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What would politicians do if everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter, adequate medical care, high-quality formal education, and a means to sustain all these without grovelling at their feet? What would they say at political campaign rallies if they could not say: “If you elect me, I will build you roads, bring you piped water, build you schools, hospitals, and even police stations”? What would they do if no one needed their financial contributions at funerals, or fundraisers for school fees or medical emergencies? In short, what kind of politics would we have if we did not have rampant abject poverty? If, as it seems, our politics thrive on poverty, would the political elite really want to eradicate it, or only to seem to be working to eradicate it? In short, do our politicians know any politics beyond the politics of poverty?
Down memory lane
In the context of Africa, the politics of poverty began with the European sea expeditions from the late 15th century that ushered in the 400-year slave trade. As Walter Rodney informs us in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, prior to this, Africa and Europe were at the same level of economic growth:
Western Europe and Africa had a relationship which insured the transfer of wealth from Africa to Europe. The transfer was possible only after trade became truly international, and that takes one back to the late fifteenth century when Africa and Europe were drawn into common relations for the first time – along with Asia and the Americas. The developed and underdeveloped parts of the present capitalist section of the world have been in continuous contact for four and a half centuries. The contention here is that over that period, Africa helped to develop Western Europe in the same proportion as Western Europe helped to underdevelop Africa.
Rodney also points out that the slave trade, which the West carried out on both the west and east coast of Africa, was a basic factor in our continent’s gross economic disadvantage, as it robbed our continent of its youth for four hundred years, making intergenerational knowledge transfer virtually impossible because our societies were left with the very young and the very old.
However, with the nineteenth-century Western industrial revolution, the business classes in Europe now needed low-prized raw materials from our motherland, so that it was now expedient for them to have the young, energetic peoples of Africa stay home to produce those. Thus, the purpose of Western colonization was to secure low-prized raw material from Africa and other non-Western societies and ready markets for the same goods once processed in European factories. Indeed, if the West had ended the slave trade for humanitarian reasons alone, it would not have gone ahead to colonize our peoples to secure sources of raw material for its industries.
Political independence ushered in neocolonialism. As Kwame Nkrumah explained in his 1966 Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, “The essence of neocolonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” About five years before Nkrumah’s observations, Frantz Fanon had written in The Wretched of the Earth:
The national economy of the period of independence is not set on a new footing. It is still concerned with the groundnut harvest, with the cocoa crop and the olive yield… We go on sending out raw materials; we go on being Europe’s small farmers, who specialize in unfinished products.
(…) The budget is balanced through loans and gifts, while every three or four months, the chief ministers themselves or else their governmental delegations come to the erstwhile mother countries or elsewhere, fishing for capital.
The former colonial power increases its demands, accumulates concessions and guarantees, and takes fewer and fewer pains to mask the hold it has over the national government. The people stagnate deplorably in unbearable poverty; slowly, they awaken to the unutterable treason of their leaders.
Furthermore, as Samir Amin explained in 2012, the severe effects of neoliberal economic initiatives such as Structural Adjustment Programmes, open market diktats, NEPAD, etc., are all meant to continue to extract “imperialist rent” from Africa’s suffering populations and others from the South. He goes on to observe that low wages, low commodity prices, high import prices for the same processed commodities, massive unemployment coupled with significant underemployment, punishing exchange rates, resource wars, the coddling of the firmly entrenched corrupt comprador classes of Africa and the South at large, the flight of capital – physical, monetary, and human – etc., are all instances of the debilitating extraction of “imperialist rent” from Africa.
Moreover, in a chapter in Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities Through African Perspectives, Samir Amin points out that “Modern capitalist agriculture – encompassing both rich, large-scale family farming and agribusiness corporations – is now engaged in a massive attack on Third World peasant production. The green light for this was given at the November 2001 session of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Doha, Qatar. There are many victims of this attack – and most are Third World peasants, who still make up half of humankind.”
The development fad
In every campaign season, politicians tell the masses that they (the politicians) will bring “development” if elected, and challenge their opponents on their “development track record”. This narrative has been making the rounds in Kenya for over six decades now, a period long enough for it to be entrenched in the thinking of many as the only and adequate way to conduct politics. Indeed, I recall how back in the early 1970s, my playmates at Thika Primary School for the Blind said that such and such a politician should win or would win because he “brought water and electricity”. I remember wondering how an individual could do that. I was later to learn that it meant that the politician was able to lobby the government to allocate funds for such projects.
In his chapter in Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities Through African Perspectives, Frederick Cooper explains that the idea of “development” as we presently understand it has its origins in the post-1945 French and British colonial policies. “Development”, according to the colonizers, was a process of acting on colonial peoples to further replace their economic and social structures with Western ones. Thus, notes Cooper, the UK’s Labour’s Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones referred to Africans as “raw and ignorant”, while a British governor of a colonial territory in 1947 described the continent as “a great mass of human beings who are at present in a very primitive moral, cultural and social state”. Cooper goes on to explain that according to such thinkers, this supposedly miserable mass of humanity could only be rescued from their plight through Western “modernization”, namely, “a series of co-varying changes: from subsistence to market economies, from subject to participant political culture, from ascriptive status systems to achievement status systems, from extended to nuclear kinship, from religious to secular ideology”.
Similarly, James Ferguson traces the genealogy of the idea that African societies needed “development” to the works of anthropologists, whose discipline, inspired by the idea of social evolution, was understood as “the science of ‘less developed’ peoples”. He goes on to observe that not surprisingly, the first discipline to feel the effects of the post-1945 order was economics, and a recognized subfield of “development economics” appeared swiftly in response to the post-war initiatives. Ferguson further explains that as decolonization proceeded, the social sciences became more and more concerned with the problems of the “development” of new states. In the process, the anthropological concern with social and cultural change became increasingly linked with the idea of “development”.
The late Kenyan Philosophy Prof. Odera Oruka was acutely aware of the impact of language on the discourse about decolonization, and specifically on the manipulative character of the “development” discourse. In his Practical Philosophy, he wrote:
In the heat of the struggle for independence, some nationalists were preaching to the African masses that they were unfree and poor because of colonialism. The colonial powers rushed to change this “dangerous” proposition, this seed of consciousness. To the colonial powers, African people were what they were – unfree and poor – not because of colonialism, but because of underdevelopment. Thus the term “underdevelopment” removes the guilt of colonization and justifies the fact that colonial powers established regimes in Africa; the colonialists came to help Africa develop. Africa’s underdevelopment, they preached, is not due to colonization – Africa was underdeveloped long before its colonization.
Thus as I pointed out in an earlier article here, Claude Ake observes that “the West is able to dominate the ‘Third World’ not simply because of its military and economic power, but also because it has foisted its idea of development on the Third World through the institutions and activities of knowledge production”. Put simply, the “development” discourse is about the endeavour to transform our societies into the kind of societies found in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, thereby making the West the ideal to which all humanity must strive. No wonder on the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone of the Royal Technical College of East Africa, now the University of Nairobi, on 25 April 1952, then Kenya’s Governor Philip Mitchell expressed the hope and belief that the College would grow to be a University Institution of Science and Technology which would be recognized in the world outside East Africa and would serve for the generations to come as an invaluable part of the foundations of the new society which the colonial government was building in Kenya.
In some, the development discourse was part of the exit strategy of the colonizers through which they would pretend to have metamorphosed from colonizers to “development partners”. No wonder the idea of “development” never arose in relation to the rebuilding of Western Europe devastated by her 1939–1945 war. Indeed, The US funded the European Recovery Programme, usually referred to as the Marshall Plan, whose stated goals were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity, and prevent the spread of communism. That venture was touted as one to reconstruct Europe, not to “develop” her. On the other hand, African societies, devastated by four centuries of the slave trade and about eight decades of classical colonialism, are said to need “development”. Europe’s purported need for “reconstruction” and Africa’s alleged need for “development” led to the establishment of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Yet the political elite in Africa have swallowed this narrative hook, line, and sinker, thereby confirming that its modus operandi is colonial in essence. They have ignored Frantz Fanon’s sound advice in The Wretched of the Earth:
If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.
But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.
The enslaving nature of the charity approach to poverty alleviation
By “the charity approach”, I refer to a situation in which poverty alleviation is founded on acts of “kindness” rather than on legislation and policies of empowerment. For example, to normalize the displaying of pupils needing school fees in newspapers and TV and calling for well-wishers to come to their aid is an instance of the charity approach, while to put the necessary legislation and policies in place to ensure that the schooling of every child in the country is taken care of is the pursuit of empowerment. To be sure, part of our being human is that we give and receive charity. Nursing a family member back to health, helping a neighbour sort out a flat tyre, or giving a colleague a lift are all acts of charity. The trouble arises when this fact of the human condition is translated into a way of managing public affairs.
Indeed, charity is grossly ineffective in the management of public affairs because it leaves the vulnerable to the whims of the privileged. Over a decade ago, I was discussing the place of one of the royal families in Western Europe with a lady from that country. I stated that I thought the royal family was an unnecessary expense on taxpayers, to which she replied that their monarch supports many charities. My response was that if there were no systemic injustices to plunge people into abject poverty, there would be no need for charitable ventures.
Elsewhere, I have outlined four demerits of the charity approach in the context of disability inclusion. Here I outline them in the light of poverty alleviation.
First, a charity approach glosses over the systemic injustices that cause and sustain poverty. As Samir Amin correctly observed more than two decades ago, “A discourse on poverty and the necessity of reducing its magnitude, if not eradicating it, has become fashionable today. It is a discourse of charity, in the nineteenth-century style, which does not seek to understand the economic and social mechanisms that generate poverty, although the scientific and technological means to eradicate it are now available.”
Second, as Graham Hancock memorably illustrated in The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business, while by 1994 US$60 billion was spent annually in “foreign aid” with the stated aim of giving assistance to communities suffering due to natural disasters such as earthquakes, drought and disease, and for alleviating long-term hunger and poverty, only a small portion of this stupendous sum was ever translated into direct assistance to the target groups. Hancock showed that bureaucratic inefficiency, misguided policies, large executive salaries, political corruption, and the self-perpetuating “overheads” of the administrative agencies results in very little tangible action towards the stated goal for which the taxpayers in the wealthy North gave the finances. Indeed, many of us have witnessed individuals whose financial and social status skyrocketed because of jobs in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the global “charity business”, as they enjoyed lavish salaries and allowances, and joined the “jet-set club”, all in the name of working towards the alleviation of poverty.
Third, a charity approach to addressing poverty is, more often than not, minimalist, as clearly illustrated by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus in a chapter in Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities through African Perspectives, Abena D. Oduro observed that in view of the role of the MDGs as defining the minimum standards needed for progress towards poverty reduction and development, they cannot be the sole parameters to inform the design of programmes and to assess performance, or else the objective of a reduction in poverty and an improvement in the well-being of the vast majority of the population may not be achieved.
Fourth, a charity approach exposes the recipient of the charity to manipulation because the financier, often referred to as “the donor”, decides where, when, and how to give. As such, the financier is able to set “donor conditionalities”, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand, but instead promote the interests of the financier rather than those of the recipient. Thus in the many funeral, medical, and education fundraisers, politicians speak endlessly about their own interests simply because they have contributed to the funds drives. This brings to mind Prof. Odera Oruka’s observation:
Poverty-stricken people want bread, not freedom of thought and speech. Neither do they care about the right to vote and stand for public office, unless this is clearly explained to them in terms of their social frustration. Otherwise, a potential voter would easily sell his voting card for a loaf of bread or a small sum of money… Such people long for economic equality, not for the materially valueless political democracy.
Furthermore, the politics of poverty is global rather than local. International financiers and foreign governments offer grants and loans to financially impoverished former colonies on terms that serve the interests of the financiers themselves. For example, a wealthy Western country may offer credit to its former colony to build a road on condition that the work is done by road construction companies from the lending country, never mind the fact that the recipient country will also pay a hefty interest for the loan. Yet this kind of offer will be splashed on print and electronic media as a case of outstanding generosity. What is more, a vast proportion of such loans are misappropriated by the political elite of the recipient country through the inflating of the cost of the project, kickbacks, and even outright disappearance of funds that end up in secret foreign bank accounts, and yet the taxpayer must still service the loans.
Indeed, the massive loss of public funds in Kenya has been copiously documented. For example, according to The Guardian, a Report prepared by Kroll Associates UK Limited, which President Mwai Kibaki commissioned after his 2002 election victory, exposed corrupt transactions and holdings by several powerful members of the Kenyan elite during the Moi Regime (1978–2002): “The assets accumulated included multi-million-pound properties in London, New York and South Africa, as well as a 10,000-hectare ranch in Australia and bank accounts containing hundreds of millions of pounds.” Similarly, Joe Khamisi wrote Looters and Grabbers: 54 Years of Corruption and Plunder by the Elite, 1963–2017. In it we read that from independence to the late 1980s, Kenyan elites had stashed abroad the equivalent of US$5 billion (KSh518.5 billion), which at that time exceeded Kenya’s foreign debt of US$4 billion (KSh414.8 billion). Furthermore, in July 2024, The Star published an article titled “State cannot fully account for Sh1.3 trillion loans – Auditor”. It reported that a Special Audit by Auditor General Nancy Gathungu on loans Kenya took between 2010 and 2021 revealed that the funds had not been adequately accounted for.
The pauperisation of politics
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy informs us, the word “politics” comes from the Greek word polis, which refers to a city-state. The ancient Greeks lived in city-states, and every freeborn inhabitant of the polis was a politês (citizen). The direct democracy of Athens required active, ongoing participation of the citizenry. However, in due course, a class of “politicians” as a distinct occupation arose in modern Western European societies, and grew in size with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle class which vied for the sharing of power with the feudal families that had enjoyed wealth and power for centuries. Representative democracy, typical of modern Western societies and their neocolonial satellites, presumes the existence of a group of people who compete for political power and use it for the good of society. In reality, however, they typically pursue it to serve personal and class interests, all the while convincing the masses that they are vigorously promoting their good.
In Kenya, the deception that political elite interests converge with the interests of the masses often rises to levels so fanatical that even when a politician is accused of embezzling public funds, his or her followers will declare: “Even if he/she has stolen, he/she is our thief.” About a decade and a half ago, Michella Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat highlighted the way in which politicians push the narrative that the winning of state power gives a politician and his/her followers inordinate access to state largesse. More recently, I hear those in government chiding the opposition for having nothing to show in terms of “development” over the current electoral term, despite the fact that those in the opposition have no access to the state largesse with which to excite the voters. Similarly, those in the opposition promise the electorate that if they get to power, they will facilitate “development” to levels hitherto unseen.
The fact that the politics of poverty has resulted in the poverty of politics is evident all around us. The “Harambee” tradition, popularized by the Jomo Kenyatta regime, quickly deteriorated into an avenue for political campaigns. By the time of the Moi regime, politicians would even write fat cheques and get their “generous” contributions announced to thunderous applause at large fund-raising gatherings, only for them to cancel the cheques before they could be cashed, by which time those who had cheered their “generosity” had no way of knowing about their deception. Although the Kibaki regime tried to abolish “harambees”, they have found their way back in a variety of appellations.
Besides, voters regularly expect aspirants to give them financial inducements, and the politicians often seek to meet their expectations. It is widely believed that the KANU regime printed the KSh500 note in 1991/1992 for this very purpose, and, as should have been expected, it set off horrible inflation in the wake of the 1992 elections. What is more, politicians accompany their cash handouts with juicy promises of the country they will bring to birth if only they are elected or re-elected. Most tragically, they invariably find a ready audience in the masses whom they have deceived in this way again and again and again.
Furthermore, in many of our rural areas, politicians are under constant pressure to contribute to all manner of causes – funerals, education funds, even bridewealth, among others – in order to gain favour with the electorate. Besides, in some of our rural areas, funerals have turned into opportunities for rowdy youth to harass politicians and others perceived to have money for handouts. In addition, politicians are under pressure to raise campaign funds for the numerous expenses associated with running for office – statutory payments to the electoral commission, the printing of posters, newspaper, radio and TV adverts, logistics for the organizing of campaign rallies, salaries for agents in all polling stations, among others. Consequently, local and foreign economic elite step in to bankroll the politicians, and in return expect preferential treatment in government procurement opportunities, as well as legislation and policies that favour them, all in a bid to enable them recover what they “invested” in the campaigns. Some of my readers will recall the elitist fund-raising dinners for some aspirants, with a single plate costing a million shillings or more.
The dawn of the Kibaki regime witnessed MPs raising their salaries and allowances in February 2003, with a number of them declaring that they would use the higher perks to meet the needs of their constituents. In this they inadvertently admitted their involvement in the politics of poverty instead of working for pieces of legislation that promote the creation of a more equitable society. I recall one of the very senior cabinet ministers at the time, recently demised, stating that the raising of the MPS perks was justified because the Kibaki regime was going to govern so well that the economy of the country was bound to grow. A month later, in March 2003, the MPs awarded themselves a duty-free multi-million-shilling personal car allowance scheme. They have since repeatedly raised their perks while those they purport to represent languish in penury.
At the beginning of the Kibaki regime, members of parliament also passed the Constituencies Development Fund Act 2003, thereby purporting to codify in law the long-held perception that it was their duty to initiate various “development projects”. Besides, parliament passed the National Government Constituency Development Fund Act (NG-CDF) in 2015, giving the false impression that the fund now fell under the executive rather than the legislature, with MPs purportedly only playing an oversight role. However, in September 2024, the High Court declared the NG-CDF Act unconstitutional for, among other things, purporting to extend the mandate of parliament beyond representation, legislation and oversight, as well as for being contrary to the principle of devolution. However, in February 2026, the Court of Appeal overturned the Ruling of the High Court.
Moreover, in the current era of neoliberalism, where the so-called market has gained unprecedented prominence, the corrupting influence of money on politics has become even more devastating. The old capitalist doctrine of supply and demand, and the conscious effort to create demand through marketing and advertisement, have now reached fever pitch in the era of the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. In this new digital jungle, blatantly false narratives are created and popularized with dazzling success, while truths are denied or given a virtual media blackout in the name of tackling “misinformation”, “disinformation” or “malinformation”; and it is the rich who have the resources to achieve all this. For example, with the aid of Facebook, the infamous Cambridge Analytica manipulated several elections around the world, including the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan general elections, through data mining which enabled it to deploy targeted messaging in favour of its clients.
Thus, through the politics of poverty, the ethical foundation of politics has been eroded and replaced by a Machiavellian outlook that turns politics into the law of the jungle. In this jungle, a wealthy man can form a party a year before elections and gain a startling number of votes, and the agency of the people is transferred to party leaders and their inner circles. Most tragically, instead of developing and implementing programmes that respond to the concerns of the people, politicians gain popularity by dishing out dubiously acquired money to crowds who seldom have enough to eat.
Oligarchy in democratic garb
During his Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln famously described democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. In practice, however, representative democracy, popularized by the modern West but unknown to the ancient Greeks with whom the West credits democracy, is much easier to theorize than to actualize. In his Politics, Aristotle identified six major kinds of government, three good, and three bad, with each of the bad ones being a corruption of a good one. Thus when one person rules well we have “kingship”, but when he is oppressive then we have “tyranny”; rulership by a few is “aristocracy” (rule by the best) when it is good, and “oligarchy” (rule by the wealthy few) when bad; rule by the many is a “state” or “polity” when good, but “democracy” (rule by the many poor) when bad:
Now the corruptions attending each of these governments are these; a kingdom may degenerate into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and a state into a democracy. Now a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view.
The pair of state/polity and democracy, with democracy as the bad one, will surprise many in our day who have heard the West sing the virtues of democracy again and again. Nevertheless, Aristotle pointed out that wealth plays a central place in the manifestations of power. According to him, the many poor (the demos) and the few rich (the oligoi) are each trying to acquire or retain power for their own benefit rather than for the good of the political community. It is for this reason that he recommended a “state” or “polity” where a society has a large middle class (not too rich and not too poor), for he thought such a class would moderate the highly contradictory interests of the very rich and the very poor.
However, in our time, a large proportion of the masses of the abject poor on the globe are convinced that they live in democracies simply because they regularly participate in elections as voters. Nevertheless, as I show elsewhere, elections are actually an obstacle to democracy conceived as meaningful citizen participation in governance, and one of the reasons for this situation is that the kind of money one needs to run for office is well out of the reach of the vast majority of the people. In Kenya even accomplished professionals in the civil service with a lot to contribute to the management of public affairs cannot easily run for political office because the law requires them to resign from their posts before doing so, and yet they have no financial fallback in the event that they lose in the polls. As such, it is mostly the rich who stand for elections, or who finance some not very rich people to stand for elections in order to pursue legislation and policies that suit them (the financiers).
Which way forward?
Going by past experience, the politics of poverty will continue to rise in intensity as we draw closer and closer to August 2027. Even with focus and unflinching resolve, it would take time to rebuild the politics of a society adulterated and grossly distorted by money; how much more difficult is the task when the adulteration and distortion continue unabated? For example, it continues to be extremely difficult to enforce transparency and accountability in the raising of campaign funds in Kenya. Nevertheless, to give up on the endeavour to clean up our politics is, in a very real sense, to give up on life itself. At the very minimum, each of us ought to resolve to refuse to participate in the racket, whether as the dispensers or recipients of illicit largesse. For to the degree that we refuse to be party to the network of corruption, we render it powerless. Yet, ultimately, we need to recognize that liberal democracy, which was imposed on us at independence, is not an eternal political system, but was instead hatched in modern Western Europe with its industrialists with “new money” haggling for power with the feudal aristocracy with its “old money”. It is for this reason that I advocate for Africa Beyond Liberal Democracy: In Search of Context-Relevant Models of Democracy for the Twenty-First Century.
