Kenya and the Politics of a Postcolony critically examines key themes in the politics of Kenya from the establishment of British colonialism in the late nineteenth century to the end of the Uhuru Kenyatta presidency in 2022. The largest economy in East Africa, Kenya has remained relatively peaceful since the time of independence from Britain in 1963 even when the region has periodically been engulfed in civil strife and political turmoil. On account of this, the country serves as an anchor for Western strategic interests in the region and many international organizations and media houses have set up their regional offices in Nairobi, Kenya's bustling capital city. Indeed, Kenya is the only country outside of the global north to host the headquarters of a United Nations agency. It is home to the headquarters of the United Nations Environmental Program, which is located in the Gigiri suburbs of Nairobi. It is this important country, both regionally and internationally, that this book is all about.

The book is thematically split into nine chapters with a concluding tenth chapter. The first chapter explores the roots of colonialism as a pernicious global enterprise. It explains why colonialism, types of colonialism, and the uses that colonies were put to, with particular focus on Africa. It examines the rise of anticolonial nationalism in Africa, concluding with an exposition of the different waves of decolonization on the continent. Chapter 2 focuses on the colonial context of the making of contemporary Kenya, from the establishment of British colonialism in 1895 to independence in 1963. The chapter grapples with the most critical issues that defined the political development of Kenya within this colonial context. These include the White settler demands, the Indian question, the land and labor issue, and the rise of anticolonial nationalism. These critical issues in the colony are examined with the objective of evaluating their impact and implications in the making of contemporary Kenya.

Chapter 3 focuses on political independence and the betrayal of anticolonial nationalism. It notes that whereas anticolonial nationalism was characterized by interethnic unity, within the first decade of independence, the sense of unity and collective purpose irreparably atrophied, and, by the end of the decade, it had virtually died. More than six decades since independence, Kenya is much less of a nation than it was in 1963.

Introduction

In 2020, three presidential families in Kenya—the Kenyattas, Mois, and Kibakis—ranked among the richest 20 families in the country. This reality, according to Alexia Rij (2021), is a product of the country's entrenched neo-patrimonial regime that dates back to colonialism. The characteristic feature of this type of regime is the conflict of public and private interests, with the latter taking precedence over the former, resulting in the elite accumulating wealth through various corrupt practices: “Although the features and forms of corruption have changed over time, the underlying logic persists while becoming more complex” (Rij 2021: 9). In an inadvertent acknowledgment of the entrenched nature of corruption in Kenya, President Uhuru Kenyatta asserted, in January 2021, that KES 2 billion is stolen daily from national coffers (Muriuki 2021). The fact that corruption in Kenya has reached epidemic proportions is beyond question. In the 1960s and 1970s, bureaucratic corruption manifested itself in bureaucrats’ demands for kickbacks valued at around 10 percent of the total cost of a public tender, development project, or whatever goods or services were under procurement. By the 1980s and 1990s, the rates had escalated to around 40 percent. Under the Uhuru–Ruto dispensation in Kenya (2013–22), the rates maxed out to 100 percent! (Nasong’o 2020). This is the situation where, for instance, a development project is conjured up, it is costed, awarded, and paid for, but nothing is done. The exemplification of this is the Kimwarer and Arror dams project scandal in which billions were paid out for nothing (Some 2019; Standard Digital Team 2019). Alternatively, public funds are simply withdrawn from bank accounts and directly pocketed by public officers, a most brazen form of corruption that was amplified by the investigative report in 2020 on the financial shenanigans at Maasai Mara University (Muia 2020). In view of the epidemic levels corruption had reached in Kenya, a national conference on corruption was convened in January 2019 at the Bomas of Kenya. At the conference, President Uhuru Kenyatta asserted that the government would relentlessly pursue high-profile cases already in the courts and launch a crackdown to ensure all corrupt persons are held accountable.

Introduction

According to Kenya's Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) (2012), historical injustice means those harms and wrongs committed by individuals, groups, and institutions, including rulers and regime elite, against other individuals and groups who may be dead but whose descendants are alive. The descendants could be individuals or groups of all kinds deserving of recognition or acknowledgment for their suffering and should as such be compensated. The CRA goes further to state that the historical injustice narrative speaks of a society's deviation from or distortion of the normal living of a people. The idea of recognition of the suffering of victims of historical injustices is important in the process of redressing the wrongs. The recognition of the minority and marginalized in Kenya's Constitution is significant because it underscores the basic humanity and subjectivity of the victims denied by the perpetuation of inhumanity against them. Recognition is, of course, built into the act of restoring or compensating someone for the harm suffered (CRA 2012). This chapter focuses on this question of historical injustices with particular emphasis on the land question, which is perhaps the most controversial and most emotive issue in the country given how skewed land is distributed and considering its significance to the livelihoods of the majority of Kenyans and to the national political economy, from precolonial to contemporary times.

The notion of historical injustices in Kenya is rooted in the country's experience with colonialism and imperialism but extends into postcolonial governments. Different communities in Kenya had varied encounters with Arab imperialism and colonial occupation. At the Coast, for instance, Arabs alienated the Indigenous people from their land. For its part, the colonial government equally dispossessed Kenyans of their land in the process of creating the “White Highlands” as detailed in Chapter 2. During the colonial period, expropriation of land was achieved through various laws, ordinances, and promulgations, including the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 on land ownership and the Native Trust Bill of 1926 restricting Africans to Native Reserves (see Chapter 2). These realities raised the profile of land ownership and inequalities of the same. Historical injustices related to land continue to linger and continue to be a source of conflict.

Introduction

After a long period of single-party authoritarianism, first de facto between 1969 and 1982, then de jure between 1982 and 1992, Kenya returned to multiparty politics in 1992. This was a consequence of concerted efforts for political reform that facilitated the 1991 repeal of Section 2(A) of the Kenyan Constitution, introduced in 1982 to make the country a single-party state by law. It took a further two decades of activism before a new more progressive constitution was adopted in 2010, further advancing the cause of democracy in the country. Within the context of the new multiparty political dispensation, elections have been held regularly after every five years——the first in 1992 then, in 1997, 2002, 2007, 2013, 2017, and 2022. The timing of the 2013 elections (which should have been held in 2012) was affected by the implementation of the 2010 constitution that ushered in the country's second republic, which provided for a system of 47 devolved county governments, each with its own executive and legislative institutions.

This chapter examines these multiparty elections as democratic processes, with particular focus on presidential and parliamentary elections. It argues that of all these elections, only the 2002 election can be adjudged to have been free and fair. The rest of the elections were so replete with political corruption and all manner of electoral shenani-gans as to make them a mockery of any sense of fairness and credibility. The worst of them all was the 2007 election whose blatant rigging occasioned so much violence that pushed the country to the brink of collapse, only saved by external intervention given the country's strategic importance in great power geopolitics. Similarly, blatant manipulation of the 2017 presidential election saw it nullified by Kenya's Supreme Court, necessitating a rerun that was boycotted by the opposition presidential candidate, Raila Odinga. This rendered the legitimacy of President Uhuru Kenyatta's second term tenuous at most, nonexistent at worst.

Democracy, Political Parties, and Elections: A Conceptualization

The idea of democracy can be conceptualized at three levels—the abstract, the practical, and the concrete levels. At the abstract level, democracy is an intellectual creation, a mentally visualized reality postulated as a model of the possible and desirable in matters of social coexistence and the governance of society (Gitonga 1987).

The political story of Kenya captured in the foregoing nine chapters is the story of much of postcolonial Africa and, perhaps, the postcolonial world elsewhere in the Global South. Particularly reminiscent of the regimes of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya are those of Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe as well as those of Kamuzu Banda in Malawi, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Abdou Diouf in Senegal, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny and his successors in Ivory Coast. Paul Biya's regime in Cameroon is even worse. In power since 1982, Biya apparently spends more time per year living abroad than in the country he (mis)leads, even as the country burns under a nasty politically instigated ethno-regional conflagration. With regard to Kenya, in light of the foregoing analysis, the pertinent question, as the epilogue to the volume, remains what the future prospects of the country are. Toward this end, a few conclusions can be drawn in an attempt to address this question as elaborated in the ensuing two sections. First is a negative prognosis followed by a more positive outlook on the country's future prospects. The chapter ends with a note on some significant paradoxes inherent in the political development of postcolonial Kenya.

A Negative Prognosis

In the first place, it is noteworthy that the betrayal of anticolonial nationalism discussed in Chapter 3 has defined the nature of Kenyan society politically, socially, and economically, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The notion of willing-seller-willing-buyer as the basis for the disposal of land in the “White Highlands” after independence defined a major historical injustice that remains to this day (see Chapter 7). It resulted in a tiny minority of the Kenyan political elite acquiring the land that was forcefully taken away from Kenyans by White settlers, leaving the majority of Kenyans dispossessed by this colonial heist landless in the postcolonial dispensation. Given the agrarian-based nature of Kenyan livelihoods, this reality explains the extreme income inequality in Kenya, one of the worst in the world. Of the five presidents Kenya has had so far (1963–2024), only Mwai Kibaki attempted to address this issue. Kibaki set up the Ndung’u Land Commission to probe into irregular and illegal allocation of land in Kenya since independence.

Introduction

Aristotle, the Greek political philosopher, perceptibly hypothesized that human beings are by nature political animals. From this Aristotelian perspective, individuals are political animals because they cannot only reason, but they can also communicate with fellow human beings and, ipso facto, have the capacity to transform the environment of human existence for the better because they can recognize the difference between right and wrong. Herein, the central Aristotelian thesis is that human beings, imbued with reason by their creator, must naturally premise their approach to politics on the basic concept of the good of all human beings in the polity. This is the essence of true civic nationalism. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the nature of modern politics reveals that the notion of politics aiming at the general good for all human beings in a given polity is trumped by the manipulative tendencies of the political class. This is amply illustrated by the discussion in Chapters 3 and 4 regarding the establishment of single-party authoritarianism in Kenya that essentially amounted to a betrayal of anti-colonial nationalism.

Whether politics aims at the general good or not has a lot to do with the manner in which the public space is organized, as this has serious implications for the way in which actors conduct themselves therein. Conversely, the nature of the political actors, their worldviews, and political orientations, have equally serious implications for the nature of the public space and the discourses conducted therein. Whereas political independence was achieved under heightened anticolonial nationalism with expectations of a democratic dispensation post-independence, the process of political consolidation saw the emergence of a single-party state, which was rationalized as the most viable means for maintaining national integrity, engendering nation- and state-building, and ensuring socioeconomic development (Nasong’o 2005). This eventuality witnessed increasing consolidation of power in the hands of the executive in a conjuncture that led to the overwhelming dominance of the state in the Kenyan political economy as elsewhere on the African continent. Within this authoritarian context, political opposition was criminalized and those viewed as radicals or as a threat to entrenched interests were systematically marginalized from politics, harassed, detained, and even assassinated. Some saved themselves by escaping into exile.

Introduction

For a long period of time after attainment of political independence in 1963, Kenya's foreign economic relations remained principally tied to her former colonial power, Britain and, by extension to the European Union countries and the United States. Beginning with the Kibaki administration (2003–13), however, Kenya has increasingly looked East to China in terms of its economic relations and sourcing of development loans. Although these relations between Kenya and China existed under President Moi when China helped with the construction of Nairobi's Nyayo National Stadium and the Moi Sports Complex in Kasarani, in Nairobi as well as the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, the relations picked up pace under President Mwai Kibaki and intensified under Uhuru Kenyatta, measured in terms of volume of amounts of development financing involved. The construction of the Thika Superhighway under Kibaki, and the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), and the Nairobi Expressway both under Uhuru Kenyatta, are three of the biggest projects financed by Chinese loans in Kenya.

This chapter examines the increasing role of China as Kenya's development financier and seeks to answer the question as to whether the partnership between the two countries is mutually beneficial or whether Kenya is increasingly being mortgaged to China in a new form of imperialism. The chapter begins with an exploration of the economic rise of China and its increasing interest in Africa. It then focuses on the theme of the country's development loans to Kenya, which have increased dramatically since the decade of the 2010s. The main argument of the chapter is that as an emerging global economic power characterized by tremendous economic growth over the last several decades particularly as a consequence of Deng Xiaoping's (1978–89) reforms, China's interest in Africa in general, and in Kenya in particular, is dictated by its voracious economic needs in the form of natural resources to feed its industries and markets for its industrial goods and burgeoning labor force as well as its strategic geopolitical ambitions. Being so, China's dealings with countries such as Kenya may not be as benign as they are made out to be. As pointed out in Chapter 4, foreign policies of states are planned and implemented with the sole purpose of advancing self-interest. Helping others is never the primary purpose of any country's foreign policy in their relations with others.

Introduction

Contemporary Kenya, like all the states of Africa save for Ethiopia and the island states, is a product of colonial imperialism. The landmark development in the formal colonization of Africa was the holding of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 when the continent was formally sliced up and shared by seven colonial powers as discussed in Chapter 1. Kenya was claimed by the British who officially declared it a British Protectorate in 1895 under the name “East African Protectorate.” Uganda had been declared a British Protectorate in 1894. To open the hinterland and connect it to the bustling Port of Mombasa, the British commenced the construction of a railway linking Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with Kisumu (then known as Port Florence) on Lake Victoria. Construction of the railway began in 1896 and was completed in 1901, spanning 965 kilometers. Although construction of this so-called Uganda Railway proceeded briskly, it was seriously interrupted and halted between March and August 1898 in the Taru Desert of Tsavo in present-day Taita Taveta County by two marauding lions nicknamed “Man Eaters of Tsavo” that terrorized Indian and African railway workers, killing 135 of them before they were finally killed by Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson after a nine-month period of horror among railway workers (Patterson 1985).

In 1902 the border between Kenya and Uganda was defined, making Kisumu and the area around Lake Victoria part of Kenya. In 1907, the British colonial administration moved from Mombasa to Nairobi. Three years later, in 1910, Nairobi became the official capital of Kenya, having been founded in 1899 as a railway depot. From 1895 to 1906, the protectorate was administered by a commissioner. Thereafter, the title changed to Governor, with Sir James Sadler as the first governor, having been preceded by three commissioners including Arthur Hardinge, Charles Eliot, and Donald Stewart (see Table 2.1). The country remained the East African Protectorate until July 1920 when it was declared the Crown Colony of Kenya. Among the most critical issues that defined the development of Kenya within this colonial context include the White settler demands, the Indian question, the land and labor issue, and the rise of anticolonial nationalism. This chapter explores these issues with a view to evaluating their impact in the making of contemporary Kenya.

Introduction

The fight for political independence in Kenya was waged on many fronts—the cultural, the social, the political, the economic, and the military—and by multiple social forces—individual and corporate, ethnic, and religious, as well as regional and trans-regional. Nevertheless, in spite of the multiple identity groups involved in the struggle for independence, they all found common ground in anticolonial nationalism and harnessed unity that mirrored the dictum; “we either hang together or are hanged separately.” The urgent sense of purpose on the part of these anticolonial nationalists was almost contagious. Yet, within the first decade of independence, the sense of unity and collective purpose irreparably atrophied, and, by the end of the decade, it had virtually died. More than six decades since independence, Kenya is much less of a nation than it was in 1963. The erstwhile objective of “nation-building” has largely been betrayed. This chapter sets out to probe, explore, and analyze this betrayal of anticolonial nationalism in Kenya, and evaluate its consequences for the future of the country. The chapter proceeds by focusing on the paradoxes inherent in the relationship between two political families—the Odingas and the Kenyattas—whose political dynamics have, to a large extent, defined what ought to have been and what actually is in the Kenyan body politic.

Kenyatta and Odinga: The Making of Two Nationalist Leaders

The Kenyattas and the Odingas are formidable political families that have had and continue to have a significant imprint on the politics of Kenya. Within the politics of decolonization, the patriarchs of these two families, Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga respectively, found common ground in their anticolonial nationalism within the ambit of the Kenya African National Union (KANU). The partnership between the two saw Kenyatta become the first president of independent Kenya and Oginga Odinga the first vice president. Yet this partnership did not last long on account of ideological differences between the two and their opposite visions of what independence ought to have signified. The two leaders fell out with each other within the first two years of Kenya's independence in a manner whose implications were profound for the new republic.

Introduction

As demonstrated in Chapter 3, Kenya emerged into independence in 1963 with a quasi-federalist multiparty political system with a two-chamber parliament at the national level. The system was rooted in a rigid constitution intended to ensure its entrenched provisions endured. By the end of the decade of the 1960s, however, multiparty politics was no more, the two Houses of parliament had been merged, the regional governments had been abolished, and the so-called radicals had been marginalized from the center of power. This calculated process of power consolidation saw political power centralized in the presidency resulting in bureaucratic authoritarianism overseen by an imperial presidency under Jomo Kenyatta (Chepkwony 1987; Nyong’o 1989). In achieving this, founding president Jomo Kenyatta was supported and encouraged by the United States, through the latter's first ambassador to Kenya, William Attwood.

In encouraging and supporting Kenyatta to marginalize the so-called radicals from the center of power, the United States was advancing its own interests in terms of fighting Communism. The likes of Oginga Odinga, Bildad Kaggia, and Joseph Murumbi, among others, were considered by the United States as socialist individuals who provided an opening wedge for the entry of Communism into Kenya. In a context in which the Cold War was heightening, the United States committed to steering Kenya away from the Eastern camp of the Soviet Union by all means. In doing so, the United States ended up abetting the establishment of authoritarianism in Kenya under the guise of fighting Communism. This chapter examines the role of the United States in helping Jomo Kenyatta fight the “Communist” elements in Kenya, consolidate his power, and thus inaugurate an authoritarian political dispensation in the country. It focuses on U.S. diplomatic practice in Kenya during the tenure of William Attwood, the first American ambassador to Kenya. The chapter then juxtaposes Attwood's diplomacy with that of Smith Hempstone who arrived in Kenya at the end of the Cold War, to illustrate the changing nature of American diplomacy toward Kenya even when its objective remained the same—advancing the American national self-interest.

Introduction

Colonialism may be defined as the imposition of one country's sovereignty over another country or countries beyond its own borders. The purpose of colonialism is usually to facilitate economic domination of the resources, labor, and markets of the colonized people for the benefit of the colonizing country. As a political phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism had its roots in the demographic and social dynamics spawned by the mechanization of agriculture and displacement of peasants through land consolidation; the process of urbanization; and an emerging atmosphere of religious intolerance in Europe, especially in England. These factors contributed to the migration that led to the colonization of the Americas (Canada and the United States of America), New Zealand, and Australia, among other areas.

Colonialism was further facilitated by the economic dynamics generated by the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution resulted in high productivity of industrial goods that could not be profitably disposed of at the national level. The high productivity in turn led to the near exhaustion of raw materials for industries in Europe, especially in England, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the so-called “factory of the world” during this era. Consequently, European nations began to acquire colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific to secure sources of raw materials and markets for their goods. With regard to Africa, these colonial ven-tures reached a crisis point in the early 1880s following stiff competition among rival colonial powers over competing claims in Africa leading to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which partitioned Africa between seven colonial powers—Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

In partitioning the continent among themselves, or what Belgium's King Leopold II referred to as “sharing the magnificent African cake,” France got the lion's share of Africa at 36 percent of the continent with Britain gaining 32 percent, though it had more colonies in number than France. Belgium and Germany each received 8 percent of the continent. Portugal gained 7 percent, Italy 5 percent, and Spain came in last with 1 percent of the continent under its colonial control. Three percent of the continent, comprising Liberia and Ethiopia, remained independent of European colonial domination.