Source: @snrgoodman on X
by Wandia Njoya and Mordecai Ogada
On the first anniversary of the protests against the Finance Bill and the storming of Parliament, we cannot help being struck by the reality that Kenya was at this same point it was 30 years ago.
Thirty years ago, we who were in our twenties were facing the same circumstances. The elites had become wealthy from doing business with the government, which they gave themselves the license to do through the Ndegwa report of 1971. They had rigidly stifled dissent, exiled and persecuted people of faith and ideas, massacred whole communities, and in the 90s, were stifling the voices of an emerging generation whose economic prospects were being crushed by SAPs from IMF and World Bank, and who were being broken by an AIDS pandemic with no treatment at the time.
On the first anniversary of the protests against the Finance Bill and the storming of Parliament, we cannot help being struck by the reality that Kenya was at this same point it was 30 years ago.
Thirty years ago, we who were in our twenties were facing the same circumstances. The elites had become wealthy from doing business with the government, which they gave themselves the license to do through the Ndegwa report of 1971. They had rigidly stifled dissent, exiled and persecuted people of faith and ideas, massacred whole communities, and in the 90s, were stifling the voices of an emerging generation whose economic prospects were being crushed by SAPs from IMF and World Bank, and who were being broken by an AIDS pandemic with no treatment at the time.
In this decade, young Kenyans are facing similar circumstances. The economy is completely hostile to production of any sort, and crushes innovation that emerges from the people, after which the state implements a bastardized version of that creativity through “policy” or “startups.” This behavior is inevitable in a country governed by a wealthy elite that has no innovation or achievement to its name, and that uses police violence to cover up its shame and emptiness. Meanwhile, Kenyans suffer from the ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of Structural Adjustment Programs from the IMF and World Bank, in the name of paying back debts whose borrowing Kenyans had actively campaigned against.
When one generation faces the very same dynamics that their parents faced 30 years ago, and is facing a deaf government like their parents did 30 years ago, and is paying loans to the same sharks which destroyed its economy 30 years ago, it is no longer enough to speak the usual language of listening to the youth and seeking dialogue. We’ve been here before, calling for police restraint, and for respect of the judiciary and human rights. Clearly, those calls have not worked. Therefore, the next question we must ask is “why are we still here after 30 years?”
We are here because, as Patrick Gathara once said, Kenya has “tried everything except reform the 'systematic patterns of thought' that generated the repressive and kleptocratic regimes of the last five decades, patterns of thought that find their genesis in the attitudes and divisions of the half century of colonial rule that preceded them..” For the last three decades, a generation that fought for, and finally won a people-initiated constitution, has said that the problems of Kenya go beyond respect for the rule of law and for the three arms of the state. There are underlying beliefs, economic practices and structural issues that are blocking Kenya from leaving its colonial legacy behind once and for all.
That generation, relying on the legacy of its elders, examined everything from the way we built our roads, to the way we managed our environment, the way we produced popular culture, the way we educated our children, the way we grew our food and stored our seeds, the way we managed our water, and even the way we expressed our religious faith. But at every front, we came up with the same verdict: our practices and institutions are solidly colonial. However, the political elite would not use the knowledge from us, people who were trained by the resources of Kenya. Instead, the government subjected us to the humiliation of watching experts from the West, many times less educated, knowledgeable and experienced than us, having access to government offices, crafting government policy, and supervising us in patronizing workshops and public participation meetings, in the name of “international standards” and a plethora of harebrained “startups.”
In other words, we are where we are, with our youth having no job prospects and no meaningful social life, shouting at a tone deaf government, because Kenyan institutions have remained solidly colonial and have stagnated, blocking Kenyans from building their own country.
We therefore have to say more than the insipid calls of the Western embassies on the state to respect human rights and to embrace dialogue with the youth. We are taking the next step from where our parents left off 30 years ago, and questioning the international actors responsible for Kenya’s stagnation. Just like colonialism was not a local effort, the maintenance of the colonial structure 60 years after independence cannot be said to be exclusively local.
It is no longer sufficient to draw balance sheets and calculations to figure out how the international loan sharks, IMF and World Bank, have kept us in this mess. Especially not after the revelations about USAID under the Trump administration confirmed what we had always known: there are deliberate efforts to sabotage African economies. We knew it from the days when Nkrumah wrote about neo-colonialism, or when we read about John Perkins’s experience as an “economic hitman,” or from the work of several political economists like Dambisa Moyo, Thandika Mkandawire, François Xavier-Verschave and Michael Hudson. But now we got the confirmation from the heart of Washington itself. Africa’s plight is not of its doing alone.
Because of these international actors, we cannot help but tie the economic mess in Kenya to what is happening elsewhere on the continent, from Somalia to Sudan to Congo to Nigeria. It cannot be a coincidence that Kenyans are experiencing the same shadowy convulsions of their economies as other African countries, accompanied by a concerted effort to control what Africans know and the conversations which Africans have. It is not lost on us that Nairobi is the hub for international media houses in the region, and that foreign embassies, donor organizations and corporations have made a concerted effort to manage our journalists and our education systems. Meanwhile, our home grown media like African Stream and journalists like David Hundeyin are singled out for shut down and smear campaigns.
We have no option but to conclude that this 30-year cycle of social implosion is deliberately instigated by the institutions masquerading as financial. What is really happening is that Africa – and Kenya in this case – is being reset the way it was 30 years ago. Any innovations, possibilities of industrialization, from a youthful generation which the global oligarchs can’t stop yapping about, are being smashed by these so called economic reforms. This maneuvering forces the youth to fight their way into the economy, and those who manage to scrape by are forced to begin from ground zero, as the West singles out a few young Africans to train to become the next predatory African elite. We will recall that the political career of Ruto was incubated in the same way, when he was involved in the Youth for KANU 1992 whose goal was to crush dissent against Moi.
These structural adjustment programs are not simply about finance. They are a social reset. Every 30 years, imperialism destroys whatever little that African countries have managed to scrape through with blood, sweat and tears, so that the next generation of youth start from ground zero as if the previous generation did nothing. In this way, imperialism ensures that the accumulated knowledge of the generation that was on the streets 30 years ago is severed from the generation on the streets now. This rupture is made complete by the media that is runs a concerted campaign telling the same youth that their salvation lies in artificial intelligence instead of knowledge.
And the Kenyan elite, in their hubris, pursue the same myopia by increasing bureaucracy and taxes to ensure that anyone who wants to innovate, who wants to join a profession, who wants to receive an education, has to wade through a higher mountain of paperwork and digital apps. In every sector, the Kenyan state tells Kenyans that no one can grow, work or produce without first kissing the ring of politicians, bureaucrats and security officers. The government would rather shut down businesses than give them a grace period to pay taxes (or bribes for that matter).
The poisoned chalice with which we are serving this the pacifier is referred to as “communication”. It has permeated every sector of our society and become our favorite substitute for justice. When our youth smell the putrefaction of our society, we suddenly have a wave of clergy, politicians and ‘elders’ lining up to “talk” to them instead of doing right by them. When parents start sensing that they are getting short shrift from the failed education system, schools convene parents’ meetings and ‘talk’ to them about their shortcomings as parents and deflect their attention from the injustices they and their progeny face. It is even entrenched in our 2010 constitution as “public participation”, poisoning policy processes and normalizing the imposition of all manner of injustice, as long as it has been through ‘public participation’.
Philosophically the ‘public participation’ is abusive, because it presumes consent. Is there any member of the public for instance, who approves of a punitive tax? Or an eviction of a community to make room for a random government project? Participation is not discourse, and should never be construed as such in a civilized society. Even with our troubles now, an innocent person gets killed in police cells, the top politicians immediately call his father to “talk” rather than prevent the extrajudicial killings. When the youth plan a protest in memory of their lost colleagues, what does the interior ministry do? They declare their preparedness to meet and “talk” with the affected families. We have the dubious distinction of being one of the only countries on earth to turn a basic function of human civilization- communication into a lethal toxin and an ingredient of violence.
This is the global landscape that young Kenyans, with nothing but courage and conviction, are confronting. Their calls for Ruto to resign go beyond the man to attacking the root of an entire political and bureaucratic elite who just don’t get it. Kenyan elites do not see any problem with our economy; they consider the people as the problem which is bedeviling the economy. And the elites genuinely believe that eating cake, or digitizing cake, is the solution to Kenyans having no bread to eat.
Africa must realize that the source of our destabilization is one: a global system that keeps resetting our economies and putting in place an incoherent, rigid elite that cannot lead their countries forward, but will stay in power until they progressively shrivel in the public eye, or until the next generation of youth forces them out. These kinds of inter-generational transitions are violent and humiliating for the entire societies. They distort the dignity of knowledge, aging and wisdom. They make the older generations entrenched in power mimic the youth and as they atrophy. In the process, older elites make our youth disparage knowledge, wisdom and age, only for them to later on become the monsters they once despised.
It is said that a civilization is where one generation plants trees under whose shade it will never sit. But in Africa, each generation plants trees, and just when the trees are about to become the shade under which the next generation sits, structural adjustment cuts down the trees, and then tells the next generation to plant more trees and sit in the hot sun while waiting for the trees to grow. In Kenya, this reset has been done to our healthcare system, our education system, and pun not intended, even to the forest trees themselves!
And this is the cycle to which the west has subjected Africa for the last five centuries. It has crushed every generation with slavery, then colonialism, then neocolonialism, then structural adjustment, and at each stage replaced the aging insipid, decadent elite with a youthful, freshly trained one. And after all that, the West has the audacity to instruct us on how to develop.
The youth of Kenya have rightly understood that Kenya’s current political and bureaucratic elite are incapable of understanding, let alone delivering, an end to the stalemate that has blocked the youth from assuming their rightful roles in society. But as always, Western embassies are meddling on behalf of the insipid Kenyan elite, presumably giving instructions on how to manage protests through lame statements on human rights, and inviting the Kenyan youth to see which of them can take over from old guard.
That is how Kenyan society has operated since the 1960s when the British planned the Kenyan civil service before independence, and American foundations constructed our higher education and wrote our economic plans. Since then, every generation transition is decided in the Bretton Woods institutions and managed by embassies here. That is why Kenyan politicians and top bureaucrats have no qualms citing Dutch and American police professionalism at us, clearly unaware of the violent record of the police, especially in the US, that sparked of the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide. Or journalists are more concerned about Kenya's reputation among Western nations than about whether Kenya serves us.
Sixty years later, the formula of depending on the West to manage Kenyan social transitions is wearing thin. Kenya does not need to rely on Western “partners” and benevolent local politicians for “development.” We want to grow our country ourselves. With our own brains and muscles. Our young people have gone to school, they have the energy, knowledge and ideas to put to work. And most of all, they have the commitment. Only Kenyans can decide what’s best for Kenya. Only Kenyans can build Kenya. The people SHALL.
When one generation faces the very same dynamics that their parents faced 30 years ago, and is facing a deaf government like their parents did 30 years ago, and is paying loans to the same sharks which destroyed its economy 30 years ago, it is no longer enough to speak the usual language of listening to the youth and seeking dialogue. We’ve been here before, calling for police restraint, and for respect of the judiciary and human rights. Clearly, those calls have not worked. Therefore, the next question we must ask is “why are we still here after 30 years?”
We are here because, as Patrick Gathara once said, Kenya has “tried everything except reform the 'systematic patterns of thought' that generated the repressive and kleptocratic regimes of the last five decades, patterns of thought that find their genesis in the attitudes and divisions of the half century of colonial rule that preceded them..” For the last three decades, a generation that fought for, and finally won a people-initiated constitution, has said that the problems of Kenya go beyond respect for the rule of law and for the three arms of the state. There are underlying beliefs, economic practices and structural issues that are blocking Kenya from leaving its colonial legacy behind once and for all.
That generation, relying on the legacy of its elders, examined everything from the way we built our roads, to the way we managed our environment, the way we produced popular culture, the way we educated our children, the way we grew our food and stored our seeds, the way we managed our water, and even the way we expressed our religious faith. But at every front, we came up with the same verdict: our practices and institutions are solidly colonial. However, the political elite would not use the knowledge from us, people who were trained by the resources of Kenya. Instead, the government subjected us to the humiliation of watching experts from the West, many times less educated, knowledgeable and experienced than us, having access to government offices, crafting government policy, and supervising us in patronizing workshops and public participation meetings, in the name of “international standards” and a plethora of harebrained “startups.”
In other words, we are where we are, with our youth having no job prospects and no meaningful social life, shouting at a tone deaf government, because Kenyan institutions have remained solidly colonial and have stagnated, blocking Kenyans from building their own country.
We therefore have to say more than the insipid calls of the Western embassies on the state to respect human rights and to embrace dialogue with the youth. We are taking the next step from where our parents left off 30 years ago, and questioning the international actors responsible for Kenya’s stagnation. Just like colonialism was not a local effort, the maintenance of the colonial structure 60 years after independence cannot be said to be exclusively local.
It is no longer sufficient to draw balance sheets and calculations to figure out how the international loan sharks, IMF and World Bank, have kept us in this mess. Especially not after the revelations about USAID under the Trump administration confirmed what we had always known: there are deliberate efforts to sabotage African economies. We knew it from the days when Nkrumah wrote about neo-colonialism, or when we read about John Perkins’s experience as an “economic hitman,” or from the work of several political economists like Dambisa Moyo, Thandika Mkandawire, François Xavier-Verschave and Michael Hudson. But now we got the confirmation from the heart of Washington itself. Africa’s plight is not of its doing alone.
Because of these international actors, we cannot help but tie the economic mess in Kenya to what is happening elsewhere on the continent, from Somalia to Sudan to Congo to Nigeria. It cannot be a coincidence that Kenyans are experiencing the same shadowy convulsions of their economies as other African countries, accompanied by a concerted effort to control what Africans know and the conversations which Africans have. It is not lost on us that Nairobi is the hub for international media houses in the region, and that foreign embassies, donor organizations and corporations have made a concerted effort to manage our journalists and our education systems. Meanwhile, our home grown media like African Stream and journalists like David Hundeyin are singled out for shut down and smear campaigns.
We have no option but to conclude that this 30-year cycle of social implosion is deliberately instigated by the institutions masquerading as financial. What is really happening is that Africa – and Kenya in this case – is being reset the way it was 30 years ago. Any innovations, possibilities of industrialization, from a youthful generation which the global oligarchs can’t stop yapping about, are being smashed by these so called economic reforms. This maneuvering forces the youth to fight their way into the economy, and those who manage to scrape by are forced to begin from ground zero, as the West singles out a few young Africans to train to become the next predatory African elite. We will recall that the political career of Ruto was incubated in the same way, when he was involved in the Youth for KANU 1992 whose goal was to crush dissent against Moi.
These structural adjustment programs are not simply about finance. They are a social reset. Every 30 years, imperialism destroys whatever little that African countries have managed to scrape through with blood, sweat and tears, so that the next generation of youth start from ground zero as if the previous generation did nothing. In this way, imperialism ensures that the accumulated knowledge of the generation that was on the streets 30 years ago is severed from the generation on the streets now. This rupture is made complete by the media that is runs a concerted campaign telling the same youth that their salvation lies in artificial intelligence instead of knowledge.
And the Kenyan elite, in their hubris, pursue the same myopia by increasing bureaucracy and taxes to ensure that anyone who wants to innovate, who wants to join a profession, who wants to receive an education, has to wade through a higher mountain of paperwork and digital apps. In every sector, the Kenyan state tells Kenyans that no one can grow, work or produce without first kissing the ring of politicians, bureaucrats and security officers. The government would rather shut down businesses than give them a grace period to pay taxes (or bribes for that matter).
The poisoned chalice with which we are serving this the pacifier is referred to as “communication”. It has permeated every sector of our society and become our favorite substitute for justice. When our youth smell the putrefaction of our society, we suddenly have a wave of clergy, politicians and ‘elders’ lining up to “talk” to them instead of doing right by them. When parents start sensing that they are getting short shrift from the failed education system, schools convene parents’ meetings and ‘talk’ to them about their shortcomings as parents and deflect their attention from the injustices they and their progeny face. It is even entrenched in our 2010 constitution as “public participation”, poisoning policy processes and normalizing the imposition of all manner of injustice, as long as it has been through ‘public participation’.
Philosophically the ‘public participation’ is abusive, because it presumes consent. Is there any member of the public for instance, who approves of a punitive tax? Or an eviction of a community to make room for a random government project? Participation is not discourse, and should never be construed as such in a civilized society. Even with our troubles now, an innocent person gets killed in police cells, the top politicians immediately call his father to “talk” rather than prevent the extrajudicial killings. When the youth plan a protest in memory of their lost colleagues, what does the interior ministry do? They declare their preparedness to meet and “talk” with the affected families. We have the dubious distinction of being one of the only countries on earth to turn a basic function of human civilization- communication into a lethal toxin and an ingredient of violence.
This is the global landscape that young Kenyans, with nothing but courage and conviction, are confronting. Their calls for Ruto to resign go beyond the man to attacking the root of an entire political and bureaucratic elite who just don’t get it. Kenyan elites do not see any problem with our economy; they consider the people as the problem which is bedeviling the economy. And the elites genuinely believe that eating cake, or digitizing cake, is the solution to Kenyans having no bread to eat.
Africa must realize that the source of our destabilization is one: a global system that keeps resetting our economies and putting in place an incoherent, rigid elite that cannot lead their countries forward, but will stay in power until they progressively shrivel in the public eye, or until the next generation of youth forces them out. These kinds of inter-generational transitions are violent and humiliating for the entire societies. They distort the dignity of knowledge, aging and wisdom. They make the older generations entrenched in power mimic the youth and as they atrophy. In the process, older elites make our youth disparage knowledge, wisdom and age, only for them to later on become the monsters they once despised.
It is said that a civilization is where one generation plants trees under whose shade it will never sit. But in Africa, each generation plants trees, and just when the trees are about to become the shade under which the next generation sits, structural adjustment cuts down the trees, and then tells the next generation to plant more trees and sit in the hot sun while waiting for the trees to grow. In Kenya, this reset has been done to our healthcare system, our education system, and pun not intended, even to the forest trees themselves!
And this is the cycle to which the west has subjected Africa for the last five centuries. It has crushed every generation with slavery, then colonialism, then neocolonialism, then structural adjustment, and at each stage replaced the aging insipid, decadent elite with a youthful, freshly trained one. And after all that, the West has the audacity to instruct us on how to develop.
The youth of Kenya have rightly understood that Kenya’s current political and bureaucratic elite are incapable of understanding, let alone delivering, an end to the stalemate that has blocked the youth from assuming their rightful roles in society. But as always, Western embassies are meddling on behalf of the insipid Kenyan elite, presumably giving instructions on how to manage protests through lame statements on human rights, and inviting the Kenyan youth to see which of them can take over from old guard.
That is how Kenyan society has operated since the 1960s when the British planned the Kenyan civil service before independence, and American foundations constructed our higher education and wrote our economic plans. Since then, every generation transition is decided in the Bretton Woods institutions and managed by embassies here. That is why Kenyan politicians and top bureaucrats have no qualms citing Dutch and American police professionalism at us, clearly unaware of the violent record of the police, especially in the US, that sparked of the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide. Or journalists are more concerned about Kenya's reputation among Western nations than about whether Kenya serves us.
Sixty years later, the formula of depending on the West to manage Kenyan social transitions is wearing thin. Kenya does not need to rely on Western “partners” and benevolent local politicians for “development.” We want to grow our country ourselves. With our own brains and muscles. Our young people have gone to school, they have the energy, knowledge and ideas to put to work. And most of all, they have the commitment. Only Kenyans can decide what’s best for Kenya. Only Kenyans can build Kenya. The people SHALL.
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