Boris Johnson’s new mandate in the UK feels increasingly familiar. There is a pattern between governments in Kenya, US and the UK. It’s the politics of the single issue.

From ICC, to MAGA (Make America Great Again) to CBC, to Brexit to huduma namba, and to BBI, all instances unite in politicians are hoodwinking citizens on single issues that camouflage multiple reforms that will destroy social services and suppress citizens’ rights. And these reforms are all linked to the interests of mostly Anglo-Saxon billionaires.

ICC was made the pet issue by Kenya’s current president during his 2013 campaign, and it was on the advice of a British PR company. Muigai’s supporters, especially from the Kikuyu community, were hoodwinked into believing that voting for ICC suspects was voting against imperialism. The irony was that the strategy came from imperialists.

Brexit is the same as MAGA. It is about gutting down environmental protections, protecting zero contract hours for workers, austerity and tax breaks for the 0.1%. The British were told lies that the EU caused all that, and the Remain campaign was too weak in countering those lies. That has meant that the conversation has been so dominated by Brexit, that by the time Labour tried to talk about the real issues, it was too late.

It is now fairly well accepted in public discourse outside Kikuyu-land that the rates of alcoholism and suicide among Kikuyu men are related to the soul pact which the Kikuyu community have signed since 1969 to keep the Kenyattas in power. It is a phenomenon that brings a lot of bitterness in the rest of the country, especially in the communities that have most recently suffered large scale state violence, such as that was witnessed in Kibra and Kisumu in 2017 as Kenyans protested the rigged election of Muigai Kenyatta.
 
The extremely slow realization that the Kikuyu are getting isolated from the rest of Kenya has started to produce a literature in which it is explained that the Kikuyu have acknowledged the mistake they made in supporting Muigai in 2017.

he persistence of the Kenyan politicians in discussing who might win the presidency in 2022 is part of a larger hegemonic tactic of narrowing the Kenyan national consciousness to the future. This narrow national view has been internalized so much by the Kenyan public, that we have developed a vocabulary of abuse against anyone who tries talk about where Kenya has come from and where it is now.

This narrow obsession with the future is not new. During colonial times, we Africans were promised "civilization" if we adopted European cultures, and "heaven" if we worshipped the European god. After independence, we were promised "development" if we did what IMF and World Bank said.  Today, we are still promised development by the current president on condition that Kenyans refrain from all political discussions.

The history of Kenya is a story of distracting the people of Kenya from fundamental economic reforms that would allow the Kenyan people to participate in their economy and have institutions that serve Kenyans, rather than serve the interests of Western capital and its local caretakers in government. The latest referendum push led by Raila Odinga, against our will, despite claiming otherwise, is just the latest installment in scuttling economic and social reforms.

And yet, Raila's insistence on a referendum to restructure political power is, strangely, a fulfillment of his father's Jaramogi Oginga Odinga's principles. Until this week, I held onto the romantic notion that Jaramogi was interested in fundamental social reform, and was opposed to the capitalist and feudal accumulation of wealth by the Kinyatta family and their fellow ethnic elites. That was until I stumbled about the work of Nicola Swainson, author of The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya, 1918-1977. I now understand what Julius Malema calls the "arrangement" of Kenya, very differently from before.

To understand the Jaramogi paradox, one must first go back to what happened with colonialism and independence.

​In the last few days, in the run up of the repeat “election” that takes place today, the business community has gone full throttle in bombarding Kenyans with the idea that the elections have cost the economy too much. The latest in this messaging came from the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, which released a statement saying that 700bn shillings have been lost over the last four months. In other words, democracy is too expensive for Africans.

​Similarly, it is clear that the US, its embassy and media, have taken the side of the current government, although with less subtlety than the business community. The US Ambassador’s statements, for example, suggest that Kenyans should not set a high standard for Kenya’s electoral body, and instead be grateful that we’ve come this far in the democratic process.