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The Laikipia Crisis and the Disenfranchisement of Kenyans in the North

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The conflicts in Laikipia and elsewhere in northern Kenya ought to be looked at as a national security issue exacerbated by historical land injustices and the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that relegates the true owners of the resources to the periphery.

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The Laikipia Crisis and the Disenfranchisement of Kenyans in the North
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The widely publicised recent invasions of wildlife conservancies in Laikipia County in Kenya have often been framed as conflicts between pastoralist communities and conservationists. However, the conflicts in Laikipia and elsewhere in northern Kenya ought to be looked at as a national security issue exacerbated by historical land injustices and the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that relegates the true owners of the resources to the periphery.

It is instructive that the state has identified environmental degradation as constituting a threat to national security. This was highlighted in a story published in the Sunday Nation on May 7, 2017 on Kenya’s plans to expand the military. Quoting from The National Defence Policy, the reporter stated that the government had identified environmental degradation as one of the threats to Kenya’s security.

This admission is significant because for a long time the country has taken for granted fatal consequences of wanton destruction of forests, rivers, habitats, ecosystems, as well as serious erosion of biological diversity. How individual actions affect the environment appears not to preoccupy most people’s minds in the country. Collectively though, such injurious individual actions result in a situation that has far-reaching implications, not just on the well-being of the environment or inability of ecosystems to supply life-nurturing environmental resources to citizens, but also on the security of the country.

On its part, the state has kept making one policy pronouncement after another without putting in place the necessary resources and personnel to implement the policies or to whip everyone into line. For many years now, the discord between what is said in official statements and what is done by citizens, companies and the state itself has given rise to serious crises. This greatly affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of Kenyans, some of whom opt for extra-legal measures to stay alive.

Many have gone on to equate Laikipia to the Biblical Eden; “it represents a lost Eden in European settler thinking, epitomised by the writings of Kuki Gallman, which are infused with an imagined sense of entitlement to and identification with her adopted land.”

Added to this is the long-running official neglect of arid and semi-arid areas of the country. Individuals and organisations that constitute the country’s conservation fraternity have capitalised on officialdom’s disinterest by experimenting with a conservation model that is harmful to the communities there. With financial support from multilateral and bilateral donors, as well as big-bucks international NGOs, the fraternity has literary taken over and has been running not just conservation, but also security, livestock marketing and conflict resolution in a manner that greatly interferes with the sovereignty of the communities that claim ownership of the land there.

This sad state of affairs is epitomised by the fact that one organization, Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), openly claims that it has brought into conservation a whopping 44,000 km2 of the lands in the upper Rift, north and coastal regions. The reaction to what happens there and how it affects the rights of the communities to their lands and resources, as well as how this translates into the apparent insecurity in Laikipia and elsewhere in the north, ought to be seen as social reverberations of historical land injustices and official neglect.

The historical narrative

In Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, Lotte Hughes paints a picture of pastoralist communities disinherited from their land on two different occasions in 1904 and 1911. The British author says that between 1904 and 1905, colonial authorities forcibly moved the Maasai people from their favour­ite grazing grounds between Na­ivasha and Nakuru into two reserves in order to make way for white settlement. Laikipia was one of the reserves while the other was in the south, on the border with Tanzania. According to Hughes, this was done following the 1904 Maasai Agreement through which the community was promised that it could keep the reserved ar­eas “so long as the Maasai as a race shall exist.” She writes that the British did not honour their promise but went on to move the Maasai again seven years later “at gunpoint from Laikipia to an extended southern Maasai reserve.” More than 20,000 people and not less than 2.5 million livestock were moved between 1911 and 1913. All this was done mainly to pave way for white settlers, although, as Hughes says, there were other extraneous reasons, including the desire by the colonial administration to concentrate the Maasai in one reserve in order to better rule over them and to impose taxes. Consequently, the Maasai lost between 50% and 70% of the land they occupied be­fore 1904.

Since the second “move” was implemented, the Maasai have maintained that this was not an “agreement” per se as their leaders signed it under heavy duress and coercion. “This effectively ren­dered the first Agreement void,” writes Hughes. This supports the intermittent claims made by activists from the community that they have a legal claim over the land now occupied by the mainly white ranchers in Laikipia.

The campaign for redress for this historical injustice reached a crescendo in the early 2000s when the community, led by the defunct Osirigi NGO and people like the late Elijah Marima Sempeta, intensified calls for a return of the lost lands. The latter was a young lawyer who travelled to Britain and unearthed documentary evidence ascertaining that the leases given to the white ranchers had come to an end and that time had come for the ownership of the land to revert to the local community. Following a spirited campaign, the matter fizzled out after Sempeta was murdered outside his home in Ngong Town in circumstances that remain unexplained. However, the push appears to have borne fruit when lease periods were lowered from 999 years to 99 years in Kenya’s 2010 constitution.

Defeating the land rights campaign

The white lessees of the land in Laikipia have adopted a multi-pronged counter-campaign and have shown – in words and deeds – that they are not ready to forfeit the land. According to Hughes, many have gone on to equate Laikipia to the Biblical Eden; “it represents a lost Eden in European settler thinking, epitomised by the writings of Kuki Gallman, which are infused with an imagined sense of entitlement to and identification with her adopted land.”

In Land Deals in Kenya: The Genesis of Land Deals in Kenya and its Implication on Pastoral Livelihoods – A Case Study of Laikipia District, 2011, John Letai says that Laikipia has “profound inequalities” in land ownership, with 40.3% of the land being controlled by 48 individuals. Among the biggest landowners in Laikipia include Gallman, whose Ol Ari Nyiro ranch is said to be 100,000 acres. Other large ranches include the Ol Pejeta ranch (92,000 acres) that was once associated with Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the Ol Jogi ranch (67,000 acres) owned by the late French billionaire art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. But even with this kind of inequality, it has been apparent that the ranchers cannot countenance the idea of ever giving up the giant parcels of land to the original owners. Some have been offloading the land to other rich people (some of whom are foreigners) while top business and political elites in the country have also increasingly acquired land there.

The white lessees of the land in Laikipia have adopted a multi-pronged counter-campaign and have shown – in words and deeds – that they are not ready to forfeit the land.

Another approach has been to front the sprawling ranches as important wildlife conservation areas. Targeted in this approach is a powerful and moneyed audience in the West that has contributed immensely to support wildlife conservation in cash and kind. Initially, the white ranchers had not taken wildlife conservation as seriously. For a long time, many had taken to large-scale livestock keeping but later realised that they stood to gain much more by converting their properties to either mixed livestock-and-wildlife areas or to exclusive wildlife conservation zones. They appear to have been inspired by arguments put forward by people such as Dr. David Western, a former Kenya Wildlife Service director, who championed the parks-beyond-parks concept, as well as the outcome of the 2003 World Parks Congress organised by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in Durban, South Africa. According to Dr Mordecai Ogada, a former chief executive of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, the central theme and message coming out of the Congress was “benefits beyond boundaries”.

“The model that proposed establishment of conservancies outside protected areas … gained immediate currency and caught the eye of donors as well as statutory agencies like the Kenya Wildlife Service, which were keen to gain more habitat for wildlife and secure reservoir wildlife populations that could augment those in parks via wildlife corridors,” says Dr. Ogada.

He says that this led to a “carefully laid out and presented plan” to secure the future of wildlife in these vast lands and to get financial support from private and institutional donors.

To avoid paying taxes and to continue enjoying the largesse of global supporters of wildlife conservation, many of the Laikipia ranchers registered their conservancies as non-profit organisations. Today, Ian Craig’s Lewa Conservancy and Kuki Gallman’s Ol-Ari Nyiro Conservancy are registered as non-profit outfits. However, this is a misnomer because many of them run exclusive, high-end lodges and camps that charge tens of thousands of shillings daily to tourists. For instance, with 12 tents that can accommodate 26 guests, Lewa Safari Camp located in the Lewa Downs charges between Ksh15,500 ($155) and Ksh42,600 ($426) per night depending on the season.

The plot thickens

Getting the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to give world heritage status to the ranches is the third approach adopted by the ranch owners. The secret scheme to have UNESCO play ball is aimed at enabling the ranchers to maintain a lasting claim on the land and, therefore, “eternally” defeat any campaign to have it revert to the Maasai community. So far, this is a feat that only Lewa Conservancy has attained. The 60,000-acre ranch was given this status in 2013, as an extension of the Mount Kenya World Heritage Site together with the Ngare Ndare Forest, which is also in Laikipia.

However, there are those who say that the elevation of Lewa was an anomaly because according to the World Heritage Convention, the duty of ensuring the identification, protection and conservation of cultural and natural heritage sites “belongs primarily” to the state. In addition, Article 5(4) of the convention burdens states with the funding and the protection of such sites, besides coming up with laws to protect them. Further, Article 6(3) states: “Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to take any deliberate measures which might damage directly or indirectly the cultural and natural heritage.”

Nevertheless, Lewa’s success appears to have encouraged others with huge ranches, some which were constituted through the NRT, to seek similar status for their property. According to what I found out, the ranchers commenced this in 2014 when 24 wildlife conservancies and private game ranches made applications to be included in the world database of protected areas. These include Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Segera, Solio Ranch, Ol-jogi Ranch, Kisima Farm and Ol Ari Nyiro Ranch (see: https://protectedplanet.net/ ).

“There is a rush to create a super big protected area stretching from Lewa to Solio – all of it under the cover of Word Heritage Convention,” says Njenga Kahiro, a former Project Officer with Laikipia Wildlife Forum.

If this goes through, it will mean that the conservancies and ranches will be declared of outstanding universal value and natural beauty. It is also bound to have far-reaching implications for Kenya, which is a signatory to the World Heritage Convention. Formulated in 1972, the Convention protects the world’s cultural and natural heritage. In essence, the ranchers appear to be putting forward the argument that the land is special and only its present owners can be trusted to keep it that way. But this has attracted criticism from members of the Maasai community. “This is a misplaced idea and it will receive serious challenges and resistance from human rights and indigenous people,” said Mali Ole Kaunga, the director of IMPACT, an NGO based in Laikipia County. Ole Kaunga accuses the ranch owners of “hiding behind international conventions…in order to get the Kenya government to protect them as it is obliged to by the Convention.”

Laikipia has “profound inequalities” in land ownership, with 40.3% of the land being controlled by 48 individuals.

Eustace Gitonga, the director of the Community Museums of Kenya, says that this will prevent Kenya from ever changing the use of such a vast segment of its real estate. “This will mean that Kenya cannot access any mineral wealth suspected to be in these lands.” Gitonga believes that this will also affect Kenya’s sovereign right to decide on how best to use its resources.

Other dynamics have also set in to further disenfranchise the pastoralist communities. This includes acquisition of large parcels of land by top politicians and rich people, from different ethnic groups in Kenya. Added to this is the phenomenon of absentee landlords and the resettlement of smallholders, mainly from the Kikuyu community, there. According to Letai, today, smallholder farms constitute 22.21% of the land. Many of the owners of the small farms have abandoned their parcels, as ascertained by a study done in 2013 titled The Abandoned Lands of Laikipia Land Use Options Study). A whopping 238,000 acres have been abandoned by some 85,000 titleholders, most of whom live elsewhere.

The absentee landowners, who were settled there by the first independent government under the late President Jomo Kenyatta, ended up using the land as collateral to acquire loans, mainly from the Agricultural Development Corporation. Letai says that there has been a rush to buy off the land from the absentee land owners. “Former commercial ranch managers are identifying the title holders of the absentee lands to convince them to consolidate their holdings and sell them to foreign diplomats, aid workers and even some former Zimbabwean white farmers. He adds that after purchasing the land, the latter have been fencing them which “has created tension with the Maasai and other pastoralists who have been using this land over a long period of time.

NRT’s approach

This situation is compounded by the fact that the inappropriate conservation approach and, to some extent, the goings-on in the private ranches of Laikipia, is replicated in the sprawling communally-owned lands within Laikipia and neighbouring counties. Northern Rangelands Trust has been championing the well-oiled conservation initiative, arguing that it enables communities to get revenue from conservation activities, promotes security in the north and has been facilitating the mainly pastoralist communities to put in place grazing plans that lessen their vulnerability to frequent and severe droughts occasioned by climate change. The organisation further says that it is involved in bringing more lands into wildlife conservation through the development of strong community-led institutions and that this forms the basis for investment in tourism and community development. NRT-inspired community conservancies have now spread across Laikipia, Samburu, Isiolo, Marsabit, Baringo/East Pokot, Garissa, Tana River and Lamu counties.

The largesse extended to the NRT is large and extensive to say the least. For instance, last November, the United States government channelled, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), some Ksh2 billion (US $20 million) in a new five-year scheme meant to expand NRT’s operations in 33 conservancies in Kenya’s coastal and northern regions. According to NRT’s website, the conservancies now cover 10.8 million acres (or 44,000km2) of the country and are spread across 11 counties. Announcing the grant, US ambassador Robert Godec said it was meant to “support the work of community rangers, conserve wildlife and fisheries, and improve livelihoods and advance women’s enterprises.”

The NRT was started in 2004 by Craig, with the initial aim of raising funds to aid the formation and running of wildlife conservancies. Its website says it supports the training of relevant communities and helps to “broker agreements between conservancies and investors.” It also says that it provides donors with “a degree of oversight and quality assurance.” Besides the US, the organisation’s activities are heavily funded by the Danish Development Agency (DANIDA), The Nature Conservancy (a US-based international NGO) and the French government’s Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD). Other financiers include Fauna & Flora International, Zoos South Australia, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ of Germany), US Fish and Wildlife Service, San Diego Zoo, International Elephant Foundation, Saint Louis Zo, and Running Wild.

However, it is the massive grants from USAID and Tullow Oil, the British company that has struck oil in Turkana County, which has attracted curious interest from observers who believe that there’s more than is being said in official communication. Pundits say that NRT’s approach affects communities negatively. According to Dr Ogada, the launch of community conservancies “began the mass disenfranchisement of communities in the name of conservation, and the rest is history.”

“Conservation is a noble cause, but like all other sectors, should be properly regulated. Kenya is currently failing to do that.”

In an interview with this writer, Michael Lalampaa, an official with the Higher Education Loans Board who hails from Samburu County, said that “even when droughts occur, pastoralists cannot access part of their lands that are now set aside for wildlife conservation and which constitute the community conservancies.” Indeed, many of the NRT-inspired community conservancies visited by this writer in late December 2016 had set aside big portions of the community lands as exclusive wildlife areas (or core areas). Some of these zones have better ecological characteristics and impressive landscapes favoured by tourists. Lalampaa complains that NRT compels communities to set aside the best portions of their lands for the exclusive use of wildlife and investors subsequently lease it to set up tourist facilities.

What is interesting, as this writer found during a tour of the Kurikuri Conservancy close to Mukogondo forest, is that the NRT not only brokers the investment agreements, but has also insisted on having its employees as some of the signatories of conservancies’ bank accounts. More alarming, the community in Kurikuri is required to meet some of the costs of running the lodges, which eats deeply into the cash they get from leasing out their land and from each of the tourists who visit the conservancy.

To ensure that the operations within the conservancies have the support of relevant communities, NRT has identified and co-opted local leaders and elites who aid in persuading the pastoralists to set aside land for conservation. As a result, some of the prominent personalities within the Samburu, Borana, Maasai and Rendile communities are on the NRT’s board.

Drought part of the problem

Although the prolonged drought that ended last month is believed to have triggered the recent invasions of ranches and conservancies in Laikipia, there are claims that some of the pastoralist communities there have unwittingly locked themselves out of parts of their lands through the conservancy agreements. “Once the agreements are put in place, it becomes impossible for the herders to access pastures in the conservancies as they are confronted by armed scouts who kick them out. It is sad that at times, livestock end up dying simply because their owners cannot graze them in what used to be their lands,” says Lalampaa.

The setting aside of huge sections of community ranches (which is facilitated by the NRT) for conservation purposes has created a dilemma for the communities and is proving to worsen rather than diminish insecurity, particularly in the upper eastern and northern Kenya regions. According to media reports, the alienation of land has contributed to the hardships suffered by local pastoralists, especially during the current prolonged dry spell. Reports paint a worrisome picture of members of communities invading either the areas they had earlier set aside or other private game ranches. For instance, armed herdsmen invaded the ranch belonging to Will Jennings, a mixed race Kenyan, resulting in a shootout between members of the Rapid Deployment Unit of the Kenya Police and the rangers. Other ranches invaded recently include the Loisaba Conservancy and Sera Conservancies established by the pastoralists, the 50,000-acre Segera Ranch owned by Jochen Zeitz, a former CEO of the Puma sports brand, and the Sosian and Galmann ranches. So far, one rancher, Tristan Voorspuy, has been killed in Sosian Ranch, while Gallmann is still recovering in hospital after being shot by herders.

NRT’s security apparatus

Although the government has moved its security machinery into Laikipia, the long-running insecurity in Laikipia and other parts of the north is an indictment on its ability to pacify these areas. It is also apparent that the NRT has “filled the gap” by establishing a security apparatus that is considered one of the most controversial aspects of the organisation’s activities. On its website, the organisation says that it carries out anti-poaching operations, wildlife monitoring and that conservancy rangers are “invaluable to the Kenya Police in helping to tackle cattle rustling and road banditry.” NRT says that each conservancy has a team of uniformed rangers that are “employed by the communities and trained with support from NRT”. By 2014, there were some 645 such rangers.

Additional information posted on the organisation’s website shows that the rangers are given basic training by KWS personnel at the wildlife agency’s Manyani Training School. There, they learn “bush craft skills, as well as how to effectively gather and share intelligence, monitor wildlife and manage combat situations.” According to information posted on the website of the NGO Save the Rhino, some rangers have been given Kenya Police Reserve accreditation and “sufficient weapons handling training.” Such advanced training is done by 51 Degrees, a company associated with Batian Craig, the son of Ian Craig. Among the specifics of the training include tactical movement with weapons, ambush and anti-ambush drills, handling and effective usage of night-vision and thermal-imaging equipment and ground-to-air communications and coordination. The rangers are also taken through what is called “typical training of different operations in war situation”, as well as observation, stalking, camouflage and concealment, judging distance and map reading. NRT has also launched patrol boats for security operations in its coastal chapter, which has now benefitted from USAID’s finances.

The crisis is worsened by the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that has resulted in more disenfranchisement of the local people and led to rising incidences of severe drought as a result of climate change. The crisis is further exacerbated by neglect by the state and its unwillingness to stamp its authority in these areas –which has given undeserving space and say to the NRT and its foreign supporters.

“This formidable armed force is under the overall control of a CEO who is a civilian and isn’t even a citizen of this country,” said Dr. Ogada. He added that by allowing this to happen, KWS “has effectively abdicated its wildlife protection role” to the NRT.

Dr. Ogada believes that the immense foreign and private control over such a large proportion of the country’s resources and citizens calls for more overt dialogue and regulation. “Conservation is a noble cause, but like all other sectors, should be properly regulated. Kenya is currently failing to do that.” He adds that the sheer geographical, financial, cultural and political scale of this intervention calls for a lot more thought than has been given to it thus far.

It is apparent that the crisis in Laikipia and other areas in Northern Kenya is a multifaceted one that defies a simple explanation. It has its origins in historical land injustices that have not been addressed even after Kenya became independent. The crisis is worsened by the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that has resulted in more disenfranchisement of the local people and led to rising incidences of severe drought as a result of climate change. The crisis is further exacerbated by neglect by the state and its unwillingness to stamp its authority in these areas –which has given undeserving space and say to the NRT and its foreign supporters.

To address this crisis, all players must come together to examine, in a holistic and comprehensive manner, issues related to land ownership and use, security, economic well-being of the people, and vulnerability of the local communities to adverse effects of climate change, among other issues. The state must also pacify these areas, not merely by sending the police or members of the Kenya Defence Forces, but also by starting social and economic projects in a manner that will establish a meaningful and lasting economic footprint there.

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Politics

Kenya’s Police Are Violent and Unaccountable – Should They Be Abolished?

After Kenya’s independence in 1963, the police were “Africanised” but retained much of their colonial character. Under Daniel arap Moi’s authoritarian regime (1978-2002), the police continued to play a key role in repressing dissent.

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Kenya’s Police Are Violent and Unaccountable – Should They Be Abolished?
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A world without the police is inconceivable to many people. The police are viewed as part of modern society’s foundation, ensuring democracy and keeping people safe.

In practice, however, police around the world sometimes repress social movements, stifle democracy, and exacerbate social and racial injustice. Across the African continent, they often use force to prop up repressive regimes. And in Kenya in particular, extortion and extrajudicial killings by the police are rampant.

Kenya is unusual for its extensive attempts to reform the police. Reform efforts began in earnest in 2008, when the police were found to be complicit in post-election violence. And yet, after 15 years and billions of shillings spent, the police reform project has largely failed.

The Kenyan police remain repressive, unaccountable and effectively unreformable. Many citizens complain about how the police treat them like ATMs – a source of cash. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the police killed tens of Kenyans while enforcing curfew measures.

We’ve conducted hundreds of interviews, discussion groups and over a decade of ethnographic research into how counter-terrorist policing and securitisation have shaped Nairobi. And in turn, how local residents respond to police violence and build their own practices of care, mutual aid and security.

We have come to the conclusion that the police make most people feel less safe. Many residents told us they don’t depend on the police for their safety: they keep each other safe. Given the impasse of police reform – and citizen responses to this – there is a strong argument to be made for the abolition of the Kenyan police altogether.

Policing at an impasse

Modern police institutions made their first appearances on the African continent as part of colonisation and the expansion of European capitalist interests.

In Kenya, the roots of policing lie in early colonial “conquest”. The Imperial British East African Company developed security forces to protect its expanding economic interests in the 1890s, and the Kenya-Uganda Railroad developed its own police force in 1902.

After Kenya’s independence in 1963, the police were “Africanised” but retained much of their colonial character. Under Daniel arap Moi’s authoritarian regime (1978-2002), the police continued to play a key role in repressing dissent.

There have been calls to reform the Kenyan police for decades. But the 2007-08 post-election violence, in which police were complicit in widespread ethnic violence, accelerated attempts at reform.

Over the past 15 years, police reform has been enshrined in the 2010 constitution and actualised in numerous acts of parliament. It’s been supported internationally with funding and technical expertise from the UN, the US and the EU, among others. It prompted the reorganisation of the police service and the establishment of civil oversight mechanisms.

Yet, despite all of these efforts, the Kenyan police remain corrupt, violent and unaccountable.

Civilian oversight over the police has proved ineffectual. The Independent Policing Oversight Agency has managed to bring only 12 cases of police violence to conviction out of more than 20,000 complaints received between 2012 and 2021. That is only one out of every 1,667 complaints. The under-resourced agency simply can’t grapple with the immense volume of reported police abuses.

The case for abolition

Police reform has failed. Is it time to consider abolition?

Abolition is not about simply tearing things down, but rather asking what should exist in place of outdated and violent systems that no longer serve people. Abolition is a creative and constructive project with deep philosophical roots.

So why abolish the Kenya police?

  1. The police are functionally obsolete for most Kenyans. In many low-income neighbourhoods, our research shows that people avoid calling the police to respond to crises or crimes. For many, experience shows that the police can make matters worse.
  2. The police often exacerbate insecurity, violence and corruption. To provide for their own safety, residents increasingly organise themselves into networks of friends, family and neighbours for basic safety. For instance, women in Mathare, Nairobi, organise their own security practices, which include conflict resolution, de-escalation of violence and support for survivors.
  3. In more affluent neighbourhoods, residents increasingly rely on private companies to provide security in their compounds. Police are seen as one among many security services available for hire. In our research, the few positive experiences with the Kenyan police were reported (predominantly) by such affluent residents.
  4. The remaining function of the police is “enforcing order” and protecting the state against society. Officers uphold and protect a rarefied governing class and political elite against the population.

Police abolition, therefore, would mean dismantling ineffective and repressive institutions and replacing them with systems of actual safety, systems that enable society to thrive.

What should replace the police?

When confronted with the idea of “abolition” for the first time, many people often respond: “but who will keep us safe?”

In Nairobi, the answer is to be found in existing social practices. The problem is that there’s a lack of resources to support alternatives to punitive security. We call for defunding the police and investing these resources in such alternatives.

  1. Invest in communities.When we ask about local security problems, residents often answer that the lack of schools, food, land, quality housing, water, electricity, toilets, healthcare and safe places for kids to play are what cause “insecurity”. Reinvestment in community means funding such social infrastructure to allow people to thrive. This reduces crime and violence.
  2. Invest in alternative safety mechanisms.This means strengthening dispute-resolution mechanisms that help resolve conflicts without violence. The government needs to support existing social justice centresnetworks and movements fighting for change.

When these forms of social reinvestment are pursued, the need for the police is greatly diminished.

The Conversation

Wangui Kimari, Anthropologist, University of Cape Town and Zoltán Glück, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Politics

Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems

In Nigeria’s recent election cycle, many citizens looked to Peter Obi for change. But the country needs people-led social transformation, not saviors.

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Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems
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On February 25, Nigerians once again took to the polls with a determination that their votes could change the fate of a country in deep despair. For the seventh time since a civilian dispensation began in 1999, Nigerians hoped that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would conduct a free, fair, and credible election. This hope was reinvigorated by the emergence of technology that would ensure, purportedly, a transparent process. Yet, once again, voters had their dreams crushed with an election marred by violence, ballot box snatching, forged results and, of course, voter intimidation and buying. In the days that followed, despite mounting evidence of irregularities and international outcry, INEC declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the winner of the presidential poll. The continuation of a gerontocratic oligarchy was solidified.

Although media attention focused on a young class of voters and the uniqueness of this historical moment, a deeper analysis is necessary. If nothing else, this election provided an opportunity to examine the shifting landscape of Nigeria’s elite electoral politics, and the increasingly complex voting patterns of citizens, while understanding these voters are increasingly a minority—less than 30 percent of the registered voters (about one-tenth of the population) cast their vote.

The dizzying rise of Peter Obi as a “third force” candidate over the last nine months was largely due to a movement of emergent and middle-class youth, the so-called “Obidients,” who used technology to galvanize a youthful base to push forward their candidate. That the Obidient movement was formed, ironically, off the back of the EndSARS movement, is in many ways a direct contradiction. The generation that was “leaderless” now suddenly had a leader. The rate at which young people chose this candidate still gives me whiplash. But there was no shaking their convictions. Obi was their candidate, and no one could shake their belief that a new Nigeria would be formed under his presidency, despite the evidence that he was directly endorsed by the same ruling class that has led to the country’s demise.

Obi is not a revolutionary, a social welfarist, nor even pro labor, but he became the savior many youth were looking for to “rescue” Nigeria. Ironically, the millions of youth that fought the EndSARS battle, and named themselves the leaderless soro soke (“speak up” in Yoruba) generation, did not seek elective office themselves. Rather, many put their eggs in Obi’s basket in supporting an older, veteran politician whose clean cut and soft demeanor led to his near deification. Other EndSARS activists, including Omoyele Sowore, were mocked for running in the election and were seen as not experienced enough for the job. In the end Sowore  performed abysmally at the polls, despite his demonstrated commitment to Nigerian youth and human rights record and involvement in the EndSARS protests (Sowore’s African Action Congress polled only 14,608 votes, faring worse than in the 2019 election).

This absolute faith in Obi was demonstrated when his followers patiently waited for five days after the election to hear from him. Instead of sending them into the streets, he advised them to wait for him to challenge the electoral irregularities in the courts. Why did a leaderless generation need a hero?

The contradictions in the EndSARS ideology and the Obidient campaign will be tested in the years ahead. After the Lekki massacre on October 20, 2020 brought the massive street protests of the EndSARS movement to an abrupt halt, many of the sites of protests shut down completely and groups that were loosely organized dismantled into relative silence for almost two years. In fact, there was little indication that EndSARS would evolve into a mass political movement until Peter Obi emerged on the scene in May 2022. The first- and second anniversaries of the Lekki massacre were marked by smaller protests in Lagos and a few other cities, which paled in comparison to the numbers at the 2020  protests. Still, efforts to free many of the prisoners arrested during EndSARS are proving difficult, with some protesters and victims still in jail today. There was no direction, no cohesiveness, and no willingness to move forward at that point. But in May 2022, seemingly out of nowhere, things began to shift. A candidate emerged that many EndSARS protesters seemed to think would be the savior.

Understanding the youth divide

While often lumped into a sum, the category of “youth” is not a single class of people. When Obi was said to carry the youth vote he actually only carried the vote of a particular category of young people, an emergent middle and professional class, who were also some of the most vocal in the EndSARS movement. However, if we are to use the discredited election geography as a proxy for representation, it is clear that this demographic is both well defined and narrow. Major urban areas like Lagos and Abuja pulled towards Obi, as did a few Eastern states. The North Central states including Plateau and Benue asserted their own identity by aligning with Obi, perhaps in a rejection of the Northern Muslim tickets of the Peoples Democratic Party (with whom Atiku Abubaker ran) and the APC.

The 2023 election also forces us to re-examine the dynamics of class, ethnic and religious divides and the deepening malaise of the poor and their disengagement with politics. What is clear from this election, like many before, is that Nigeria has yet to come of age as a democracy; indeed, the conditions for democracy simply do not exist. It is also quite evident that the Nigerian elite are adept at changing the political game to suit the mood of the Nigerian people. Electoral malpractices have shifted over time in response to the increasing pressure of civil society for accountable elections. Strong civil society advocacy from organizations focused on accountability and transparency in government have pushed against electoral practices. While these practices continue, there are significant shifts from previous elections where vote buying was brazen. However, it begs the historical questions: has Nigeria ever had a truly free and fair election, and is the process with which democracy is regenerated through the ballot the path for emancipatory politics? These questions become more relevant as the numbers of voters continue to dwindle, with the 2023 election having the lowest turnout in Nigeria’s electoral history, despite the social media propaganda around the youth vote and the turning tide of discontent that was predicted to shape the election.

Lessons from history

The fact that young people were surprised by the events on February 25 may be indicative of youthful exuberance or a startling lack of knowledge of history. The idea that a ruling class, who had brought the EndSARS struggle to a bloody end, would somehow deliver a free and fair election, needs more critical scrutiny. For those that remember the history of the June 12, 1993 elections—annulled after the popular rise of MKO Abiola—the election is no surprise. But for young people deprived of history education, which has been removed from Nigeria’s curriculum for the past 30 years, the knowledge may be limited. When a young person says they have never seen an election like this, they also cannot be faulted, as many young voters were voting for the first time. Given that many youth seem to underestimate the long history of elections and electoral fraud, the question of intergenerational knowledge and of a public history that seems to be absent from electoral discourse cannot be ignored. It is also hard to fault young voters, in a  land where there is no hope, and whatever hope is sought after can be found in the marketplace.

Many of the young organizers were adept at reading their constituencies and mobilizing their bases, but some of the elephants in the room were ignored. One of these elephants, of course, was the deep geographic and ethno-religious and class divisions between the North and the South. This is evident in the voting patterns in the North West and North East where Obi’s campaign did not make a dent. Though Obi ran with a vice president from the North, the majority of votes in Northern zones were divided between PDP, APC and New Nigeria People’s Party while two of the North Central states, Plateau and Nasarawa, went to Obi’s Labor party. Kano, the largest voting population in the country went to Rabiu Kwankwaso’s NNPP, an outlier who was ignored to the peril of opposition parties (Kwankwaso was the former governor of Kano).

Obi’s campaign also focused on the emergent middle class youth, as well as appealing to religious sentiments through churches on a Christian ticket and ethnic sentiments appealing to his Ibo base in the South East, where he swept states with more than 90 percent of the vote. The North is largely made up of the rural poor with poverty rates as high as 87 percent and literacy rates among young women in Zamfara state as low as 16 percent. Tracking Obi’s victories, most of the states where he won had lower poverty rates and higher literacy rates; states like Delta and Lagos have the lowest poverty counts in the country. While Obi used poverty statistics to bolster his campaign, his proposed austerity measures and cuts in government spending do not align with the massive government investments that would be needed to lift Nigerians out of poverty. While the jury is still out on the reasons for low voter turnout, deepening poverty and the limited access to cash invariably impacted poor voters.

Historically, Nigeria’s presidency has swung between the North and the South, between Muslims and Christians, and this delicate balance was disrupted on all sides. In 2013, an alliance between the Southern Action Congress (AC), the Northern All Nigeria’s People’s Party (ANPP), and Congressive People’s Alliance (CPC) to produce the Action People’s Congress (APC) was able to remove the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) who had dominated the political scene. Another important historical note is that of the legacy of Biafra that lives on, as an Igbo man has never taken the helm of the Presidency since the Civil War. While Obi ran on the promise of a united youth vote, the lingering ethnic and religious sentiments demonstrate the need for his campaign to have created a stronger alliance with the North and the rural and urban poor.

The failure of the youth vote is also a failure of the left

The other factor that we must examine is the failure of the left to articulate and bring into public critique the neoliberal model that all the candidates fully endorsed. Many young Nigerians believe if Nigeria works, it will work for everyone, and that “good governance” is the answer to the myriad problems the country faces. The politics of disorder and the intentionality of chaos are often overlooked in favor of the “corrupt leader” indictment. The left was divided between the Labor Party, whose presidential flag bearer ran on a neoliberal rather than pro worker or socialist platform, and the African Action Congress, who ran on a socialist manifesto, but failed to capture the imaginations of young people or win them over to socialist politics and ideology. In seeking to disrupt the two party power block, young Nigerians took less notice of the lack of difference between the three front running parties, and chose to select the lesser of three evils, based on credentials and the idea that Obi was “the best man for the job.” In fact, the Nigerian youth on the campaign trail emphasized experience in government as a criteria for a good candidate, over and above fresh ideas.

The left also failed to garner the EndSARS movement and channel it into a political force. The emergent youth middle class, not the workers and the working poor, continued to carry the message of liberal rather than revolutionary politics. Unfortunately, just as the gunning down of Nigerian protesters caught young people off guard in October 2020, so too the massive rigging of this election. However, there is no cohesive movement to fight the fraud of this election. The partisan protests and separate court cases by the Labor Party and PDP, demonstrate that the disgruntled candidates are fighting for themselves, rather than as a single voice to call out electoral fraud and the rerun of the election. The fact that there is acceptance of the National Assembly election outcomes and not the presidential election, points to the seeking of selective justice, which may eventually result in the complete disenfranchisement of the Nigerian people.

At this time we must seek answers to our current dilemma within history, the history that we so often want to jettison for the euphoria or overwhelming devastation of the moment. The question for the youth will now be, which way forward? Will we continue to rely on the old guard, the gerontocratic oligarchy that has terrorized Nigerians under the guise of different political parties for the past 24 years? Or will we drop all expectations and pursue the revolution that is sorely needed? Will young people once again rise to be a revolutionary vanguard that works with millions of working poor to form a truly pro-people, pro-poor party that has ordinary Nigerians as actual participants in a virbrant democracy from the local to the federal levels, not just during election time but every day?  Will the middle class Nigerian youth be willing to commit class suicide to fight alongside the poor to smash the existing oligarchy and gerontocracy and snatch our collective destiny back?

It is a time for truth telling, for examining our own shortcomings. As young people, as the left, and as civil society, we have relied too long on the oppressors for our own liberation.

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

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Africa in the New World Disorder

The war in Ukraine indicates a new world disorder, where great powers fight for primacy and Africa continues to be exploited.

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Africa in the New World Disorder
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There are some of us in Africa who believe that we should not invest any serious thinking in the war in Ukraine as it is one of the “European tribal wars.” The logic of that belief is that in Africa we have too many of our own problems to invest energy and effort in European problems. The trouble of being African in the present world order, however, is that all problems and wars end up African in effect if not in form. In the sense in which one who knows it feels it, every war in the world is an African war because Africans have, for the longest time, felt and known wars that are not of their creation. The African condition itself can be understood as a daily experience of war.

Over centuries Africa has been structured and positioned to be on the receiving end of all world problems. As such, Africa is not only the storied cradle of mankind, but also the cemetery of the human condition where every human and world problem comes to kill and to die as well. The worst of the human condition and human experiences tend to find final expression in Africa. It is for that reason that Julius Nyerere once opined that the Devil’s Headquarters must be in Africa because everything that might go wrong actually goes wrong in the continent.As the world tiptoes precariously from the COVID-19 pandemic, at the same time it seems to be tottering irreversibly towards a nuclear World War III. The countries of the world that have the power and the privilege to stop the war pretend to be unable to do so. Even some powerful and privileged Western thinkers are beating the drums of war. For instance, Slavoj Zizek, considered “the most dangerous philosopher in the West,” wrote for The Guardian in June 2022 to say: “pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine,” and “the least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do that we need a stronger NATO.” Western philosophers, not just soldiers and their generals, are demanding stronger armies and bigger weapons to wage bigger wars. In Ukraine, the conflict is proving too important to be left to the soldiers, the generals and the politicians. In that assertion Zizek speaks from the Euro-American political and military ego, whose fantasy is a humiliating total defeat of Russia in Ukraine. Zizek, the “dangerous philosopher” takes his place as a spokesperson for war and large-scale violence, agitating from a comfortable university office far away from the horrors of Bakhmut.

United States President, Joe Biden, spoke from the same egopolitics of war before the Business Roundtable CEO Quarterly Meeting on March 21 last year: “And now is a time when things are shifting… there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.  And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.” Clearly, an “end of history” fantasy of another unipolar world led by the US and its NATO allies has possessed Western powers that are prepared to pump money, weapons and de-uniformed soldiers into Ukraine to support the besieged country to the “last Ukrainian.” During a surprise visit to Kyiv on the eve of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden hawkishly said the US will support Ukraine in fighting “as long as it takes,” dismissing diplomatic alternatives. Suggestions for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine that have come from influential figures, such as Henry Kissinger on the right and Noam Chomsky on the left, have been dismissed with the sleight of the left hand, and this is as Ukraine is literally being bombed to dustAfrican countries that have for years been theaters of colonial invasions, proxy wars, sponsored military coups, and regime changes can only see themselves in Ukraine. What Ukraine is going through is a typical African experience taking place in Europe and the first victims are Europeans this time.

Being Africans in Africa, at the least, should equip us with the eyes to see the war in Ukraine for what it is, a war driven by a Euro-American will to power, a spirited desire for world dominion against the Russian fear of NATO encirclement and containment, and nostalgia about a great Soviet empireIt is a war of desires and fears from which the belligerents will not back off. The envisaged “new world order” can only be another “world disorder” for an Africa that has for so long been in the periphery of economic, political, and military world affairs.

Destined for war: The Thucydides trap

Well before the war, the Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani described how the “world has turned a corner” and why “the West has lost it” in trying to maintain its economic and political dominion by any means necessary and some means unnecessary. Power is shifting under the feet of a young and fragile Euro-American empire that will not lose power peacefully, hence the spirited desire to force another unipolar world without China and Russia as powersTaiwan and Ukraine are the chosen sites where the Euro-American establishment is prepared to militarily confront its threatening rivals. That “from AD 1 to 1820, the two largest economies were always those of China and India” and that “only in that period did Europe take off followed by America” is little understood. That the Euro-American empire has not been the first and it will not be the last empire is little understood by the champions of the “new world order” that Francis Fukuyama, in 1989, mistakenly declared as “the end of history and the last man;” a world ruled by the West, led by the US  and its European allies had arrived and was here to stay in Fukuyama’s enchanting prophecy. Ensuing history, 9/11 amongst other catastrophic events, and the present war in Ukraine, were to prove Fukuyama’s dream a horrific nightmare. Mahbubani predicts that the short-lived rise and power of the Euro-American Empire has “come to a natural end, and that is happening now.” It seems to be happening expensively if the costs in human life, to the climate and in big dollars are to be counted.

In the struggle of major world powers for dominion of the globe Ukraine is reduced to a burnt offering. While, on the one hand, we have a terrified Euro-American empire fearing a humiliating return to oblivion and powerlessness, on the other hand we have the reality of an angry China and Russia, carrying the burden of many decades of geopolitical humiliation. Such corners of the world as Africa become the proverbial grass that suffers when elephants fight. The scramble to reduce Africa to a sphere of influence for this and that power is a spectacle to behold and the very definition of the new world disorder; a damaged and asymmetrical shape of the world where the weaker other is dispensable and disposable.

In its form and content, this new world disorder is ghastly to ponder, not only for Africa, but also for the rest of the world. Graham Allison pondered it in 2015 and came up with the alarming observation that “war between the US and China is more likely than recognised at the moment” because the two powerful countries have fallen into the Thucydides Trap. The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, described the trap when he narrated how avoiding war becomes next to impossible when a ruling power is confronted by a rival rising power that threatens its dominion. Thucydides witnessed how the growing power and prosperity of Athens threatened Sparta in ancient Greece,  driving the two powers to warThe political and historical climate between China and the US captures the charged political temperatures that punctuated the relations between an entitled and proud Sparta confronted with the growth and anger of a frightening Athens. The proverbial chips were down.

For the US and China to escape the Thucydides Trap that is luring both superpowers to war, “tremendous effort” is required of both parties and their allies. The effort is mainly in mustering the emotional stamina to see and to know that the world is going to be a shared place where there must never be one center of power; that political, economic and military diversity is natural, and the world must be a decolonial pentecostal place where those of different identities, and competing interests can share power and space, is the beginning of the political wisdom that can guarantee peace. President Xi Jinping of China seems to have read Allison’s warning about the Thucydides Trap that envelops China and the US because on a visit to Seattle he was recorded saying: “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might make such traps for themselves.” The world is sinking deeper into new disorder and violence because rival powers cannot resist the Thucydides Trap and keep repeating “strategic miscalculations” based on their will to power and desire for global dominion.

The problem with China (the Athens of our present case) that troubles the US as the Sparta of the moment is that, as Allison observes, “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.” The problem with world powers, past and present, seems to be that they cannot live with difference. In fact, political, economic and cultural differences are quickly turned from competition to conflict, from opposition to total enmity. How to translate antagonism to agonism, and to move from being enemies to being respectful adversaries that can exist among each other in a conflictual but shared world is a small lesson that seems to elude big powers, whose egopolitics drives their geopolitics into a kind of militarized lunacy. One would be forgiven, for instance, to think that playground toys are being spoken of when presidents of powerful countries talk about monstrous weapons to be deployed in Ukraine. Observing from Africa one can hazard the view that big powers might be small and slow learners, after all. The death-drive of the superpowers is perpetuated by the desire to force other countries, including other powers, to be “more like us” when they are formidably determined to be themselves. To break out of the Thucydides Trap and avoid war, for instance, the US has to generate and sustain enough emotional stamina to live with the strong truth that China is a 5,000-year-old civilization with close to 1.5 billion people and in its recent rise is only returning to glory and not coming from the blue sky. And that the world has to be shared with China and other powers, and countries. China, and allies, would also not have learnt well from  many years of decline if they dreamt and worked for a world under their sole dominion.

Any fantasy of one world ruled from one mighty center of power is exactly that, a fantasy that might be pursued at the dear cost of a World War. Away from that fantasy, the future world will be politically pentecostal, not a paradise but a perpetually in the making and incomplete world where human, national, cultural, political and religious differences will be normal. From Africa that future world is thinkable and world powers should be investing thought and action in that and not in new monstrous weapons and military might.

Africa in the new world disorder

The symptoms are spectacular and everywhere to be seen. It can be the Namibian President, Hage Geingob, on live television having to shout at a German politician, Norbet Lammert, for complaining about the growing Chinese population in Namibia. Geingob asks why Germans land in Namibia on a “red carpet” and do “what they want” but it becomes a huge  problem for the West when the Chinese are seen in Namibia. That Namibia should not be reduced into a theater of contestation between the West and China because it is a sovereign country was Geingob’s plea to the German politician. It can be President Emmanuel Macron of France, in May 2021, asking President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for forgiveness for France’s role in the genocide of 1994—the bottom line being that African conflicts and genocides bear European footprints and fingerprints. Africa is reduced to the West’s crime scene, from slavery to colonialism and from colonialism to present coloniality. 

Coloniality is brought to life with, for instance, the US Republican lawmakers launching a bill “opposing the Republic of South Africa’s hosting of military exercises with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and calling on the Biden administration to conduct a thorough review of the US-South Africa relationship.” Africa as an object that does not have the agency to act for itself but is acted upon in the new world disorder, is real. It is Africa as a child in the world system that must be protected from other relationships and that must be told who to relate with and who not to relate with. It is also Africa as an owned thing that must be protected from rival owners. Behind the myth of African independence and liberation is the reality of Africa as a “sphere of influence,” about which world powers are still scrambling for control and ownership, including Russia and China. When in January 2018, Donald Trump referred to African countries as “all these shithole countries,” he meant that Africa still metaphorized the toilet of the world order, where disposable waste and dispensable people were to be found. Looking at the world disorder from Africa is a troubling view from the toilet of world affairs.

Looking at the world disorder from Africa with African eyes and sensibility makes it obvious that it is Africa that should be against war and for a decolonial, multipolar world order where differences are legitimated, not criminalized; where economic competition, political opposition, and rivalry are democratized from antagonism to agonism; and where political opponents are adversaries that are not necessarily blood enemies that must work on eliminating each other to the “last man.” Such a world order may be liberating in that both fears and desires of nations may play out in a political climate where might is not necessarily right. From long experiences of being the dominated and exploited other of the world, Africa should expectedly be the first to demand such a world. 

World powers need to be persuaded or to pressure themselves to understand what Mahbubani prescribes as a future world order that is against war, and liberating in that it is minimalist, multilateral, and Machiavellian. Minimalist, in that major countries should minimize thinking and act like other countries are minors that should be changed into their own image. Multilateral in the sense that world institutions, such as the United Nations, must be pentecostal sites where differences, fears and desires of all countries are moderated and democratized. Machiavellian in that world powers, no matter how mighty they believe they are, must adapt to the change to the order of things and live with the truth that they will not enjoy world dominion alone, in perpetuity. The world must be a shared place that naturalizes and normalizes political, economic, cultural, and human diversity.

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

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