I could as well have entitled my article: “Youth upraising in Kenya: Indicator of African awakening”.
East Africa is now moving in unison with West Africa. Southern Africa will be next. We can still forget North Africa, which beats at a geopolitical rhythm of a different kind: a buffer between Africa South of the Sahara (what they call Sub-Saharan Africa, not without a cynical meaning to it!) and an old, tired, colonially-rich European Continent that is afraid of the African population growth, but is covetous of the resources of Africa.
What is happening? A few weeks ago, an overwhelming majority of the young people in 35 of the 45 Counties of Kenya spontaneously stood up and went to the streets, to reject the 2024 Kenya Finance Bill under consideration in their Parliament, declaring it an unbearable aggravation of the growing economic oppression of the people by its own government. The rest of the dramatic events that are still unfolding in Kenya is public knowledge. This story is important throughout Africa because deep down, the message of the youth is much wider than is being reported, and I propose to summarize it as follows: the leadership of the country should ensure policies that firmly:
Refuse the instrumentalization and economic oppression of (more than Kenya) Africa[1].
Reject the continued colonization of Africa as a foreign project.
Do not allow national institutions to collaborate with international financial institutions in maintaining the project that wishes to perpetuate Africa as: divided, subdued, underdeveloped, a colonial resource warehouse.[2]
In that sense, I wish to seize this political mo(ve)ment to offer to our leaders, and perhaps even to non-African readers, a few reflections of my own on how to read the Continent moving forward. Dismissing this historical youth contestation moment would be at risk and peril of governance, international relations and peace. The youth will continue to remain the most important constituency in Africa. In fact, that is the fear of Europe: the African population growth (the terrifying youth bulge that Europe keeps repeating).
We must acknowledge that the youth of today understand much better than their parents the place and role that Africa is being forced to remain into, in the current global order. It is this situation that the youth in Mali, Burkina and Niger have understood and are challenging. It is this situation that the Kenyan youth have understood and are willing to cha(lle)nge. In West Africa, the French colonial system and the entire western dominance are being challenged by a militarized youth. In Kenya, the youth does not have those military powers because the country has always been kept under firm control by European and American capital, buttressed by a British and American military presence, and a continuous flow of capital that makes Kenya unable to exercise full sovereignty: an oppression reinforced by the deceptive repetitive discourse of electoral democracy. Kenya itself has shown that elections just entrench existing minority monopoly interests and systematically exclude the people. Suffice it to recall the stalemate after the election of President Ruto, or the 2007 electoral violence that displaced hundreds of thousands and thousands of lives were lost.
Kenya remains a colonial project, aided by a political elite that has been systematically coopted into the western model of governance. The youth are rejecting this. President Ruto is but an actor that upset a balance that was already excessively tilted. His own excesses are just a continuation of previous policies of the same minority. Let us see just some of them, without entering into the issues such as the killing of the Mumias sugar project to allow politicians to dominate the importation of sugar, or the bags of imported fertilizers filled with sand and sold to poor farmers, or still, the authorization of entry into Kenya of GMOs, which includes genetically-engineered self-sterilizing seeds that prevent seed multiplication, stealing the space of local seeds, and slowly leading the country into food slavery[3]. Through the market monopoly of seed patenting. Etc.
President Ruto himself continued a policy of exclusion of political opponents from public office while thanking his supporters with important government portfolios, annulment of running criminal cases running in the courts against these supporters, and proceeded to create:
The office of the First Lady, who proceeded to use public funds to invite Benny Hinn, an American Christian televangelist preacher, to travel to Kenya and promote his proselytizing;
The office of the spouse of the Deputy President;
The office of the spouse of the Prime Cabinet Secretary.
Today, Kenya is a country with $80 billion of public debt, representing 70% of the national GDP (there are worse cases such as Mozambique, with a debt that is bigger than its entire GDP[4]). These situations, in Kenya or in Mozambique, result in huge youth unemployment. How does President Ruto formulate the solution? He negotiates for 250,000 jobs per year, to allow him to export his youth, in the hope of increasing remittances back to the country. He finds these solutions mostly in the Gulf Countries, precisely where the African is looked at and treated as a slave. Many of these African migrant labourers have been killed and many more live in slave-like conditions. That is where a leader proposes to send his people!
To oversimplify the issue: Exporting a youth employment problem because for one, there is not enough land in the country to go round, is tantamount to making unemployment extra-territorial, by exporting the problem, on the hope that that can result in the importation of a solution. While western corporations grab land through the false pretense of expanding nature conservation, huge export crop farms are in the hands of foreigners, and a few local politicians use public office to participate in land accumulation: the Kenyatta family retains more than 500,000 acres of land, president Ruto has more than 21,500 acres of land, and the list can go on. So, the productive carrying capacity of the land does no longer respond to a growing population and has been exhausted already. As I said, it is an oversimplification but an indicator of the depth of issues.
The youth may not have said it in so many words, but their movement expresses a fear that the country may be lost to foreign interests as an enterprise. The British military presence of the colonial times has never been completely removed, the Americans continue present militarily and are reinforcing their presence in Wajir. The Finance Bill was designed to weaken further the national fabric so as to facilitate the capture of Kenya. The youth are refusing that 55 million people should continue to remain impoverished by less than 1,000 rich Kenyan politicians.
Meanwhile, counter discourses are multiplying, some even trying to trivialize the huge youth demonstrations as foreign-funded, first blamed on Russians (and what next?).
Of course, someone has induced President Ruto into overreaching and overvaluing himself. We have seen Ruto’s public and international profile rise, in part a strategy to place himself as a youth leader (does the phrase “Young African Leadership Programme” sound familiar and can the reader trace the origin of this discourse?). Through high-profile conferences shoved onto Kenya, his being invited to events with no apparent relation to his national or regional role, such as the G7 (where Africa would be represented by the African Union, now a member), his highly publicized official visit to the United States (a country that did not receive official visits from Africa in the last sixteen years or so), and the elevation of his country to the status of non-military ally of NATO. His own effort at being the African spokesperson on environment and carbon trading.
It is perhaps in foreign policy where most of his blunders became visible outside Kenya. These we relate more closely with. Recently Kenya seemed to operate foreign policy reversals[5] including on the war in Gaza and the genocide against the Palestinian people[6], the trade go-it-alone with the EU and US, leaving behind other East African Community countries, a group to which it belongs. And above all, accepting to be the instrument of US policy in another African country, Haiti.
And his double-speak: while he decried “why so many African Presidents should be ferried in a bus to go meet one European gentleman?[7]”, the next thing we witness is his very public participation in such similarly demeaning group protocols. Our leaders (the whole continent) participating in group in meetings with one counterpart leader of another country outside of Africa is disrespect for the African peoples. By accepting to be grouped into one protocol, such participation means that our Presidents overlook or do not realize (all of them?) that the protocol dispensed to them is not for their personal importance, but for the peoples they represent.
CENTRAL THEME: LEADERSHIP IS NO CHIEFTANSHIP
Let me preface my conclusion with a minuscule anecdote. I have lived in Switzerland and one major treat I gave to myself was the decision to buy a $450 Tissot precision watch in 2004. By any African standards, this amount for a watch is huge. I still have it. What does a $500,000 watch do that a $500 equally Swiss watch does not do?
With this digression, I wish to underline a prevailing mental inferiority complex that affects our chiefs and which is compensated with the compulsive accumulation of luxury items (cars, clothes, watches and villas in Europe and Dubai). A thousand people thriving where more than fifty-five million Kenyans (or Mozambicans, or…) are living in misery, children studying under trees, even in the capital, and wading through floods to reach their school, only to find that there are no desks to sit on. Meanwhile, rare wood is being actively exported to China!
Our political chiefs everywhere in Africa have not factored demographics in their policy priorities. Not only are we growing as a national population, but also we are affecting changes in the demographic patterns: those presidents of old, originating from the heroic history of national liberation are gone and are going. They felt entitled to the fruits of their sacrifice by imposing themselves as rulers, enriched themselves and their families. Their children are invariably arrogant and self-entitled, rich entrepreneurs without the experience but with an obscure easy access to the finances of the countries ruled by their fathers. The servant of the people has thus become the suzerain, with such huge tracts of national land holdings, they can no longer begin to know how much. Like Kenya, my country is no exception.
In the process, they have planted in other opposition political aspirants the same desire for land and resource grabs, personal aggrandizement and family enrichment. The perfect environment for breeding a group of mediocre politicians seeking public office for enrichment, five years at a time. The opposition is therefore learning from the people in power how to perfect the plunder of national resources, in the form of corruption or PPP. Both ruling and opposition have set aside the social contract with the people, the foundation of the power they display in parliament or in public office. They hardly recognize or accept that the Social Contract acknowledges the right of the people to revolt against the power, if the contract is not being fulfilled to the satisfaction of this sovereign.
That is how to characterize President Ruto: he has consolidated his political basis as Minister of Agriculture, during which time his story is less than exemplary; then there was the 2007 election crisis, his alliance with President Kenyata being the stepping stone to his personal presidential ambitions, now realized.
I need to insist on the Politics of exclusion that can be observed in many African countries, whereby political and ideological differences have become criteria for exclusion of citizens from employment, from credit facility, from material support, and a basis for punishment and public banishment to remote rural areas of perceived opposition in public services.
Leadership includes understanding the demographic evolution of the country one has battled to lead: Sixty or fifty years down the independence road, our leaders do not seem to have planned about demographic growth: in Kenya, the leadership is now rudely awakened to a youth force, and is being told, as if they never knew, that spatial development, service outreach, and infrastructure development have not taken into account population growing needs. Still, it is public knowledge that populations grow all the time. In Kenya, an average population growth of 1.99% per year, in Mozambique a growth of 2.8% per year! That growth requires forecasting infrastructure expansion, spatial management and human resources development to deal efficiently and qualitatively with the needs of education, health and other human services. A school without teachers, a health centre without the trained personnel are not indicators of development. They are instead an indictment of the quality of leadership.
Let me open here another bracket to digress a bit: Reciprocity in international relations is a major theme that we cannot begin to unpack in this article, but if Africa should establish its space in the context of current relations between Continents and between nations, then one major issue of leadership will necessarily be the need to start treating other continents and countries in a reciprocal way, until they understand that we are equally deserving of respect. We should not be instruments of other continents’ policies while we impose none of our own, including on migration, a theme that I have developed in my Blogsite[8]. Borders should not be closed one direction, and open in the opposite direction.
In summary, a new form of political management is necessary: the renewal of the compact between the leaders and the led. For the latter, sovereignty is a national priority, and the presence of foreign military bases, foreign forces refusing to leave Africa and spread throughout the Continent are a current and future threat to the independence of our countries and to the control of our own resources. As stated by several voices, we are not poor, we are empoverished. In addition, there is an attempt at forcing us into accepting foreign cultures through the universalization of western values, with the support of their institutions and NGOs established among us.
The Youth demands are clear: services, and jobs and a dignified life. Our resources for us first. A new model of negotiation: for instance, how much of the gas in Mozambique should benefit the people of Mozambique, and in particular of Cabo Delgado. And how much, by natural justice, should the investor benefit, since he put in money and expertise? A new type of negotiations should be adopted, where the people are the overriding consideration. That should be how resource sovereignty should be exercised. Because the youth is a growing service demand. Today, in Mozambique for instance, the youth (upper age of 44) represents 87.6% of the 33.4 million people[9]. Although quite frankly, a 55 year person is still youth for me. Ignore such a percentage at the leaders’ own peril. Understanding this is acknowledging that there is need for a new approach to the economy. Kenya or Mozambique. Or any other African country.
Another critical area of leadership includes how to manage national external debt in a manner that does not penalize the 55 million people in Kenya while enriching the less than thousand already rich people. And why, why can Africa not adopt a new economic model where we can live without an oppressive foreign debt in the medium term?
Leadership is also about recognizing false solutions that only serve to entertain, prolong and entrench poverty in the name of pro-poor programmes. For instance, school feeding programmes have been the widespread solution to increasing school attendance, an effort to realize the right to universal access to basic education. And when school-feeding is suspended for financial reasons, school attendance drops dramatically in any country in Africa. To be sustainable, school feeding needs to be indigenous, not a charity sustained by foreign funding. It needs to be assumed by governments and not left to foreign organizations and NGOs! These programmes, ill-conceived and structured to the exclusion of local resources and capacity building for their continuity, further entrench dependency, including a pathetically colonial grateful mentality.
Kenya is one of the most organized governance machineries in Africa and the Kenya youth represent a human, social and economic force that commands respect. They proved that they can take over Parliament and shake the establishment. While we hope that the youth do not exceed themselves, and do not allow political opportunists to hijack the movement to bring down a legitimately elected government, governments across Africa will do well to learn the lesson. The following are a few of the themes I would propose for deep urgent reflection:
Exclusion, impact of the elite in the management of public resources.
The official who sought to serve the people but soon after being elected became self-appointed suzerain to which even the judiciary must bow.
Foreign debt as an instrument of the continuation of the colonial project, through local chiefs that are entertained by foreign capital.
How do we protect sovereignty if the election of our office-bearers is financed by foreign money? (can we say “no thank you, keep your money because the leaders we want to elect are to pursue our priorities, not yours”?). A few countries could start by rejecting foreign financing of their elections.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are now joined, although in a different form, by Kenya, and all four countries represent a lesson for us all[10]. A lesson built over the course of more than sixty years of independence, for which there is little to show.
Unfortunately, there is no liberation without blood being shed. And foreign interests have understood this and have been positioning themselves militarily in our Continent for that[11].
Jose
Tete, July 2024
[3] https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2023/10/science-wins-as-kenyan-court-dismisses-landmark-case-against-gmos/#:~:text=Kenya%20is%20now%20free%20to,the%20environment%20or%20human%20health.
[4] https://www.worldeconomics.com/GrossDomesticProduct/Debt-to-GDP-Ratio/Mozambique.aspx#:~:text=GDP%20in%20Mozambique%20is%20offically,debt%20level%20is%20%2417%20Billion. of course, we still need to change our economic standards and indicators, as the nomenclature “GDP” hides the fact that most of the important production actually does not stay in the country, while the debt does.
[6] https://theconversation.com/whats-east-africas-position-on-the-israel-hamas-war-an-expert-unpacks-the-reactions-of-kenya-tanzania-and-uganda-218097
[7] https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/news/east-africa-news/kenyan-president-ruto-defends-summit-trips-he-once-criticised-4509168
[11] https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2017/02/15/updated-rough-guide-foreign-military-bases-africa
Comments