Introduction
Interest in African protests is growing substantially among academics and policymakers in light of high-profile, “third-wave” uprisings in recent years. Specifically, in the current decade, there have been widespread protests in, among other countries, Kenya, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Congo, South Africa, Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, Western Sahara, Burkina, Togo, Zimbabwe, and many more. Some of these protests are vestiges from earlier waves of prodemocracy and anti-austerity protests in the 1990s.
Existing interest is heavily dominated by academics domiciled in Northern academies, with few locals in the fray. Additionally, the dominant analytical lenses are drawn from the North. Observing such separation between the sites of theoretical production and collective action, Foweraker (1995) wonders whether theories modelled on Western Europe and North America can sufficiently analyse social movements in other social, economic, and political settings. This book is centred on African knowledge and ideas often sidelined in academies of the Global North. Nonetheless, it is also a conversation with related analysis by non-Africans.
In Kenya, the dominant struggle has been centred on embedding a democratic constitutional order, which has been a constant in the country’s recent political history. This struggle is an exemplar of a constant dialectic in the postcolonial African state reform project which has been characterised on the one hand by vicious intra-elite competition and fragmentation,1 ethnic-based political mobilisation, and mass inter-ethnic conflict. On the other hand, there have been occasional moments of elite and mass consensus that resulted in the emergence of powerful movements and moments for change.
Many scholars of contemporary African protests and their politics are quick to employ ethnicity as a default analytical lens. Like Mueller (2018), this study illustrates that class distinctions also drive different actors in these social movements. The study, however, does not ignore ethnicity. Instead, it contributes to the understanding of how social distinctions, including class, ethnicity, religious, gender, and generation, can be overcome through carefully crafted frames and strategies in building alliances for a shared struggle. This shared struggle, however, does not equate to a common struggle, as each of the social classes, especially, brings with it a package of expectations, some of which are diametrically opposed to those of other social groups. The net effect, as the Kenyan constitutional reform struggles show, has been a movement beset with multiple contradictions.
The question to be answered is: what prevailing conditions allowed citizens from disparate social groupings of both secular and religious civil society2 and opposition political parties and movements of differing socioeconomic backgrounds and competing political and ideological orientations and interests to cohere into a movement for constitutional change and state reform in Kenya? More specifically, what were the particular reasons (i.e. social, economic, and political) and conditions for the emergence of a movement for constitutional change? Engaging the intersections of social movement and democratisation theories, the analysis in this book sheds light on this important question. It engages the political opportunities model in analysing the emergence, growth, and decay of successive waves of constitutional reform struggles that came into being from the early 1990s.
A dominant approach in studying African protests has also been comparative analysis, either within a country or cross-nationally (see, for example, Mueller 2018; LeBas 2013; Branch and Mampilly 2015). The current book departs from this, with a specific analytical gaze concentrated on the Ufungamano Initiative,3 a movement that crystallised in the late 1990s from disparate struggles of various social groupings of both secular and religious civil society and opposition political parties that managed to force substantial concessions from the regime of President Daniel arap Moi (Kenya’s second president; 1978–2002) and the then ruling party – the Kenyan African National Union (KANU).
By following in detail the Ufungamano Initiative, this approach rejects superficial descriptions of movement “types” and instead systematically analyses and illustrates how a multi-identity movement emerges and transforms in terms of membership, leadership, strategies, successes, and failures. The Ufungamano Initiative emerged from citizens’ palpable rage against the refusal of the government of President Moi to allow popular participation of the Kenyan people in reviewing their constitution. Emerging in an environment of deep societal divisions (especially class and ethnic, but also religious, generational, and gender) with multiple sites of struggle, the Ufungamano Initiative is a remarkable story of how and why previously disjointed and disparate individuals and groups came together in a broad “movement of movements” to become a critical contender in Kenyan constitutional reform. In its formative years, it epitomised a social movement with extraordinary mass appeal and a multiplicity of actors that many social movements, especially predecessors like the National Convention Executive Council (NCEC), had failed to achieve. Its membership was drawn from 54 stakeholders of citizens’ organisations, including human rights nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), several faith groups, student and youth organisations, women’s organisations, grassroots social movements, trade unions as well as some opposition political parties.
The Ufungamano Initiative mounted a credible challenge to the Moi/KANU state forcing it to capitulate (Ogony 2004; Andreassen and Tostensen 2006; Mati 2012a; 2012b; 2013; 2015; 2017). Of relevance here are three questions. What mobilisation strategies and resources did this multi-identity movement employ in its struggle to ensure it mounted a successful challenge against the state? What do the strategies employed and their outcomes tell us about the nature of successes, challenges, and failures of the state reform movement in Kenya? Put differently, how did a movement for change with disparate actors force popular participation in Kenya’s constitutional reform process?
The Ufungamano Initiative utilised direct social movement action through one of its organs – the People’s Commission of Kenya (PCK) – that was in direct competition with the Moi/KANU state for control of the constitutional reform process. This direct competition and challenge posed a legitimacy crisis for the state-led process, forcing an autocratic and intolerant regime to capitulate. But the Ufungamano Initiative is also a story of the limits of social movements, which, while holding so much power and promise, are limited in their ability to effect fundamental changes in society. Even after substantial gains in challenging the state, the Ufungamano Initiative was vulnerable and in a way agreed to a “coerced” merger with the state-led process in 2001. The merger dissipated the Ufungamano Initiative’s energy. This raises a counter question: what do the strategies that were employed and their outcomes tell us about the nature of the challenges and failures of this movement? Put differently, what were its shortcomings?
But this book is not just about the Ufungamano Initiative. Rather, building on the convergence of Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) concept of “double movement” and the “political process model,” the book locates the generation, processes, actors, and outcomes of Ufungamano Initiative within the broader historical socioeconomic and political conditions of the late twentieth century. The Ufungamano Initiative is therefore treated as one wave of social mobilisations that emerged encumbered by memories and images of previous struggles. Using a periodisation approach, the long history of these struggles and their sustenance of protest are explained through “cycles or waves of contention,” where past struggles feed into succeeding ones.
This introductory chapter therefore sets the context and background which preceded the emergence of the Ufungamano Initiative. It offers a conceptual theorisation of the emergence and manifestations of contemporary state reform contentions in Kenyan. The approach is socio-historical with a view to explaining the nested and phased nature of these struggles. The intention here is not to recreate the entire canvas within which these struggles were embedded. Rather, the aim – to borrow from Burawoy (2012) – is to place these struggles in the context of the field of their production, competitors, allies, and antagonists, as these invariably shaped the emergence and practices of social movements and other actors involved. In so doing, the analysis builds on Tilly (2004), Wallerstein (1974), and Silver and Slater’s (1999) advocacy for the centrality of history in explaining contemporary socio-political struggles. This illumination of history is an effort to avoid a common pitfall of treating social movements and their contentious politics as “expressions of current attitudes, interests, or social conditions rather than as elements of longer-run histories” (Tilly 2004: 8).
Locating Kenyan constitutional reform struggles
Contemporary Kenyan contentions for constitutional change – like most other political protests in the rest of Africa – were reactions to social, political, and economic malaise. Specifically, they were citizens’ responses to a crisis orchestrated by the behaviour of the postcolonial political and economic elites, especially their failure to address the social grievances predating Kenya’s independence (Ochieng 2008). These grievances emanated from the contradictory expectations of the different social groups who had underwritten the struggle for independence (Murungi 1995). For a majority of the masses behind the struggle for independence, the legitimacy of the postcolonial state lay in meeting political economy imperatives: “huge developmental backlog of colonialism, in providing more schools, hospitals, jobs and other services and opportunities” (Veney and Zeleza 2013: 2). More importantly, most expected land – a primary source of the grievances against the colonial state – to be fairly redistributed to Africans after independence. However, the expectations of the masses were either ignored or pushed aside by the political elites without any serious redress to the fundamental issues that had led to agitations for independence.
Instead of addressing these grievances, the postcolonial political elite went for targeted co-optations of a few “peasants who benefited from the land resettlement schemes” (Veney and Zeleza 2013: 2) in the ethno-class formation project. Secondly, even among elites, there was serious factionalism resulting from disagreements over how to share the economic and political spoils after independence. Existing analyses of relationships between the various factions of socio-political elites in postcolonial Kenya, as in the rest of Africa, reveal a series of “betrayals” and false dawns of state transformation (see, for example, Davidson 1992; Zeilig et al. 2008). These “betrayals” were products as well as manifestations of fragmentations within these groups, and especially “indicative of the disintegrating [interclass] alliance that had been formed between the restive petty bourgeoisie and disaffected masses in the struggle for independence” (Veney and Zeleza 2013: 2; see also Mati 2012b). Additionally, these fragmentations were, by extension, products of exclusionary politics and economics that engineered high levels of conflict in postcolonial African nations (Mueller 2018). These class cleavages have rendered a contrast of both opportunities and constraints to reform of the postcolonial state across Africa.
A theorisation of the nature and character of these state reform contentions follows in the section below. Thereafter, an analysis of the contradictions in the postcolonial state – the principal reason for the dialectic of state reform contentions – follows. This is done in a periodised order, starting with the first post-independent decade to 1990. Next, the chapter examines how the contributions of the global political economy of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in the aftermath of the Cold War choreographed the consolidation of pro-democracy forces into constitutional reform struggles.
