A few weeks into the protests that were sparked off by the Kenya government’s belligerent persistence in passing the Finance Bill, the government spokesman, Isaac Maura, held a presser in which he offered a strange apology to Kenyans. As he announced the president’s concessions to the protesters’ demands, he talked off the script and said: “On behalf of any public official who has been seen to be opulent, proud and arrogant, I wish to issue an unreserved apology to the people of Kenya. Going forward, public officials shall demonstrate responsibility and humility, as has been instructed by our appointing authority, our president.” He repeated, “I wish to offer an unreserved apology for that opulence and arrogance of matters that could be seen to be contemptuous of the sufferings of Kenyans.”
The apology was meant to be an about-turn for a government that had been defiant in the face of the growing public anger against the draconian tax legislation of 2023 and 2024. But if the apology was meant to show a softer side of the government, it completely misfired. Instead, it simply confirmed the “eat cake” hubris of Kenyan politicians, showing that they have still not understood what has provoked the intense anger of Kenyans. The protesters were not pointing at the optics, but at what the optics reflected, which was the unexplained wealth of politicians, while the same politicians imposed draconian tax collection measures on Kenyans. The government spokesman hedged this important fact, reducing the problem to “matters that could be seen to be contemptuous”. He missed the fact that the issue wasn’t what could be seen to be contemptuous, but that the politicians were, in their actions, already contemptuous.
How did we arrive at this cluelessness, where politicians are oblivious, not only to their own vanity, but also to how it looks to the Kenyan public? In this first segment of a two-part series, I will trace how Kenyan politics deteriorated to the level of the grotesque, where grandeur, obscene wealth, crass contempt and spectacular violence against citizens were normalised as the political culture of Kenya. This decline was shielded from scrutiny by a narrative of Kenyan exceptionalism in a continent painted as synonymous with dictatorship and political dysfunction. This narrative was exemplified by Lang’ata member of parliament Felix Jalang’o at the height of public indignance at the Finance Bill before the parliamentary vote. While on a visit to Zambia, and with no care for the possible diplomatic implications that could ensue, the MP wrote a post on X mocking Zambian infrastructure and marvelling at how Kenya was “ahead in the region”.
How is this hubris possible? In summary, I trace it to Kenya’s identity as the “white man’s country”, the name by which it was baptised by Theodore Roosevelt when he made his obscenely destructive expedition to Kenya in 1909. This identity has never been challenged. For the last few years, the work of Mordecai Ogada and Mbaria wa Gitau in conservation, and myself in education, among others, has revealed that the Kenyan elite have remained solidly committed to maintaining the racist and colonial status quo, even as Kenyans boast of having made popular, through Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the idea of “decolonising the mind”. This dissonance, in which a cultural bravado exists side by side with a complete lack of African consciousness, has blocked the acknowledgement that Kenya’s political culture is crass, grotesque and oppressive.
As the Deputy President would whine after protesters stormed the Kenya Parliament, many observers, from the crass and foolish Kenya political establishment, to the international media, were surprised by the protests and the storming of parliament. Few imagined that a mere budgetary law could draw so much ire from Kenyans. And yet, someone who read keenly what people like Darius Okolla had written in The Elephant, or to what I have consistently said about the expensive change in the education system, should have known that Kenya was heading for a political stand-off.
I kept warning that a new education system cannot fix the problem of Kenya’s feudal economic system and the government’s aversion to creativity. The ideas and ingenuity of young Kenyans were being shot down with taxes and regulation, and Kenya Revenue Authority was suffocating businesses in the name of tax compliance. Team sports like rugby and football, and even participation in the Olympics, would be riddled with corruption that led to sportspeople missing out on accommodation and allowances, while politicians funded joyriders. Meanwhile, the young people would be treated contemptuously by long-serving civil servants telling them to be creative or to stop expecting employed.
One of the most iconic manifestations of this contempt for the Kenyan youth was the 2022 murder by police of the Kianjokoma brothers, Benson Njiru, 22, and Emmanuel Mutura, 19, on the day when they opened a butchery business. The incident presumably occurred when the police were doing their usual rounds of extortion, a constant problem for small businesses. The parallels between what happened to them and the frustrations of the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi could not be more stark.
Over the last six years, I thought that the Kenyan education, media, church and government establishment could not get more tone-deaf, but this year proved me wrong. Between the previous year’s Finance Bill and the passing of this year’s bill, the political class still did not get how detached they were from Kenyan realities. The politicians remained unfazed as Kenyans started to cost the politicians’ watches, shoes and belts, with some bills adding up to close to US$100,000, money that even the top paid CEOs in Kenya do not earn. The politicians continued their weekend tradition of donating huge sums of money at fundraising meetings in events outside Nairobi, especially at churches. Oscar Sudi hit the record for donating 20 million shillings at a church harambee, raising a furore among Kenyans. At least this time, he noticed that something was up, because he gave the lame excuse that the money was the total sum of contributions he had collected, rather than money from himself alone.
For two months, Kenyans had tried to negotiate with the political elite to withdraw the proposed Finance Bill. They diligently honoured the constitutional mandate of public participation in sending their statements to parliament, but the politicians stubbornly stood their ground, some arrogantly declaring that they would not change even a comma of the bill. Kenyans ramped up the pressure, contacting their individual MPs by phone and telling them not to vote for the bill. But together with the media, politicians laughed it off, chuckling at the numerous insults politicians were receiving on their phones. The cluelessness was reinforced by Karen Nyamu – who serves as the Barbie of the current parliament – who expressed her agony at losing 10,000 Instagram followers due to the bill.
By mid-June, the politicians started to get uneasy about the public discontent and chose to amend some of the most egregious clauses. But by then, Kenyans had had enough. They insisted that the entire bill had to be rejected, not amended, and they decided to escort the politicians to parliament to vote against the bill. The ensuing storming of the parliament finally made the political class realise that Kenyans were serious, but by then, it was clear that the political establishment had been caught flat-footed. The president first reacted with a threatening speech, then adopted a more conciliatory tone in his next address. In the following days, he gave an interview that exposed him as unfeeling and unsympathetic, and eventually, he withdrew the bill. It was during this fumbling around that the government spokesman deviated from reading his script and gave a tasteless apology for the insensitive behaviour of the political elite.
How did Kenya, with all the accolades for its progressive constitution and dynamic public sphere, end up with such a hopelessly clueless and crass political elite? As I’ve already mentioned above, Kenya’s politics have always been this way. However, there are two other factors within Kenyan society I consider responsible for blocking a reckoning with this truth – the constant suppression of the economic conversation in Kenyan politics, and the anti-intellectual, and specifically the anti-arts education agenda that made Kenya substitute mimicry, the grotesque and the carnivalesque for genuine political engagement. The protests, hopefully, are not simply an opportunity to fix our broken governance, but are also an opportunity to build a new political culture where people’s lives and livelihoods are not a joke, and where choosing political leaders isn’t a glorified form of entertainment similar to American Idol.
Island of peace
Since independence, Kenya has earned a reputation for being a capitalist haven of stability surrounded by a continent in political turmoil and armed conflict. This reputation was cemented by internal and external forces. One internal factor is the fact that independence began with one of Africa’s oldest first presidents, Jomo Kenyatta, who had been trained at home by British missionaries, and then weaned on British capitalism during his 17-year stint in the UK. By the time he became president, Jomo, a patriarch in his mid-60s, had no patience for debates on Africa’s destiny in which younger Africans around the continent were engaged. Anecdote has it that he treated his cabinet ministers with condescension, talking to them like they were children and sometimes even striking them. In the infamous Sessional Paper of 1965, Kenyatta himself said that debate was over and it was time to get to work.
Under Kenyatta, the settler model of land and wealth accumulation continued full steam ahead, almost like in colonial times. But the question of land redistribution and inequality would not go away. As ES Atieno Odhiambo wrote in his famous essay entitled “Democracy and the Ideology of Order”, the response of the Jomo government was to proscribe public debate about the direction that the Kenyan political economy should take, especially during the Cold War era that offered the options of capitalism, communism and non-alignment. To block those discussions from taking place, the Kenyan state employed the toolkit of assassinations, detentions and political exile. Pio Gama Pinto, who had strong opinions on the land question, and JM Kariuki, himself a wealthy man but who dared to call Kenya a land of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars, were felled by the assassin’s bullet. This policy of silence continued into the Moi presidency. The few intellectuals who broached the subject, such Barack Obama Snr, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo, were persecuted and exiled.
However, there was another more subtle, if not more sinister factor, besides political oppression, that kept the discussion of Kenya’s economy out of the public sphere. Schooling, and especially the positions in the civil service for which it prepared people, became a guarantee of wealth. In their landmark research, both GCM Mutiso and Benjamin Kipkorir captured how the Kenyans who received a Western education expected to amass wealth through employment in the civil service. This elite entitlement, which is explored in Kipkorir’s dissertation still under lock and key at the Cambridge University Library, has continued to haunt Kenya and yet evade public discussion.
Thus grew a culture of silence on the economic question as the political and civil service structure became more voracious. The families of the early civil servants appointed during colonial rule also amassed great wealth before and after independence. Nicola Swainson’s study details how, after independence, Kenyan politicians and top civil servants arranged the trade and commerce laws to monopolise certain business sectors, and to blackmail the Asian community to pay kickbacks and, in some cases, confiscate their property. The political and bureaucratic elite demanded that foreign companies intending to do business in Kenya appoint Africans on their boards of directors. One unnamed Kenyan cabinet minister earned the nickname Mr Ten Percent, due to his notoriety for demanding a kickback of 10 per cent of the total investment of a company.
The role of the civil service in wealth accumulation was further endorsed by the Ndegwa Commission of 1971, which permitted civil servants to operate private businesses on the frivolous condition that the business must not conflict with the civil servants’ ethics and professional duties. This greed was cheered by the American empire. An American economist, David K Leonard, wrote a glowing tribute to senior civil servants like Simeon Nyachae who accumulated wealth, ostensibly due to their entrepreneurial spirit.
The ethics of secrecy and discreetness, which the civil service inherited from its colonial predecessors, helped exclude discussion of the wealth of the political class from the public sphere. As a teenager, I often heard that to analyse wealth distribution was essentially to be a communist, which the government frowned upon. I would sometimes hear about the wealth of senior government officials and politicians, but only in hushed tones.
The national narrative of Kenya as a successful capitalist African country was also bolstered on the international arena by the reputation that Africa had gained for political buffoonery. Hollywood, the media and academia affirmed the image of Africa as a continent where regimes were characterised by the grotesque and the carnivalesque. Leaders like as Jean-Bédel Bokassa of Central African Republic represented the buffoonery of African rulers, and many other countries – like South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Rwanda – gained international attention for horrifying crimes against humanity.
The problem, however, is that these narratives divorced the gory details of massacres from the political context of a continent whose economic and political recovery was sabotaged by the CIA or Françafrique through coups, assassinations, sanctions, civil war, and now debt. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated for imagining that Congo’s rich mineral wealth could be used for the benefit of the Congolese people. From the ’60s to the early ’90s, other African leaders who imagined economic freedom for their countries, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Thomas Sankara, were also targeted by coups, assassinations or sanctions. By sabotaging the imagination and economic ambitions of the continent, the Anglo-American empire and Françafrique essentially created conditions where African leaders could only avoid the wrath of the former colonial masters by being buffoons, and suppressing their own people, as their countries were plundered by capital.
Thanks to the heavy bureaucracy of Kenya, the country evaded falling into these aesthetics which Achille Mbembe famously described in his book On the Postcolony. As such, the national elite consoled themselves that Kenya was not like other African countries. And with history and other subjects of the arts and humanities having been declared irrelevant to Kenya’s development, and with thinking ridiculed as “just theory”, the Kenyan public marched on, wallowing in ignorance and anti-intellectualism, and never discussing the economic question. A key culprit in this intellectual stagnation is the school system, especially the universities that still remain under direct interference from global capital in the name of quality education according to global standards. A few years ago, I was surprised when a student of economics, barely 25 years old, told me that there was no need to discuss the IMF because “Kenya is a capitalist country and communism doesn’t work”. To mute my surprise that a Cold War narrative was still being used in the 21st century, I asked the student if she knew what the Cold War was. She’d never heard of it.
Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, economic conversations remained muted in the public sphere. At the time, I was in my twenties, finishing my undergraduate degree, and watching the public schools and hospitals deteriorate. However, I do not recall any public discussion of what was happening to the country. As I have narrated in a few interviews, part of the capture of the discourse – at least for me – happened with the rise of the evangelical church. With its vibrant music, and its nuclear family values promising hope for the families we hoped to start, the church distracted us from asking fundamental questions about the economy we were now joining, and offered prosperity gospel as a remedy. In any case, the country was also preoccupied with how to get Moi out, and that struggle only ended in 2002.
Under the Kibaki presidency, the slight economic boom was not accessible to everyone. The artists noticed it. Parselelo Kantai’s essay on the Redykyulass Generation became a landmark in capturing the broken dreams of Kenyans in the midst of optimism. Kantai’s essay begins with the story of a friend who enthusiastically began several business ventures that did not work, while keeping a bright face to reflect the discourse of the time. None of the ventures succeeded and she sank into debt. Eventually she ended her own life.
Binyavanga Wainaina also noticed that there was a dissonance between Kenya’s narratives of herself and her economic realities. In essays and interviews, Binyavanga expressed bewilderment at the apparent fatalism of the Kenyan middle class, which took pride in exposure to international corporations as a result of their schooling, but which remained blind to the fact that those opportunities were available only to a slim sliver of Kenyan society.
By 2007, the post-election violence made it clear that the economy was broken, but the ethnic and land dimensions of the post-election violence made the country postpone the economic conversation yet again, and focus on building consensus among politicians and getting Kenya a new constitution. Basking in the new foundational document, Kenya entered the 2013 elections on, ironically, a feudal arrangement, where the son of the first president, with a running mate implicated in the violence, was tasked with implementing the new constitution which they had both opposed before its ratification. Ruto had criticised the constitution on the basis that it was not capitalist enough in terms of commodifying land for sale, indicating that he did not want to let go of the old land-based settler economy that Kenya was. Unfortunately for him, Kenyans had prevailed.
Thus Kenya began the 2010 constitutional dispensation headed by a duo who wanted to keep the old economic arrangement. One was the original beneficiary of it, the other was a hoping to benefit from it, when Kenyans were ready to dump it. Both hoped to perpetuate the old economic order, but unfortunately for them, the taboo of discussing resource distribution and the wealth of politicians had begun to wear off.
Empowered by the new constitution, Kenyans raised the question of the Kenyatta family wealth and land in the run up to the first elections. As years went on, the issue of the Kenyatta empire became thornier, especially as a new generation of Kenyan adults, with access to the internet, began to dig through the archives. They read books that were previously scarce for older generations, and gradually discovered that the reputation of Uhuru Kenyatta’s father as the leader of the Mau Mau and a freedom fighter was largely a tall tale. By 2017, the question of the Kenyatta empire had become so uncomfortable that Uhuru’s supporters felt the need to sanitise his second tenure by claiming that Uhuru was “too rich to steal”.
The Uhuruto regime took the position that the problem with the economy was that Kenyans wanted jobs which were above their station, and the solution was to get more people in technical and manual jobs. Therefore, higher education and the arts and humanities needed to be whittled down even further. The superman to the rescue was the fire-breathing Cabinet Secretary for Education, Fred Matiang’i, who militarised national exams and then depicted the spike in the failure rate as his victory of superman slaying the dragons of national examination cartels. He later imposed a new education system to force Kenyans into pathways that would relegate more than half the children to manual and technical labour, a rehashing of the education logic of Booker T. Washington that was enthusiastically embraced by the American robber barons and brought to Kenya in the 1924 by the Phelps Stokes Commission. As Ruto pursued his PhD at the University of Nairobi, he also as set about establishing more TVET colleges (Technical and Vocational Education and Training) and railed against subjects like history that taught useless things like when Vasco da Gama arrived in Malindi.
Clearly, the Uhuruto pair were unwilling, or most likely too clueless, to handle the inescapable need to modify the structure of the Kenyan economy. By the 2020s, the discomfort and rising frustration were becoming palpable. Mental health problems became more conspicuous, with suicide rising across the spectrum of Kenyans who were working harder but being exploited and gaslighted more. But the political class and civil service remained as delusional as ever. As the 2022 elections approached, Ruto decided to reduce the social issue to identity, framing himself as a hustler seeking to fulfil a Cinderella dream of taking over from the prince. He talked the language of the guillotine for the dynasties but offered nothing close to it. He captured the imagination of a population that was becoming more restless as their economic fortunes dwindled.
However, as the folks at the Financial Times observed, Ruto misread the Kenyan public. He failed to realise that for ordinary people, the hustle was not simply a winning line of a successful campaign – it was their lived reality under neoliberal economics, just as Lester K Spence has explained in the case of the black communities in the United States.
The hype of the 2022 elections offered politicians a reprieve from answering tough questions about Kenya’s economy. With their usual hubris, the politicians confused that reprieve with a confirmation that the habit of extraction and plunder by a few, while Kenyans pay for it, could continue unabated. As public concern turned to disgust and later to anger, politicians showed Kenyans the finger. Younger Kenyans watched themselves being auctioned to labour markets in Dubai and their futures being sacrificed to the IMF, as politicians wore jewellery costing almost a million shillings. By June 2024, Kenyans had had enough. The politicians never saw the impending burst of the dam of Kenyans’ pent-up anger and frustration coming.
In the second part of this series, I will discuss how cultural changes in the neoliberal era, and the culture of mimicry, made politicians oblivious to how ignorant and tone-deaf they had become. They could not understand that a mere apology for “matters that could be seen to be contemptuous of the sufferings of Kenyans” was not enough. Kenyans wanted more than lip service and cabinet reshuffles. They wanted political overhaul.
