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“Who asked you to say that?” the spokesmen were asked. “Who is behind you?”
To this question came the reply: “Piny Owacho.” (The Country Says.)
—Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru
If we put down The Prince and pick up Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, we might see that the matter of political power is much more complex than the Newtonian application of pressure and force, of love and fear. Political power is a quantum affair. It moves in ways that can be counterintuitive. It empowers whomever it empowers and, just as swiftly, will abandon whomever it wills, usually those teetering at the height of their hubris.
Many of our leaders remain locked in a logic of power that is maximalist, accumulative, fundamentally neoliberal, and colonialist in its genesis. The will of the majority of the people is seen as that of the rabble, as it were. And any attempt to mobilize against unfair dictates is seen not as an attempt to be heard but as a challenge to be quelled. So that when governance oversteps the bounds of human decency, when hospitals are in a state of disrepair despite crushing tax burdens, criticism is potentially seen as an act of treason rather than an attempt at holding leaders accountable.
This approach to power is woven into the works of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and others. It started with colonial officers visiting the village or town, the establishment of the hut tax, and the eventual erosion of indigenous liberty in the interest of a queen or king in a foreign land. Very little has changed, unfortunately, and we must begin to break apart this fundamental logic to move past extractive governance and towards real national leadership.
Legitimacy is the fulcrum of political power, and the way we conceive of it needs to be looked at again carefully. We have entered a more anarchic world where simply attaching oneself to a geopolitical pole is no longer enough to protect national interests. In this context, the idea of depending on external powers and ideas for internal political legitimacy is simply no longer strategically viable.
The Khaldunian approach to legitimacy
When I was younger, I became exasperated at the inability of Western analytical models to be applied to the so-called Global South. I saw that the state-building approaches used during the Arab Spring failed miserably in places like Libya and Syria because of the inability for these frameworks to understand legitimacy past structure, institution, and process.
Ibn Khaldun’s model of political change allowed me to approach political legitimacy in terms of dynamics as opposed to structure and technique. His concept of Asabiyah pointed to the importance of agency over these structures and a conceptualization of legitimacy based on collective equilibrium as opposed to domination. I do believe that this approach may serve us in looking at legitimacy from another, more human, standpoint.
The first position that Ibn Khaldun takes is that power is immanent in the individual; it stems from the people, as it were, and is pooled towards leadership through a process of legitimization. This means that legitimacy is immanent and is found within the people first and foremost. No matter what one does, however one may spin it, this remains immutable.
Second, Ibn Khaldun describes history as cyclical. It goes from the establishment of a polity, its apex, decline into decadence, and subsequent renewal by what he calls the nomads, what we can call the people, from the periphery of power.
When a new polity is established, it is based on a shared group feeling, or Asabiyah. We can call it a sense of nationalism, of solidarity. This shared Asabiyah binds the people together with leaders emerging who can define and protect the interests of the polity in an inclusive manner. (There is no ideological definition of this dynamic, and political power can be defined functionally in terms of the control over the flow of wealth and the monopoly over the use of force.)
A polity reaches its apex when leadership emerges from amongst the population that is recognized as a reflection, as being representative, of this Asabiyah. It declines into decadence once a leader’s power is exercised not in the name of the people, but in the name of the group to which they belong. Machiavelli calls this factionalism. This is the point of a crisis of legitimacy.
It is at this point, the point of decadence, that new leadership under a renewed Asabiyah takes over from the periphery. Ibn Khaldun identifies these as nomads as opposed to the sedentary populations and defines them as not having externalized their immanent political power to the extent of those in more technocratic states or boardrooms.
The Kenyan context
Kenya has gone through several iterations of Asabiyah since independence. The first was that of uhuru, where legitimacy was pooled to the KANU government and its leaders as the custodians of the process of decolonization. This gave way to calls for a more inclusive and representative form of unity during the 1990s after the dominance of factional interests – both economic and ethnic – over the national interest led to a breakdown in legitimacy.
Factionalism continued to frustrate calls for greater representation and the strengthening of state legitimacy. This led to the flaring up of competition over the state in the form of post-election violence in 2007. The divisions between citizens and the lack of national Asabiyah, became a matter of immediate concern at home and in the international arena. The 2010 Constitution, however flawed some may perceive it to be, was an attempt to formulate a truly national Asabiyah based on a social contract that was deemed reflective of the nation.
The competition between factional and national interests has gradually negated the Asabiyah of the 2010 Constitution. Factionalism requires the state to keep its colonial extractive logic to deal with issues of legitimation through the use of ethnic mobilization and the use of force. This has led to the clawing back of devolution and the process of institutionalization until we have reached a point where the national Asabiyah of 2010 is under serious pressure, leading to the crisis of legitimacy we are seeing today.
So, what are these factional interests that are stopping us from establishing a state logic of internal, national, legitimization? Kenya has a somewhat unique political economy, thanks in large part to the Ndegwa Report, which allowed conflict of interest among government functionaries, ostensibly due to the lack of a viable local middle class at the time.
This has allowed for an incestuous relationship between political leaders and capital that is legitimated not by the people, but by dint of our economy being a peripheral part of the global economy. It relies on external legitimization as opposed to that of the people, and the main popular mobilizing force remains ethnic rather than national, even though interests align at the top, as it were.
As with the West, we have commodified legitimacy and entrenched inequality. And with this comes an underlying logic that those with money matter, and those without simply do not. As with the West, human issues such as poverty are seen as a point of personal criticism rather than an issue of national interest that must be addressed. The emerging concept of the K-shaped recovery is illustrative of this as elite spending becomes enough to keep a financialized economy afloat when inequality reaches its limits.
Furthermore, the political class and economic elite of our country live in a different reality to the people, and this has been taken to the point where they are sociologically detached from the majority. They simply do not have the points of reference to understand the concerns of everyday people; their interests are taken to be those of the people. We no longer live in the same country, and there is a lack of nationalist sentiment when it comes to legitimacy, governance, and policy.
In his Discourses, using the example of republican Rome, Machiavelli extols the need for a force to represent both elite and popular interests. The friction between these two forces in an institutional setting allows for dynamism and for something to emerge that is greater than the sum of its parts. Kenya has a leadership vacuum when it comes to organic popular representation, largely due to the passing of Raila Odinga and the aggressive efforts to stop his successors from emerging in a truly legitimate manner. Without this counterbalance to elite interests and a strong social contract, Kenya has found itself off track at the expense of everyone’s interests.
A return to national unity
We are currently at the precipice of determining how we approach Kenya’s role on the continent and globally, as we enter further global crises. Are we going to define our national trajectory, or are we going to be unwilling participants? Things don’t look too good from where we currently stand, unfortunately.
The financialization of governance that our current leaders are promoting will result in an even more hollowed-out state and even less accountability. Despite the significant economic challenges the country faces as it tries to balance its books, we do not need a neo-Thatcherite response; we will not benefit from taking on the Argentinian model. Kenya needs to address issues such as import dependency, the lack of market development, and the disinterested provision of social benefits to maintain congruence in the face of a more challenging and less integrated global system.
To do this, we need a return to the social contract that defined the Asabiyah of the 2010 Constitution as a guide to establishing legitimacy and national equilibrium. That will allow us as Kenyans to reestablish a foundation from which we can innovate further around governance. Meanwhile, our leaders need to understand that legitimacy comes from us, that we are in the same boat, and that, as captains of that boat, they are responsible not only for the economy but for building and maintaining a civilization, for being the protectors of those without protection.
