[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Bill Fletcher on Kenya

[Patrick Bond]

Flames in Kenya

By Bill Fletcher

January 10, 2008, The Black Commentator

http://www.blackcommentator.com/259/259_cover_african_world_flames_in_kenya.html

The recent elections and post-election riots in Kenya bring
forward great sorrow and also give one pause.  Is this
another situation where Africans tear each other apart, one
may ask?  How is it that people who have lived next to one
another can go after each other in what appears to be the
wink of an eye?

As odd as it may sound, I found myself, in reading about the
Kenya crisis, thinking about an episode from Rod Serling's
legendary TV series The Twilight Zone.  The episode is called
'The Monsters are due on Maple Street' and it involves a
power failure in a neighborhood that cuts the community off
from the outside world and is completely inexplicable.  A
particular home, however, seems to continue to receive power.
The family in that home has kept very much to themselves and
has not been interacting with their neighbors.  Suspicions
fly that this family is either somehow connected to the power
failure or knows something that they are not telling.  The
neighborhood ultimately erupts into violence.  At the end of
the episode, it turns out that aliens were behind the power
failure, testing whether they can get humans to destroy
themselves.

In periods of scarce and declining resources, people can fall
prey to the worst side of humanity.  Their deepest
suspicions, fears and jealousies can arise, not to mention
pent up feelings concerning injustice.  Thus, in Kenya, after
years of oppressive rule, a pro-democracy coalition, led by
current President Mwai Kibaki, took power.  This coalition
included the active support of current opposition leader
Raila Odinga.  One major demand of a significant portion of
this coalition was for a democratizing of resources,
specifically, guaranteeing that all ethnic groups/tribes are
treated fairly and equitably.

President Kibaki's administration has turned out to be a
major disappointment for members of non-Kikuyu tribes who
have complained that the Kikuyus are the chief beneficiaries
of his rule.  It was in that context that Odinga organized
and led an opposition movement challenging President Kibaki.
Until the day of the elections, pollsters indicated that
Odinga would more than likely win the election.

Yet, he did not win.

It was at that point that Kenya exploded.  What is
significant about the explosion, however, is not that there
was anger at the alleged voter fraud that resulted in
President Kibaki's re-election (note:  charges were made by
international observers that the election process and results
were questionable), but that the anger evolved into displays
of ethnic violence rather than violence between pro-democracy
vs. anti-democracy forces.

Vijay Prashad's recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's
History of the Third World (New Press People's History),
helps to provide a framework in which to understand the
situation.  The independence movements in the colonial world
largely resulted in the creation of nation-states that made a
very incomplete break with their former colonial masters.
Even in cases where they would use the word 'socialism' to
describe the path they were taking, there was rarely a
radical redistribution of wealth and power within these new
nation-states.  In many cases, dominant ethnic groups from
the colonial period continued to dominate, or in the
alternative, massive resentment against formerly dominant
ethnic groups (that were seen as collaborating with or in
general benefiting from colonial rule) resulted in massive,
genocidal or near genocidal violence (e.g., Rwanda).  This
situation was exacerbated in Africa and the Middle East where
nation-state boundaries were largely the result of lines
drawn by the former colonial rulers rather than by the people
themselves.

In the period beginning in roughly the late 1970s, the
economic situation for much of the former colonial world,
generally called the Global South, worsened.  The massive
Debt Crisis and the demands by international funders, e.g.,
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, for what was
called 'structural adjustment' resulted in resources being
shifted in the various nation-states of the global South to
pay off debts and to gain much needed financial aid.  Across
the global South, this resulted in privatization,
specifically the selling off of the infrastructure and
resources of countries, piece by piece.  Nation-states had
fewer resources for healthcare, housing, education, and all-
round economic development.  They had to spend what funds
they had following the dictates of the funders in Geneva,
Brussels, London and Washington.

And while this happened, the lives of the average person on
the street worsened.

The Kikuyu, roughly 22% of Kenya's population were not
collaborators with colonialism, but they have been a very
significant force in Kenya's political life.  Insofar as non-
Kikuyus saw the Kibaki administration as favoring the Kikuyu,
it fanned the flames of simmering resentment that pre-existed
Kibaki.  Thus, while Kenya has been relatively stable since
independence and ethnic groups have co-existed, in the face
of declining living standards and resources, and in the
absence of visionary political leadership, many average
people fell back into ethnic consciousness and, as a result,
responded ethnically to the political crisis.

This brings us back to 'The Monsters are due on Maple
Street.'  Even in periods of calm there are suspicions and
prejudices, particularly in societies divided along lines of
class, ethnicity and gender.  These emotions and beliefs do
not necessarily reach the surface in periods of normality.
Under stress, however, demons emerge that, if left
unchallenged, can evolve in the direction of irrational,
anti-social violence.  The mob mentality arises and one soon
is confronted with the demand:  'you are either with us or
against us.'  Chasing unarmed civilians into a church to then
burning the church is only taking this all to the extreme.

While the immediate political crisis between Kibaki and
Odinga may be resolved in the not too distant future, the
deeper crisis in Kenya has now been evidenced and this will
take a very different effort.  This is not about a Rodney
King 'Why Can't We All Get Along?' scenario.  Rather, it is
about a combination of work at the grassroots level to
organize and educate the population as to the nature of the
challenges they face (and specifically who is the enemy and
who is not), while at the same time, creating and advancing a
vastly different national political leadership.  Insofar as
Kenya continues to dance to the music of the international
funders, i.e., the former colonial and neo-colonial powers,
it will be dancing a dance of death.  The violence in Kenya
speaks less about the Kenyan people and more about into what
any people in the face of despair, brought on by the loss of
control of their lives and their loss of hope, can devolve.
The violence also speaks to why Kenya, along with the rest of
the African continent, must with all deliberate speed, find a
different path to development, since the path laid out by
Washington, the IMF, et. al., is not a path into a garden but
a path into a minefield.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr. is Executive Editor of The Black
Commentator.  He is also a Senior Scholar with the Institute
for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of
TransAfrica Forum.]