Post-Colonial Kenya

The Rise of an Authoritarian and Predatory State

Rok Ajulu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781472461667
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317077466
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This engaging reassessment of postcolonial Kenya argues that the country's political turmoil over the last fifteen years is a continuation of repeating patterns of political contestation and conflict across Kenya's history.

When Kibaki stole the 2007 presidential election, leading to a spiral of violence that left over 1,000 people dead in the space of a month, many analysts wondered how this could happen in a country that had previously been considered an oasis of peace in an otherwise conflict prone region. Combining political economy with political sociology, in this book Rok Ajulu demonstrates that in fact authoritarianism and the predatory deployment of the state has been the predominant feature of Kenya's post-colonial period. Focusing on how power has been mediated in the country politically and the characters of the elites in charge, the analysis shows the dominance of extra-economic political coercion in economic activity. In a context in which economic activity remains predominantly political, continued control of state-power is so crucial for the new ruling class that it must be retained at all costs.

Rok Ajulu's masterful final book is a powerful and wide-ranging contribution to studies on post-colonial Kenya and will be an important resource for researchers from across political science, economics, history, sociology and African Studies.

1 Introduction

Kenya: The Making of an Authoritarian and Predatory State

DOI: 10.4324/9781315601625-1

The outcome of Kenya’s 2007 general elections exposed the soft underbelly of the Kenyan political economy. A country that, until 28th December 2007, had seemed built on a solid foundation suddenly collapsed into warring ethnic constituencies and revealed the fragile foundations upon which the post-colonial Kenyan state was built. Mwai Kibaki’s decision to ‘steal’ the 2007 presidential election resulted in a spiral of violence unlike any in Kenya’s 44 years of political independence. In less than one month, more than 1,000 people had died as a result of gruesome ethnic clashes, and more than 300,000 were displaced.

Scholars and political analysts have since sought to understand why such gruesome acts of violence could take place in what has traditionally been considered an oasis of peace in an otherwise conflict-prone region. What went wrong? Why did Kibaki refuse to concede defeat? And how do we explain the violent reaction to the illegitimate extension of Kibaki's incumbency? The explanation is to be found in patterns of political contestation in Kenya’s post-colony, where deep-seated frustrations (characterised by socioeconomic injustices of landlessness, joblessness and poverty) have often been contested through politicised ethnicity. In this sense, the spiral of violence that erupted in response to the contested outcome of the 2007 presidential election, although different in its intensity, was part and parcel of a pattern of political contestation that has repeated itself at crucial conjunctures in Kenya’s political history. It might have been different in scale, but such ethnic confrontations have become embedded within political contestation in the entirety of Kenya’s post-colony.

One of the enduring legacies of Kenyan politics is the politicisation of ethnicity and its deployment as a medium of political mobilisation and contestation of resources. Although such politicisation of ethnicity was basically a creation of settler colonialism; after independence, ethnicity became the most important and the most effective instrument of political mobilisation. Political elites from the different political formations soon perfected the art of mobilising and politicising ethnic or religious identities in order to achieve political and economic objectives. Of course such politicisation and mobilisation of ethnic identities only takes place under certain given circumstances. In ‘normal’ conditions, ethnic identity does not really play an important role in the interactions between different groups, and indeed different ethnic groups have lived together in various parts of the country for decades without resorting to solving their differences through violence. Only during certain specific historical conjunctures does the need to mobilise these elements of ethnic bonds arise. The aim could be to defend the identity of one group from a perceived attack by other groups, contest distribution of resources or simply to promote an already dominant group.

Kenya has experienced four such periods in the politicisation and mobilisation of ethnic identities. The first period occurred during the contestation for power in the run up to the independence elections in 1963. This involved the two parties of Kenyan nationalism: the Kenya African National Union (KANU) of the late Jomo Kenyatta and the late Oginga Odinga, and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) of Daniel Arap Moi and the late Ronald Ngala. KADU was the party which Bennett¹ called the ‘alliance of the pastoralists tribes’—Kalenjin, Masai, Turkana, Samburu and the Giriama of the coastal regions and sections of Luhyia in western Kenya—while KANU was the party of the larger ethnic groups, the Luo and the Kikuyu. So intense was the contestation for control of the post-colonial state that the minority parties opted for ethnic separatism. Their fear was the perception that the dominant ethnicities—the Luo and Kikuyu—would run roughshod over the minorities. At the centre of these fears were post-colonial land dispensation and the distribution of other resources—jobs, infrastructure, resources, etc.

It was within these circumstances that a federalist dispensation (majimboism) found its way into the Lancaster Agreement that ushered in independence. But federalism, after all, was not KADU’s creation. Federalism had its origins in 1954 with the formation of the whites-only Federal Independent Party (FIP). The FIP sought to protect the ‘White Highlands’ from African control; hence it adopted a federal platform. In 1958, the FIP was transformed into the Progressive Local Government Party (PLGP): the rhetoric had changed, but the objectives remained the same. They advocated strong local governments, with powers over local taxation and expenditure. The white PLGP hoped to exercise political control over the White Highlands. KADU adopted the majimbo idea only in 1961, and only when it had become quite clear that even together with its allies—Michael Blundell’s New Kenya Party and the Kenya Indian Congress, which then controlled the transition government—it was unlikely to win the 1963 election and assume control of an independent unitary state. It was then that majimboism was launched under the slogan ‘Regionalism or Civil War.²

The Kalenjin political elite began politicising and mobilising Kalenjin ethnicity. William Murgor, then parliamentary secretary of defence and internal security in the transitional government, invited his Kalenjin tribesmen to sharpen their spears and wait for the sound of his whistle for the beginning of the war to drive non-Kalenjins out of Rift Valley. Arap Moi, then Chairman of KADU, vowed to shed his blood to ensure that regionalism was written in the independence constitution.³

Thus from 1961 ethnic clashes swept through the Rift Valley Province. The Kikuyu, Luhyia and other ethnic groups, who had lived in the area for many years, were labelled foreigners, had their houses burnt, and the majority of them were rendered refugees—exactly the same phenomenon witnessed during the general elections of 2002 and 2007. In the Coast Province, KADU’s Sammy Omari popularised the slogans ‘Wabara Kwao!’ (Upcountry people, back to their own homelands) and ‘Kila mtu Kwao!’ (Every person to his or her own homeland). These slogans invariably had to be enforced through violence. The threat of ethnic cleansing, with the support of the settler print media, was enough to ensure that the independence constitution provided for eight separate regions, each with a regional government.

The second moment of ethnic mobilisation came in the wake of the assassination of the Minister of Finance and Secretary of the ruling party, Tom Mboya in 1969. Mboya, it would seem, was the victim of internal rivalries within the ruling KANU party for Kenyatta’s successor. His assassination, however, came at a time of increasing resentment by a majority of ethnic groups of the consolidation of economic and political power by the hegemonic Kikuyu ruling elite. His assassination thus threatened to unite the Luo and other ethnic groups behind Odinga, the former Vice-President, who was then leader of the opposition, Kenya People’s Union (KPU). This possible resurgence of Odinga’s political fortunes and the possibility of the Kikuyu ethnic coalition losing its stranglehold on power struck panic within the Kiambu coalition.

The Kikuyu ruling elite then sought cover under Kikuyu ethnicity. An oath-taking campaign to mobilise the Kikuyu peasantry—its urban sans-culottes—and its professional classes behind the Kenyatta regime was orchestrated by the Kenyatta coalition. It was not the small hegemonic Kikuyu elite that was threatened by the Mboya crisis—a crisis which in any case they had brought upon themselves; rather, they argued, it was the entire Kikuyu ethnic group that was under threat. The entire Kikuyu tribe was therefore compelled to take oath in readiness to defend the House of Mumbi, the eponymous founder of the Kikuyu tribe. As Ngunyi puts it:

… to protect its stakes and maintain the regimes inner stability … the ‘Family’ quickly constituted a Kikuyu brigade charged with the tacit responsibility of mobilizing the entire Kikuyu community to protect the “motherland” against the ‘enemy’ … The brigade was also responsible for administering to the community an oath of loyalty to the House of Mumbi and vowing by the oath to ensure that the Presidency never leaves the ‘tribe.⁴

The third moment of ethnic mobilisation came in the wake of the assassination of the populist Nyandarua North MP and a former assistant minister, Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (popularly known as JM) in 1975. JM’s assassination was to divide the Kikuyu ethnic group down the middle, isolating Kiambu from Muranga, Nyeri and ‘diaspora’ Kikuyu. And hence the context of ethnic mobilisation changed. This time round, the Kiambu Kikuyu took an oath to guard against the piki piki (the presidential motor cycle outriders) from crossing the Chania River, the boundary between Kiambu and its neighbouring Kikuyu district of Muranga; in other words, against the loss of the presidency to other Kikuyu districts.

The reintroduction of competitive politics in 1992 witnessed the fourth moment of ethnic mobilisation and a return of ethnic conflicts in the Rift Valley Province. Once again, it was the old minority coalition—the Kalenjin, Masai Turkana and Samburu (KAMATUSA), but now under the umbrella of the ruling KANU, which fell back on ethnic separatism. They publicly called on their ethnic brethren to commit acts of violence against other ethnic groups, which were not perceived to support the ruling KANU. In Nakuru, the KANU district chairperson, Wilson Leitich, called on KANU youth to patrol the streets with knives ready to chop off the fingers of anyone who showed the two-finger multi-party salute. He also instructed his youth activists to confiscate trading licences from multi-party advocates and take them to the KANU office.⁵

And just like the early 1960s, they mounted ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Rift Valley Province and throughout the bordering areas, leading to the removal of what they called Madoadoa (islands of non-Kalenjin groups) in the Rift Valley. Their ultimate objective was stated rather starkly:

‘…with the introduction of multi-party system the survival of the smaller ethnic groups is [sic] threatened and the only way to safeguard their interests was through this type of ethnic separatism…’⁶

Once again, in the run-up to the 1997 election, Kenya witnessed the outbreak of a savage war of annihilation in Coast Province. This came at a time when the ruling KANU had lost the political initiative to a section of the opposition and its allies within the National Convention Assembly, and increasingly it was beginning to look as if a constitutional reform which would ‘level the playing ground’ would be possible. It was in these circumstances that violence erupted in Coast Province with attacks on the Likoni police station on Mombasa mainland. It is widely held that once again, persons very high up in the government had been responsible for organising, funding and orchestrating the violence.

It is against this background that we can begin to understand the violent outburst and ethnic mobilisation in reaction to the 2007/08 contested electoral outcome. It followed a very familiar pattern of politicisation and mobilisation of ethnicity in Kenya. The gruesome acts of violence witnessed throughout the post-election violence had very little to do with ethnic hatred or tribal violence in the primordial sense; rather, these were brutal contestations for resources, albeit organised and orchestrated (predominantly by the political elite) for political and economic ends.

Kibaki’s ‘theft’ of the election came at a time of increasing resentment by a majority of ethnic groups towards the consolidation of economic and political power by the hegemonic Kikuyu ruling elite. Kibaki’s inner cabal, like Kenyatta’s 38 years earlier, came exclusively from the Central Province, in what has been referred to in Kenya’s political lexicon as the ‘Mount Kenya Mafia’. Like Kenyatta’s ‘Kiambu Bourgeoisie’ or the ‘Family’ before it, Kibaki’s inner cabal straddled economic and political power and occupied the commanding heights of economic, bureaucratic, diplomatic and corporate sectors, while displaying absolute arrogance in the deployment of those powers. This is what the contestation over...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Biography of the Author
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Kenya: The Making of an Authoritarian and Predatory State
• 2. The Origins of the Political Power of the Post-Colonial Elite and the Making of the Post-Colony
• 3. Independence and the Struggle for the Control of the Post-colonial State, 1963–69
• 4. Kenyatta and the Making of an Authoritarian State, 1969–1978
• 5. Moi's Presidency and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Rule
• 6. Sunset on the Moi Regime, 1992–2002
• 7. Kibaki and the Return of the Mount Kenya Crowd
• Epilogue: Capturing the fragments of post-Kibaki's Kenya
• Index