside the finance system and being kept securely “mattress and pillow” bank.
Somewhere, in history, a writer intelligently warned that “history does not repeat, but rhymes”.
While the central bank and the ministry of finance continue to deny the collapse of the local currency and to push it as “legal tender”, the effect of the income collapse is especially bad for government employees. In a video circulating on social media, nurses and nurse educators say that they are receiving their pay in the $ZW equivalent yet most shops are now demanding to be paid in US$. One member of parliament has taken a private school to court to force it to accept payment in $ZW; the consequences would be dire. If schools accept the collapsed $ZW, then they cannot pay services providers. Boarding schools would have to shut down. Some elites are somehow insulated; in the now infamous Gold Mafia scandal, it became clear that political elites are transacting in US$ and only switch to the local currency when there is advantage.
But it gets worse – some of the businesspeople that have access to the auction system can get foreign currency from the Central Bank at heavily discounted rates and still sell their goods, fuel for example, in US$. The flamboyance and arrogance of the well connected are plain to see; first-class flights, holidays in exotic locations, and imported luxury cars (Rolls Royces, Lamborghinis, and the latest Mercedes Benz models). They live in a parallel universe.
Under the late president Robert Mugabe, patronage networks started flourishing in exchange for supporting his presidency and the level of grand-scale looting of Zimbabwe’s natural resources accelerated. Here a tender worth millions for a solar farm is funded and undelivered, another tender to supply medicines is overinflated into millions; there a tender for cars is overinflated and on and on it goes. The state has become a willing and easy fishing pool for the party-state elites. Recent divorce proceedings involving the former president’s daughter exposed the level of elite privilege, with more than 21 farms becoming part of the proceedings (over 21,000 ha – the size of Monaco). Other ministers and members of parliament and connected elites have amassed prime land holdings by simply writing letters to the city council and grabbing land then subdividing it and selling it.
Post-Election, Future Trajectories and Extractive Party-Army Elite
The ruling party elite pull influential strings within the political economy. They control a large swathe of potential voters through land even threatening to dispossess land from land reform beneficiaries. In small-scale mining they have cemented control of sometimes violent “small-scale miners” but the “comrades” are also in business in the diamond, gold, coal, iron ore sectors and have extensive land holdings in urban areas. Lawyer and long-time activist, Siphosami Malunga commented that:
There’s a political economy to authoritarianism. There’s nothing like seeking power for power’s sake. Authoritarianism is not just about accumulating ALL power. It is about accumulating ALL power so you can unaccountably use it to enrich yourself endlessly. It’s always the money (Twitter, 29/08/2023).
The “comrades in business” are now fighting back because a political transition will make them orphans of the state and its apparatus of patronage and racketeering. The liberation generation, older and sometimes fractured, has started fighting back calling, the observer reports ‘advisory’ and ‘non-binding’ and the ZANU PF spokesperson accusing Zambia, of being a “neo-colonial” front posing a threat to all liberation movements in Southern Africa (especially South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and even Tanzania). For its part, the opposition has heightened its demands, announcing that they “reject the election in toto” meaning that even the parliamentary, senatorial and council opposition will potentially not take up the positions.
The diplomatic shuttles to Zimbabwe’s capital have already ensued, with the announcement that the former president of Tanzania, Jakayo Kikwete, will lead a mission to cool down the tempers. The opposition will have to contend with a regional leadership of liberation movements that are easily swayed by ZANU PF and within the region it is an open secret that Harare’s leaders have actively supported and funded networks of leaders in the region making them beholden to their patronage. The ruling elite propaganda has borrowed the Mugabe rhetoric and the deputy secretary to the president has already started playing back the clips of Robert Mugabe threatening the whole region and telling them to go hang. Whether the region will buy this bravado and allow the “comrades” in Harare to entrench illegitimacy remains to be seen.
The flamboyance and arrogance of the well-connected is plain to see.
Zimbabwe has entered another cycle of contested electoral outcomes and a herculean polarised political contest between the ruling party and the opposition is in the offing. The trajectory is not looking good for the liberation generation. As they get older, lose regional allies, and become fractured, a demographic shift is eroding their hold on power, but their dispatch from state power, long started by Morgan Tsvangirai, will be convulsive and torturous and it seems the only way out is a negotiated political settlement to ease them into retirement. Within these murky waters opposition leader Nelson Chamisa finds himself in at the deep end.
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Politics
Ruto’s Climate Contradictions and the Green Growth Lie
Kenyan president William Ruto has reinvented himself as Africa’s climate champion. But, his policy contradictions reveal that this is just his latest hustle.
Hitching himself to calls for reform of the international financial system, he has positioned himself as today’s pan-African leader. Like his mentor Moi, he is a middleman, a double agent of the newest mutation of colonialism in Africa. No longer content with plundering from and sacrificing Kenyans alone, he is now peddling Africa to the highest bidder. Always an opportunist, Ruto understood that the presidency alone could not give him access to riches across the continent. So, now he is a climate champion as well as an underdog hustler.
Contradictions big and small
In December 2022, Ruto declared that Kenya would plant 15 billion trees by 2032. Just a few months later, he lifted a logging ban that he put in place as Deputy President in 2018. Introduced to protect shrinking mountain forests that are key water sources, a task force was convened to investigate mismanagement by the Kenya Forest Service (KFS). Their recommendations, including the reform of KFS, were never implemented. This calls into question Ruto’s motive for lifting the ban, in particular, because it will likely reverse the gains in tree cover made in recent years. This will exacerbate the drought in Kenya, threatening an already fragile food and water supply. It will also reduce hydropower generation.
The problem with tree planting programs is that without a sophisticated design that prioritizes natural forest regrowth and ecological restoration over tree plantations and false metrics like the number of trees planted, they often do more harm than good. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong places can reduce biodiversity, accelerating extinctions and impairing ecosystems’ resilience. Trees also struggle to survive in the wrong environment, and even disturb the soil, releasing carbon instead of storing it. This is particularly true in drylands like those found in most of Kenya, where tree planting can also devastate wildlife.
More obviously, a large proportion of seedlings often die before reaching maturity. With no details on what tree species will be planted where, how sufficient seeds will be sourced, how they will be grown to maturity, or how they will be monitored and protected, planting 15 billion trees is just another of Ruto’s hustles.
Ruto’s Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry, Soipan Tuya, told every Kenyan to plant 30 trees per year toward the goal of 15 billion. Without any resources or plan to support mass tree planting by all citizens, this is worse than hollow nonsense—it’s a show to distract from the lack of any meaningful plan for reforestation or other ecological restoration. In an even more transparently empty performance, Tuya admonished Kenyans not to cut trees for Christmas.
Ruto has long used his farmer roots to portray himself as the everyman. A large landowner heavily invested in farming businesses, his embrace of climate-smart agriculture will undoubtedly enrich him at the expense of most farmers. Climate-smart agriculture is an opaque term that co-opts regenerative practices from sustainable agriculture and agroecology while using the climate emergency as justification to depoliticize those practices and empower industrial-scale approaches that favor big agribusiness. It has been heavily criticized for having no enforceable social or environmental criteria, leading to wildly different uses of the term. This lets big agribusiness label themselves as climate-smart by simply doing things like selling drought-tolerant seeds, despite industrial agriculture’s major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions globally. Climate-smart agriculture provides a greenwashed avenue for industrializing agriculture in Africa, which would likely increase emissions and make smallholder farmers more vulnerable.
Climate-smart agriculture also does nothing to address pressing issues for smallholder farmers such as land tenure, scarcity of arable land, or lack of capital to invest in expensive “climate-smart” technologies. Bigholder farmers with large capital reserves like Ruto, of course, will benefit from increased mechanization and input-intensive cultivation at the expense of smallholder farmers who are the least responsible for agricultural emissions. Smallholder farmers, comprising the majority of Africans today, would instead benefit from tried-and-true agroecological practices that support climate-resilient agriculture from the soil up.
Proponents of climate-smart agriculture believe that expensive technologies and inputs can be partly financed by carbon offset schemes. Instead of supporting smallholder farmers, this would create market pressures to consolidate larger tracts of land to facilitate economies of scale for carbon trading, creating incentives for land grabbing and coercion while unfairly putting the burden of climate mitigation on the least culpable but most vulnerable.
Ruto has pledged to phase out fossil fuels by 2030. He often starts this story by talking about how 90 percent of Kenya’s energy is renewable. Unlike other African leaders whose economies are dependent on fossil fuel extraction, Ruto can promote himself by talking about Kenya’s existing renewable energy production. But, this is a disingenuous story. As Murefu Barasa from EED Advisory said at our recent dialogue on climate emergencies in Africa, Kenya’s grid-based electricity is 90 percent renewable, not its total energy use. Electricity makes up only 12 to 15 percent of national energy use. 65 percent comes from biomass (firewood and charcoal), most of which is non-renewable. Petroleum makes up 20 percent and the remaining five percent is from other sources.
This dubious renewables story is further compromised by Kenya’s dependence on hydropower. Hydro is the second largest source of electricity generation after geothermal, making up about one-third of the total mix. The increasing prevalence of droughts severely undermines hydropower. Ruto’s story also does not account for the rapid increase in energy demand or high population growth. Finally, one-quarter of the population does not even have access to the grid to make use of electricity, renewable or otherwise. In this story, Ruto rarely talks about fossil fuels despite committing to build a 600km gas pipeline from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi. What does this doublespeak mean for his pledge to phase out fossil fuels? The media has been oddly silent on the matter.
To much fanfare, Ruto drove a bright yellow electric car to the Africa Climate Summit. If he had wanted to make a more meaningful statement and stand with the average Kenyan, you have to wonder why he did not make the easy 30-minute walk from the State House to the convention center. Perhaps because infrastructure to protect pedestrians is negligible in Nairobi. While more than 80 percent of Kenyans in cities walk and take public transit, and private vehicle ownership is rare, Ruto is prioritizing electric vehicle adoption and EV charging infrastructure over more equitable and low-emission options like walking, bicycling, and public transit.
In a similar stunt a few months earlier, the First Lady Rachael Ruto cycled from the State House to the UN-Habitat Assembly. While she showed up her husband by cycling instead of driving, she was surrounded by security vehicles, affording her protections that other cyclists do not have. Nairobi does not have cycling lanes. Neither her initiative, Mama Cycling, nor her husband’s policies include investments in cycling lanes or other critical safety infrastructure for cyclists. She returned to the State House in a car.
The green growth lie
In his latest costume change, Ruto has transformed himself into the go-to African climate champion. His previous climate contradictions are small in comparison to his embrace of climate positivism, carbon markets, and win-win green growth. Watch as his power and wealth grow.
Piggybacking on other leaders, Ruto has called for sorely needed reform of the international financial system and multilateral development banks, as well as debt relief and pauses. He has even called for global carbon taxes and the establishment of a new green bank. These are crucial but notably incomplete pieces of the puzzle.
Using the legitimacy that selectively criticizing European and American institutions lends him, he has shrewdly but disingenuously positioned himself as the pan-African climate leader and anointed himself as the African spokesperson for green growth. At the same time, in a clever sleight-of-hand, he has abandoned the consensus on common but differentiated responsibilities, calling it the blame game and letting polluters off the hook. Demanding accountability for historical responsibilities is not victim-playing. This is a false, pernicious, and damaging narrative dressed up as pan-African leadership. Make no mistake, this is leadership for Ruto himself and the elite few alone.
In a troubling about-face, he dropped his support for a Loss and Damage Fund and said “we don’t want the North to pay, we all want to pay.” The subtext is that we just need better lending practices to solve the climate emergency. In other words, make markets more fair but don’t do anything else. The few beneficiaries of this greenwashed, business-as-usual approach are obvious. It is a betrayal of the great majority of Africans, especially the historically large youth population.
What are Ruto’s vehicles for solving the climate finance emergency? Carbon markets and green growth. These solutions are at best magical thinking. But, given his consistently self-serving record, it seems more like a cynical bid for more power and wealth than a genuine, if gullible, belief that ever more elaborate market fixes can solve fundamental market failures.
Ruto’s embrace of carbon markets at COP27 and the Africa Climate Summit 2023 is consistent with his agenda to promote market-based mechanisms while undermining a just transition. International carbon offset markets—especially voluntary, unregulated ones—are a fatally dangerous distraction. Since their inception at COP3 in 1997, a broad range of research from progressive and conservative government, academic and media organizations have amassed an alarmingly large and insurmountable mountain of evidence demonstrating that, while offsets tell a tempting story in theory, offsetting emissions in practice is impossible.
The fundamental problem—as Barbara Hayer, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, recently told the New York Times—“is that you’re trading a known amount of emissions with an uncertain amount of emissions reductions. But there’s also the whole trading approach of companies being able to buy their way out of their responsibility to reduce their own emissions.” Efforts to fix offset’s flaws are too little too slowly. Genuine offsets that reduce emissions immediately and permanently are in fact antithetical to markets today—the global economy is too large, too complex, and too fragmented for offsets to ever be effectively regulated. Regulated in one location, polluters will always be able to move to other locations where they are not. Carbon credits, instead, offer polluters a license and incentive to keep polluting.
What does this mean for Africa? With Ruto’s leadership, the African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) was launched at COP27 in Egypt. It aims to reach 300 million credits retired annually by 2030. With weak regulatory and enforcement frameworks across the continent, ACMI will suffer from the same, if not worse, issues as other voluntary carbon markets.
The ACMI will give major polluting countries and fossil fuel and other transnational companies new opportunities to increase their emissions while saying they are reducing them. Africa is the fastest-warming and most vulnerable continent so increased emissions will exacerbate already mounting climate impacts. It also creates perverse incentives that undermine resilient and inclusive development, enabling historical polluters to keep investing in carbon-intensive development elsewhere at the expense of development in Africa. At the same time, it also shifts responsibility for climate mitigation from big polluters to negligible ones.
Carbon offset projects incentivize tons of carbon reduced over local and regional development across crucial sectors. They also incentivize green land grabbing to develop projects like tree plantations and hydropower dams. At the end of the day, carbon offset projects may get less than one-third of the money paid by polluters for credits. The rest will go to middlemen like Ruto.
At the Africa Climate Summit in September, Ruto spoke of carbon markets interchangeably with climate finance, implying that they were one and the same for Africa. In fact, many critics said the Summit was little more than a trade conference for carbon credits. It featured both virtual and physical ‘deal rooms,’ exclusive spaces where investors and project developers could meet to cut deals. Carbon credits are not a substitute for, nor can they provide, adequate climate finance.
The 2023 Climate Change (Amendment) Bill to the 2016 Climate Change Act, rushed through the Kenyan Parliament with minimal due diligence or public participation in the lead-up to the African Climate Summit, was signed into law on September 1 by Ruto. While regulation of domestic carbon trading with stipulations for community benefit sharing is perhaps better than previously unregulated trading, it may also lend legitimacy to a deeply flawed solution.
While the Amendment does include stipulations for land-based vs non-land-based projects, it does nothing to address contentious issues of land tenure. A large amount of rural land in Kenya (and 90 percent across Africa) is undocumented and informally administered. The Bill’s inconsistency with the Community Land Act that governs the process for registering communally-owned land will put rural communities at risk of losing their land and being excluded from community benefit agreements. This will make the process prone to exploitation by middlemen who can take advantage of undocumented land ownership. Land dispossession puts communities’ livelihoods at risk and therefore impairs their climate resilience.
During the National Assembly proceedings on August 22, elected representatives debated the amendment. One MP alone, Ahmed Shakeel Ahmed Shabbir of Kisumu East, dissented. He said:
I have never seen this country develop anything out of carbon credits. It is the foreign consultants who in collusion with these Kenyan consultants take away our benefits from carbon credits. Our carbon credits are worth a lot of money. They take our carbon credits and throw them at the cost of nothing with foreign consultants. And they say, ‘you must allow us to do that, we are bringing benefit to Kenya.’ I have seen no benefit to Kenya. It is the same way the colonialists came here, they gave us cowry shells and took away our gold, they gave us cowry shells and took away our wealth. Now, they are giving us carbon credits and taking away our wealth.
Good lies contain partial truths. As Danny Cullenward of CarbonPlan said: Carbon offsets can work—“if you were to reinvent the entire industrial structure, focus on a subset of activities and accept prices that are massively higher than they are today.” Short of that, carbon markets are a convenient hustle for opportunists and middlemen because they sound so good in theory but so few people understand them in practice. They are an important thread in Ruto’s green growth lie, a lie he told well at the Africa Climate Summit where he made carbon credits synonymous with climate finance (more about this lie in part two).
Politics
To Kenyan Youth: You My Children of Battle, Are Your Own Heroes
My generation grew up very close to colonialism but with the false impression that independence had made us exempt from it. We are products of the colonial curriculum, never exposed to alternative thinking. We should listen to the young people tell us what they are seeing and what we should do about the problems caused by the system that trained us.
Many with a decent knowledge of neocolonialism and global racism may have been shocked at the amount of Western decadence – from Anglo-American political stars and billionaires – that has flowed into Kenya in the first few months of President Ruto’s tenure.
Without a public discussion, the ban on Genetically Modified Organisms was lifted by decree, with a fairly racist caveat that since we Kenyans are dying of famine anyway, we need GMO foods to fill the gap. Weeks later, this dystopian logic would be openly articulated by the Trade Cabinet Secretary who, in a poor attempt at sarcasm, said in the midst of the morbid laughs of his elite audience: “By just being in this country, you are a candidate for death. And because there are so many things competing to kill you, there is nothing wrong with adding GMOs to that list.”
The introduction of GMOs is just one aspect of Ruto’s dream of turning Kenya into an industrialised country. During his ten-year tenure as Deputy President, Ruto opened hundreds of TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) colleges around the country, even as he boasted of pursuing a Masters and later on a PhD. In between, he repeatedly made remarks that technical and vocational training was better than university education, and that history and other arts and social sciences were teaching Kenyans useless knowledge about Vasco da Gama.
The problem is that a proper history lesson would have taught the president that what we learned in geography in school was simply false. Being only a few years younger than the president, I suspect he believed the usual lies we were taught in geography, which was that the West has “developed” economies because of industrialisation. It was a lie even I believed until, as a lecturer, I witnessed the proletarianisation of doctors and university lecturers. I started to ask questions as to why the few professionals who were employed in Kenya were being reduced to paper-pushing bureaucrats, as the many who were unemployed were insulted, reduced to working in the service industry, or encouraged to seek employment abroad.
After years of listening and researching, I finally understood that the Gilded Age when the US and the UK industrialised was also a time of agony for the poor, but also of the gallant fight by workers for better living and working conditions. More than that, the neoliberalisation that was oppressing professionals was a symptom of the same decay happening in the West.
It’s amazing how the education system successfully compartmentalised our minds, because even though we were told that Europe colonised Africa to obtain raw materials for their industries, it never occurred to me that our colonisation was what paid for the industrialisation Europe was now boasting to us about. In any case, raising that question would have got me physically beaten up by teachers. Mental compartments always require violence. So the violence of the school system had successfully taught me not to draw any lessons outside of what would help us pass examinations. And now I remember that I hated geography when I was in high school.
For many people of my generation, especially people like the president who joined politics in their youth, this Damascus moment has never happened. We have kept holding on to the illusion of development, and the lie that we can either achieve it through social inclusion informed by Enlightenment human rights philosophy, or through industrialisation, through the application of free-market liberalism – no matter the cost – or through a more personalised form of Christianity. The minds of otherwise highly educated Kenyans seem not to notice the chaos of evangelical America, the buffoonery of the British Tories, or, on the other hand, the hypocrisy of “wokeism” and inclusion in the Democrats in the US and the Labour Party expunged of the Corbyn flank.
What explains this hubris?
This question has haunted me for the last 15 years. I have been frustrated by the fact that the same people with whom I went to school seem to think that Kenya’s problems are only with the Kenyans themselves. Very few of us know of Frantz Fanon or Walter Rodney, and those who do will still pivot towards inclusion, rather than radical politics, or towards outright conservatism. It has been a lonely journey of looking for people who will not avoid discussing imperialism and racism in our colonial institutions. Instead, people prefer to talk of politicians being corrupt and of the people being ignorant, because that helps them avoid the role of the middle class in Kenyan political and economic life.
In our discussions, haunted by this question, I asked Mordecai Ogada if the children born in the late ’60s and in the ’70s had underestimated the impact of colonialism despite not being born during colonial rule.
This is what he said:
“We grew up in the era where the best schools were the ones the wazungu went to. The best school was the Prince of Wales [Nairobi School] or Duke of York [Lenana School]. The best hospital was the wazungu hospital [Nairobi Hospital]. There was distinction in being a church member at All Saints Cathedral. You needed to attend church at Holy Family Basillica. So we grew up with that aroma of colonialism. It had died, but its stench was still hanging around. We grew up with it, thinking we’re independent, but no.
We’re actually in denial, because to escape from colonialism, you have to accept that it is there. You can’t solve a problem without admitting that it is there. Look at how many years it has taken to just have people accept that there is racism in conservation. Yet everywhere you look, it’s right there in your face. It’s not subtle or covert. It’s overt and in your face.”
My generation grew up very close to colonialism but with the false impression that independence had made us exempt from it. We were therefore taught the colonial curriculum – like about industrial revolution being the gold standard of economic development – and we were never exposed to alternative thinking.
It is a tragedy, because we were too young to know otherwise.
The problem is that we who think this way are teaching another generation to think the same way. I was surprised when some young students of economics responded to my discussion of Thatcher’s destruction of the working class in the 1980s with the slogan “Kenya is a capitalist country and communism does not work”. These are youth born in the 2000s, long after the structural adjustment programmes (which they are not taught about).
People prefer to talk of politicians being corrupt and of the people being ignorant, because that helps them avoid the role of the middle class in Kenyan political and economic life.
That is how we arrive at a president with the ambitious plan to industrialise Kenya and hoping to get support from the very countries that de-industrialised in the ’80s because they feared democracy and a vibrant working class more than they feared de-industrialization. The president is stuck in the geography curriculum of the 1970s, being advised by economists who admire the University of Chicago graduates who wreaked havoc in Latin America in the 1980s, with the religious fervour of the evangelical movement that rose up as a backlash against the civil rights movement of the same period. The president’s biggest detractors are the civil society who are using the victories of the ’90s as the blueprint for freedom – and some of them, especially in the media, are stoking the fires for a constitutional meltdown.
Kenya is in an intellectual time warp.
Binyavanga Wainaina continually lamented about this intellectual stagnation. In an article titled Schooling for small minds, he observed that Kenya had become this country that crushed any form of creativity and independent thinking. He said, “We took the colonial system, which was designed to produce dutiful people who don’t ask questions, and perfected it.” In a YouTube series titled We must free our imaginations, which extend this thinking, he said:
“The same colonial school that said ‘bring the obedient African children so that you can become clerks, and then we drum a syllabus into you so that you sing God save the queen’, is still the same idea [as telling us] that you don’t have an imagination. You can’t imagine outside those ma-parameters. You are scared of imagining. Where that’s happening is in the middle class. Down in the villages in Africa, guys are imagining and doing all kinds of shit. But who has the opinion? The middle class.”
The century-old industrial “revolution” as an economic blueprint is right there in the ma-parameters. We’ve tried the human rights model of constitutionalism, and it has tamed the political class, but now we have transformed it into an end in itself. We are crazy for replacing our education system based on philosophies that informed the evangelical “family values” and Booker T. Washington schools.
My generation grew up very close to colonialism but with the false impression that independence had made us exempt from it.
We need new ways to see our history and new inventions. Human rights is good, but it doesn’t address these problems. Singing about the “secular state” is a poor substitute for a revolutionary theology. Those calling those who disagree with Azimio tribalists, and those who disagree with the Kenya Kwanza government “rich idlers and Twitterati with a bowl of pizza and fish fingers” or “upper deck”, are just the same middle class trading insults with each other. Worse, those insults are really about who has the right credentials to talk about the majority of Kenyans. One side waves human rights, the other brandishes elections.
Yet what that whole strata of society really needs is a major reckoning, a repentance and a dismantling of the colonial pedestals in our minds. Kenyans of my generation – and that includes the president – must unlearn what we were taught in school. And perhaps we should not be so presumptuous as to believe that we know the right solutions to apply to the problems caused by the same system that trained us. I wish we would listen to the young people tell us what they are seeing and what we should do. As Binyavanga said, we need new ideas and new stories. Perhaps we should have the audacity to say to Kenya’s youth the words of Nikki Giovanni: “You my children of battle, are your own heroes. You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.”
Politics
Hijacking Food Policies to Feed Agribusiness
AGRA’s activities in Africa have resulted in increased hunger and deprivation yet the foreign-funded organization continues to be used to exert undue influence on African government policies in a bid to make them agribusiness-friendly.
Donors, governments and business leaders had another lacklustre African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) this year from 5 to 8 September in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. There was little fanfare, few major announcements and no hint of meaningful input from small-scale farmers, the supposed beneficiaries of the erstwhile Green Revolution for Africa. Tanzanian farmers’ request for a seat at the table, in the form of a more critical side event, was denied.
Some say that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu. That’s the way Zambian farmers are feeling. Zambia is one of several countries targeted for the so-called “agro-poles”, 250,000-acre blocks of land often taken from local communities to attract agribusiness investment. On the menu indeed.
“Where are the farmers?” asked Tanzanian farmer leader Juma Shabani at a sharply critical August 30 press conference organised by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). “They are clearly excluded in the coming 2023 AGRF meeting in Tanzania, a country with more than 70 per cent of its population engaged in agriculture.”
At the August 30 press conference, farm leaders from Kenya, Uganda, Mali, Zimbabwe and Zambia denounced the failures of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (now simply known by its acronym, AGRA, after it withdrew the words “green revolution” from its name). And they decried the undue influence the foreign-funded organisation has on African government policies.
“AGRA’s direct intervention and influence over African government policies, particularly in seeds and biosafety, have tilted the scales in favour of commercial seed providers and Green Revolution technologies,” reads the AFSA press release. “This level of interference has squeezed out alternative voices and approaches like agroecology.”
This is the third consecutive year the food sovereignty alliance and its allies have protested Green Revolution proponents’ zealous faith in their seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides. The only changes farmers have seen are cosmetic. The words “green revolution” have been removed from the forum, which is now called the African Food Systems Summit. And AGRA now stands, literally, for nothing. But Green Revolution policies were on full display at the Summit, despite their proven failures.
Hunger has grown to alarming levels across Sub-Saharan Africa. AGRA’s 13 focus countries have seen rising deprivation as the heavily promoted seeds and fertilisers fail to catalyse a productivity revolution. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other AGRA sponsors promised in 2006 to double productivity and incomes while halving food insecurity by 2020. Instead, the number of chronically hungry has risen by 50 per cent in AGRA countries, according to the United Nations.
Summit host Tanzania has seen the number of “undernourished” jump 34 per cent since it joined AGRA. An estimated 59 per cent of Tanzanians suffer moderate or severe levels of food insecurity.
The hungry and food insecure, many of them small-scale farmers, didn’t get seats at the AGRF table, but they are on the menu as the Green Revolutionaries plan their next corporate-backed effort to displace small-scale farmers with industralised farms.
The latest assault is being led by the African Development Bank (AfDB) under its “Feed Africa” initiative. It is supported by the Gates Foundation, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and AGRA itself, which under its self-proclaimed “AGRA 3.0” strategy is serving as the catalyst in pressing African governments to make their policies more friendly to agribusiness.
A damning donor evaluation last year acknowledged that AGRA had failed to achieve any of its objectives in improving farmer productivity and welfare. But, noted evaluators, it was often successful at changing policies. So AGRA has intensified its work to influence farm policies.
Zambia, which recently rejoined AGRA, is a particular target, and AGRA 3.0 seems willing to hijack more democratic policy efforts.
Zambia had been developing its second National Agriculture Investment Plan (NAIP II) since 2021, the basic framework for agricultural development. After much productive public consultation during the evaluation of NAIP I, Zambian advocates and farmers were surprised to be presented with a completely different investment framework written with support from FAO-sponsored consultants and the resident AGRA consultant who has been attached to the Ministry of Agriculture since 2020.
The Comprehensive Agriculture Transformation Support Programme (CATSP) was in no way based on the emerging consensus and recommendations from the NAIP I evaluation. The massive document calls for a broad set of pro-business policy reforms designed “to enable the private sector” to take over agricultural production and marketing.
The focus is on commodity value chains for a narrow set of commercial crops. Look for more maize, soybeans and wheat, not the sorts of nutritious, climate-resilient foods such as millet and sorghum. The plan expands the development of 250,000-acre “farm blocks” for industrial farms, often on land taken from local farmers and communities.
A damning donor evaluation last year acknowledged that AGRA had failed to achieve any of its objectives in improving farmer productivity and welfare.
Green Mbozi, the Permanent Secretary for Technical Services in the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture, told participants at a meeting convened by the Economics Association of Zambia that “inefficient smallholder farmers will be phased out (stop producing) to pave way for large and commercial farmers to produce efficiently to lower the cost of food”. The CATSP document and its annexed Policy Implementation Instruments are being rushed through, with a “national validation” scheduled for 5 October 2023, a move seen by many grassroots organisations as unfortunate.
These are the kinds of policies that come from AGRA’s top-down approaches to policy development. The new strategy was prepared by foreign consultants with limited stakeholder consultation. Most smallholder farmers, civil society organisations and faith-based institutions were not at that table, and the few who were either were brought in by cooperating partners or were known to be Green Revolution allies. The final document reflects this exclusion, as smallholder interests are not represented.
USAID has shown its commitment to supporting the plan’s implementation once it is approved. The African Development Bank is financing such schemes across the continent, as the international NGO GRAIN documented in a recent report. Its director, former Nigerian Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina, boasted that African agriculture will be “the new oil”.
Judging by the strong words at the food sovereignty alliance’s August 30 press conference, African farmers will not tolerate another extractive corporate scheme that fails to benefit the poor. They again demanded that private and bilateral donors recognise the proven failures of the Green Revolution approach and shift their support to farmer-centred ecological agriculture. Farmers working with agroecologists are getting far better results than AGRA ever did.
The simple and low-cost innovation of “green manure cover-cropping” has scientists working with some 15 million small-scale maize farmers in Africa to plant local varieties of trees and nitrogen-fixing food crops in their maize fields, tripling maize yields at no cost to the farmer.
Some Zambian farmers have shifted from failing Green Revolution approaches. Organisations such as Kasisi Agricultural Training Center stopped promoting such practices when their agronomists discovered farmers were paying higher input costs but getting little in return. Kasisi now trains farmers in organic farming, with far better results.
The Zambian Alliance for Agroecology and Biodiversity works with a wide network of local “seed savers”, trying to halt the disappearance of local varieties of food crops lost to Green Revolution subsidies and promotion. They are restoring diversity to farmers’ fields.
African farmers will not tolerate another extractive corporate scheme that fails to benefit the poor.
As Mamadou Goïta of Mali’s Institute for Research and Promotion of Alternatives in Development said at the August 30 press conference, “Farmer groups have never accepted these technological fixes. People have been working on their own food systems, to push back on what AGRA was planting.”
“Africans love agriculture, it is the backbone of our economy,” said event moderator Susan Nakacwa, of the international NGO GRAIN. “But when it comes to agricultural policies, this love is not shown back to farmers.”
It is time for donors to take small-scale farmers off the menu. Allowing foreign consultants to hijack policies developed over years by the full range of stakeholders – including farmer groups – as they have in Zambia, is an insult to Zambia’s sovereignty and democratic participation. USAID and other donors should stop putting Zambia’s farmers on the menu, threatening their lands and livelihoods.
Give them back their seat at the table. Better still, let them into the kitchen to plan their own sumptuous menu of African foods that respect local cultures, restore the land, and make farmers more resilient to climate change, not more vulnerable.
They could even decide to use a few Green Revolution ingredients. Or not. It would be their choice. That’s food sovereignty: the right to choose free of corporate pressure and foreign influence.
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