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chiefnyamweya · 10 years ago

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What Was Kenya Designed to Achieve?

Reverse-Engineering Kenya

With the heartbreaking images of tear-gassed and traumatized toddlers of Langata Primary School still fresh in our minds and on the news, there could hardly be a better time to ask how this insanity became possible and what if anything can be done about it. As an enthusiast of what Edward de Bono calls design thinking, I readily admit to the possibility of having a hammer and seeing nails everywhere. The extent of my misapprehension is for you to decide.

Contrary to the beliefs of commentators who have suggested that tear-gassing schoolchildren is a “new low” for our police, I maintain that whatever their intentions were, yesterday’s conduct was absolutely consistent with the design principles of what is essentially a colonial police force far more adept at controlling citizens than protecting them.

One need not look beyond our own lifetimes for evidence of this, but if you must, there is a long and bloody history for you to unearth from the lawns of the Norfolk Hotel to the streets of Kibera. But don’t trouble yourself looking any commemorative plaques or statues though. Ours is a culture decidedly unsentimental about the misfortunes of the ‘unwashed masses’ or 'Watus'; never mind that they make up the majority of our population.

The Design

There are of course many misleading centuries old narratives for what the design outcomes for Kenya were, but I shall limit myself here to the most obvious one: An extractive commodities-based settler economy supported by an endless supply of native labour and controlled by a thin tier of arbitrarily appointed African chiefs.

This status-quo was only seriously disrupted by two devastating European wars born of the industrial revolution in which we participated in several theaters most famously Burma against the Japanese.

Africa has no doubt made huge advances for itself to date. The ordinary African today has more money in their pocket, more education and control over their labour, but unfortunately by far the biggest victors in this post-Cold-War, post-Super-China age remains Africa’s political elites. South Sudan and Somalia’s leaders may drag their countries to conflict, but here in Nairobi, their children can enjoy Kenya’s finest in malls, private schooling and night-clubs.

We still rely too heavily on commodities exports, and the Constitution we fought so desperately for to challenge our original design, is beginning to look more and more like a scrap of paper unable to withstand the force of history and privilege.

“Our” laws, religions and political economy are not accidents. They are deliberate design outcomes that we alone must take responsibility for recognizing and reforming. Unfortunately, we have left this discussion to be the preserve of bearded “radicals” and professors with the vast majority of us – to again borrow Morpheus’ words – being “so hopelessly dependent on the system, that [we] will fight to protect it.”

But our system is cancerous, and it threatens to destroy its host.

Table: The Legacy of Kenya's Design.

It must in fairness be acknowledged that as far as colonial experiences go, one could do far worse than the British variety (The Democratic Republic of Congo springs to mind), but I vehemently insist that counting our blessings is the surest path to mediocrity. If we spend all our time consoling ourselves by looking for people worse off than us, we will always find them; if not in another country, another county or neighborhood. Newsflash: to the world, we’re all Africans from Eritrea to Cape Town!

Of course not all colonial outcomes were undesirable.

For instance, although Kenya’s borders were arbitrarily drawn, I am quite happy to be able to travel to the Coast province and Mount Kenya without a passport (and to be confused for an Olympic athlete when I travel out of Kenya, but that’s another story). Now what would really be spectacular is if these borders could be gradually and democratically dissolved altogether to reflect our economic realities. Tiny states like Malawi and Burundi (I exclude Rwanda which is the de facto capital of Eastern Congo) are simply not viable.

Interrogating "Our" Institutions

These are the questions I feel we must honestly ask ourselves and answer individually and collectively if we are to fully accept responsibility for our future and be at the forefront of our own development and tackling our own crises.

1. Laws

Why on earth is there no Kiswahili language or better yet, a Sheng Constitution in 2015? Wasn’t all the fuss a decade ago about us not wanting to make a constitution not for lawyers but for ordinary citizens?

When a majority of citizens live outside a law, can a law still be called legitimate? Should the law accommodate the citizen or vice versa?

Why do we call the economic sector that employs the majority of our youth the “informal economy” and treat them like some fringe nuisance?

Why too do we treat Nairobians, the majority of whom are pedestrians, like some fringe nuisance herding them to distant commuter centers at the fringe of the city?

When the private sector solves the problem of lack of public transportation (matatus and boda bodas), why do we respond with more laws instead of superior urban design?

Why has no known participant in grand corruption been convicted to date, and are criminal convictions so directly correlated to the income group of the suspect?

Why is our annoyingly self-congratulating legal fraternity so obsessed with archaic paper-based procedural bullshit instead of substantive law???

2. Religion

What happened to indigenous schools of thought? Did our ancestors simply discard their beliefs without a fight, or did the holy miracle of gunpowder and economics play a role?

Why do we refuse to acknowledge that the earliest generations of African “believers” were coerced into the “missionary position” in order to survive the new regime. (It is not for nothing that Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” is essential reading for students all over the continent.)

Have we realized that unlike our great-grandparents, we don’t have to believe the unbelievable bronze age drivel about talking snakes and flying chariots?

Why do we assume the benevolence of church in spite of all the evidence to the contrary?

In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I will disclose here that I am the great-grandchild of one of the earliest African pastors of a Michigan-born (yes, I know how strange that sounds) doomsday sect known as The Seventh Day Adventists; one of the many doomsday sects born around the time of the American civil war. I also confess a fondness for the more innocuous aspects of its lifestyle guidance such as health and diet but reserve the right to find the rest amusing. Incidentally, membership in this church, as many Kenyan churches, is an uncomfortably reliable predictor of ethnicity.

3. Economy

How much do citizens pay to agents of the state by way of “informal taxes” (also known as bribes)?

If nightmarish bureaucracy is the mother of informal taxes, what are we doing to: firstly, destroy bureaucracy through technology and design principles; and secondly by neutralizing institutional resistance from beneficiaries of chaos?

Why do we educate our young from an early age for an economy that no longer exists? Why do we teach them conformity over innovation; risk-aversion rather than risk-taking?

What are we doing to promote fair trade and entrepreneurship?

What has been the extent of the damage of the NGO/Bob Geldof industry on FDI and the workers of Africa? (Countries after all spend millions in branding and attracting business and tourism.) How much ignorance has this merry band of do-gooders spread in the name of “saving Africa for just $4.99.”

When will it be us making the greatest contribution to tackling our own crises in health and security?

4. Politics

When will the poor of Kenya, and indeed the world, act on the fact that they have more in common with each other than they do with the wealthy politicians who claim to speak for their “tribes”?

What else was the Mau Mau Emergency other than our first bloody taste of the class-struggle that would define our country?

Why do we sell the lie to school-children that the Mau Mau ultimately prevailed over colonialism, when it was in fact defeated an driven underground by the same African elites (in collaboration with the police and settler gangs) who inherited the colonial state?

Why do we treat economic criminals, be they former presidents or pastors, with reverence while denying dignity to the paying citizen at the Passport Control Board?

5. Environment

Why do we allow the world’s hunters and trophy-seekers to lay waste to our heritage (I say “our”, not in the sense of ownership, but kinship with our brother-species.)

How did we Africans become the great historical villains of conservation???

Why have most Kenyan schoolchildren only seen the great wild animals in their text books?

Why do we tolerate a purely economic relationship with nature in which our role is simply to protect forests and wildlife for tourists rather than as a source of insight for future generations?

How do even bigger, busier and denser economies than ours still manage to maintain vast green spaces and comfortable cycle and walk ways within urban areas?

None of these questions are new. In fact they are as old as our experiment in nationhood. If you found yourself hoping that I would give you my answers, that is a problem. Gene Debs phrased it beautifully when he said "Even if I could, I would not lead you into the promised land because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out". Think for yourself, and do not fear blasphemy! That is a charge designed to appeal to the coward inside.

We can and have demonstrated in our own personal lives and our collective achievements in political freedom that we are bigger than the low expectations of our system’s designers. From our unrelenting entrepreneurs, to our defiant schoolchildren.

They are leading the charge in getting the design challenge right, and when they do, the world is in for a big surprise!

#kenya #OccupyPlayGround #Design #Colonialism #Religion #Politics #Economics

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