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Kikuyus Will Wear Kaptula and Other Short(s) Stories

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On September 1, 2017, the day the Supreme Court of Kenya nullified the 8 August elections, I was riding in a city-bound minibus matatu on Nairobi’s Waiyaki Way. I sat in front with the driver. The passenger seated next to me must have received a text message on his mobile phone because he began howling at the driver to tune in to the radio. The matatu was blasting hip-hop reggae at the time. It was a few minutes after 11.00am. What followed can only be best captured by a tragic-comedy playwright.

“The general election of August 2017 was not conducted in accordance with the constitution and the applicable law, rendering the declared results invalid, null and void. A declaration is hereby issued that the third respondent was not validly elected and declared as the president-elect and that the declaration is null and void,” pronounced Chief Justice David Maraga on Citizen Radio.

My fellow passenger, on hearing the words “invalid, null and void”, wailed loudly in agony, like someone who had been pricked by some sharp object, and called to his God – “Ngai” – so loudly that the driver was startled.

“Now see what these western people have done to us (one riu uria andu a ruguru matwika),” he harangued in the Kikuyu language. Shattered and stuttering, he spoke in staccato, unable to string his words together coherently. When his phone rang, he answered, “I am not in a frame of mind to talk right now……”

What followed was the incoherent muttering of someone possessed with schizophrenia. He cursed Maraga. He cursed the Kisii people collectively and insinuated how Maraga and his Kisii community were foolish and idiots. As if momentarily posing for introspection, he blamed the Jubilee Party political barons for allowing a non-Kikuyu to ascend to the Chief Justice’s position.

See what they have done to us

“Now see what these western people have done to us” (one riu uria andu a ruguru matwika), he harangued in the Kikuyu language. Shattered and stuttering, he spoke in staccato, unable to string his words together coherently. When his phone rang, he answered, “I am not in a frame of mind to talk right now……”

Since then, that matatu incident has variously manifested and replicated itself in different settings among the Kikuyus – individually and collectively. It is as if the Supreme Court ruling damaged their ethnic group’s psyche, causing a schizophrenic attack that cannot be explained rationally.

Days later, a friend confessed to me: “So this is how these people felt in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled in our (Jubilee’s) favour?” It was a rhetorical question. “I was so angry, so affected on the day Maraga said Uhuru had not won, it looked like my world had gone on a tailspin.” Emotional and irrational, this friend even admitted to me that if he had his way, he would kill the Chief Justice.

“For how long will Raila disturb our peace?” is a refrain that has been gaining momentum in Kikuyu gatherings – in homesteads, churches, social functions and some select exclusive clubs in Nairobi – since the Supreme Court ruling.

The first ever Presidential Election Petition case No. 5 was taken to the inaugural Supreme Court of Kenya in March 2013 by the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD), the opposition coalition led by Raila Amolo Odinga. It sought to overturn the election victory of the Jubilee coalition led by Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, who today is the fourth president of Kenya.

The Supreme Court judges, led then by the president of the court, Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, in arriving at their verdict, said: “In summary, the evidence in our opinion, does not disclose any profound irregularity in the management of the electoral process, nor does it gravely impeach the mode of participation in the electoral process by any of the candidates who offered himself or herself before the voting public.”

That Supreme Court judgment, read by Mutunga in under ten minutes (Kenyans, who had been waiting for days with bated breath for the judgment, were asked to read the entire judgement online) cast a shadow of devastation and disquiet among the opposition’s core supporters. Yet they took it in their stride, even as they were chided by the Jubilee coalition brigade to “accept and move one”. As much as they were hurt, they did not go into a frenzy of “political madness”, threatening to kill Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, and condemning and deriding his Kamba ethnic community.

Since September 1, 2017, I have numerously and repeatedly heard presumably reasonable and well brought-up Kikuyus propounding sickening theories about how some communities “need to be taught a lesson”, how David Maraga should not presume he is so important as to think “he cannot be taken out”. Such careless talk has been taking place among Kikuyu folks in social functions and places, including birthday parties, funeral services and restaurants.

To the consternation of even the most hardcore Kikuyus, the man claimed that if Raila ever became president, all Kikuyu men would be forced to wear kaptula – colonial-type khaki shorts that used to be worn by the regular police until early 1970s and which today are still worn by prisoners.

Maraga has been denounced and renounced in equal measure. The Kisii people – including all the communities that live in the western sphere of Kenya, mainly the Luos and Luhyas – have been collectively lampooned and considered to be “not too clever people” (ti andu oge). Ultra-Kikuyu sub-nationalists have been advocating for the murder of the Chief Justice and the leader of the opposition, Raila Odinga, as the “final solution” to this unceasing menace.

“For how long will Raila disturb our peace?” is a refrain that has been gaining momentum in Kikuyu gatherings – in homesteads, churches, social functions and some select exclusive clubs in Nairobi – since the Supreme Court ruling.

Fuelled by the MP for Gatundu South, Moses Kuria (jamba ya ruriri, or the brave warrior of the Kikuyu nation), who is on record for publicly and unapologetically advocating for the assassination of Raila, the Kikuyu people are now being primed, after being conditioned and socialised over time, that Raila encapsulates all their political problems, and that they would be better off and safer if he were to be taken out.

Let me illustrate this schizophrenic delusion that seems to have attacked a section of the Kikuyu community with a few anecdotes. Three weeks ago, I attended a birthday party in one of the gated, leafy and posh suburbs of Nairobi. After the people had settled down to whet their appetite, and later in the evening as they engaged in social drinking, the conversation naturally and ordinarily turned to politics.

As the conversation gathered more heat (as opposed to more light), one of the guests propounded a theory on why Kenyans (many Kikuyus conflate Kikuyu sub-nationalism with national patriotism and vice versa) should never vote for Raila Odinga. To the consternation of even the most hardcore Kikuyus, the man claimed that if Raila ever became president, all Kikuyu men would be forced to wear kaptula – colonial-type khaki shorts that used to be worn by the regular police until early 1970s and which today are still worn by prisoners. As ridiculous as his pronouncements were, he defended them fervently and vigorously. It was blatantly clear he was not bluffing.

“But as a Kikuyu I cannot vote for that Luo. As Kikuyus, we are called to vote for one of our own. It doesn’t matter if he is a drunkard, a thief or just plain inept. He is ours. That is who God has given us.”

Taken to task to explain where his weird theory emanated from, he reminded all and sundry that sometime in 2003, Raila had purportedly said that if he ever become the president, Kikuyu men would be hauled to Kamiti Prison. His interpretation of Raila’s warning (which yet to be proven): All Kikuyu men will be wearing shorts as long as Raila is the head of state.

This loose, flippant talk might have been treated as a sick joke, one which would have elicited awkward laughter, but it wasn’t. It was taken seriously by the crowd. The tragedy was that the middle-aged man spreading this falsehood was once the finance director of a blue chip company.

Ordained by God

Days after the Supreme Court overturned Uhuru’s win, my close friend’s mother – a respected leader of the Mothers’ Union of the Anglican Church of the Mt. Kenya region – called him and told him that she had an urgent thing she wanted to discuss with him. When they met, the mother went straight to the point: “John you must sack that housegirl of yours from western Kenya (the housegirl is from Kakamega County). You cannot continue keeping her. Do you know these people well? I will get you a housegirl from Murang’a.”

“Were it not for the fact that she is my beloved mother”, John told me afterwards, “I would have tongue-lashed her.” He told me that his mother had told him that “since these western people have no respect for us (how could they have overruled our win?) we should not have mercy on them.” His mother, a born-again Christian and well-educated in Kenya and the USA, did not find any contradiction in her counsel to her son, and if she did, she was not going to lose sleep over it.

Yet, it is my lawyer friend Nguru who encapsulates the irrational mood of the Kikuyu people that has pervaded their space post-September 1, 2017. “Yes the government of Uhuru and William Ruto has been corrupt, incompetent and messed up,” he told me two weeks after the Supreme Court ruling. “But as a Kikuyu I cannot vote for that Luo. As Kikuyus, we are called to vote for one of our own. It doesn’t matter if he is a drunkard, a thief or just plain inept. He is ours. That is who God has given us.”

A litigation lawyer of long standing, he argued that “where we have reached now, it matters not whether Uhuru won or lost, whether the Supreme Court’s decision is right or wrong. We must defend uthamaki (kingly leadership ship) by all means and by any means necessary. We must cast our lot with one of our own – and that is not a point for discussion or rationalisation.”

It was lunchtime and as a strict Catholic, he was headed to the Holy Family Cathedral in central Nairobi for the lunch-hour intercessional prayer to the Holy Mary Mother of God.

“The Kikuyu people are living in post-truth times,” says a Kikuyu elder associated with the Kenya Church group – an amorphous grouping of evangelical Christians that came together in the late 1990s. “Kikuyu professionals do not want to deal with justice issues, it is unpalatable” said the elder who did not want his name disclosed. “It is the elephant in the living room.”

To demand and sue for justice is to agitate for chaos, is to upset the status quo; justice has been criminalised to mean “destruction of property”.

As tragic as it is, said the elder, it is the church that has been fanning this fight against pursuing justice and truth. “Justice and truth have a way of being disruptive,” he said. “And the Kikuyu business and political elites have sworn that they must hold onto state power come what may.” The professional leadership coach and speaker told me that many Kikuyu evangelical pastors have aligned themselves to the Jubilee coalition and have been bribed to propagate pro-Jubilee messages of peace and stability. Anything outside of that boxed message is anathema to the preservation of Jubilee’s agenda of hoarding power. To demand and sue for justice is to agitate for chaos, is to upset the status quo; justice has been criminalised to mean “destruction of property”.

“The Kikuyu evangelical/Pentecostal pastors and new churches’ proprietors are involved in religious enterprise. They are in it for self-aggrandisement but also with a specific agenda: push Jubilee Coalition’s message of preaching that the president of the country is God ordained.”

A week after the Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision, pastor wa Ngunjiri, who preaches on Sunday mornings at Kameme FM, a Kikuyu vernacular station, took the trouble to explain in biblical terms why President Uhuru Kenyatta was cantankerous and furious in the afternoon of September 1, 2017. “When the ruler of the nation is agitated and seemingly untoward in his behaviour, there is a powerful message that God is relaying to the nation,” said the lady pastor, whose three-hour programme is listened to religiously by hoards of Kikuyus.

“God is asking us Kenyans to rally around the ruler, because it is not every day that a ruler is annoyed and unsettled,” cried the pastor on the airwaves. “The almighty God has already ordained a leader for us and that leader is Uhuru Muigai wa Kenyatta. It is the duty and obligation of every Kikuyu voter to come out and cast his or her vote for him, because we Kikuyus believe in and serve a living God.”

The mainstream established churches are no better, said my Kikuyu elder friend. The National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) used to be a powerful Christian platform that kept former President Daniel arap Moi in check in the 1990s as the country grappled with a decade of reestablishing multiparty politics. “But today, it is a pale shadow of its former self.”

NCCK is mainly composed of five denominations – the Anglicans, the Methodists, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), Quakers (otherwise known as the Friends Church) and the Salvation Army. When the Secretary-General is speaking, he is presumably speaking on behalf of the five churches, a consensus that is normally agreed upon in its General Assembly.

“Yet, from a cursory glance of the press conferences that NCCK has held in the recent past, it is evident that Peter Karanja, an Anglican, is not really speaking on behalf of the five churches,” said my friend. “I can tell you without a doubt, the Quakers, the Salvation Army and a section of the Anglican church have been suing for justice and truth, and this is what leaders within NCCK have been fighting for every time the Christian body seeks to talk truth to power.”

But the PCEA, Methodist and another section of the Anglican church will hear none of that message. “Peter Karanja has been put on a tight leash – he can only speak of maintaining peace and the need for NCCK to respect the laws of the land and the government of the day. If he ever attempts to go outside of that script, he will be kicked out by the more powerful Kikuyu wing of the Protestant church body.”

The church in Kenya has never pretended that it is not ethnically aligned in its mission and vision. The PCEA and Methodist churches are regarded as Kikuyu and Meru churches. And rightly so, because a majority of its adherents and top leadership are Kikuyu and Meru.

The PCEA leadership openly threw its weight behind the President Mwai Kibaki government (2003–2012) and during the 2007-2008 post-election violence; some of its top leadership was allegedly even adversely mentioned as having abetted “retaliation violence” in sections of the expansive Rift Valley region. Although the Methodist church is not as “loud” as the PCEA, it also backed to the hilt the government of Kibaki, as it is currently backing the Uhuru-led Jubilee coalition government.

A PCEA church elder who attends the church’s Kirk Session in Kajiado County unabashedly said to me, “When it comes to supporting Uhuru, it is not about Christianity but about our political survival: we swore under oath to protect subsequent Kikuyu leadership after Mzee Kenyatta exited the scene.”

The Anglican church, on the hand, is a melting crucible of followers scattered across the country, much like the Catholic church. Hence, while the PCEA and Methodist churches are mainly concentrated in the Mount Kenya region and in the Rift Valley Kikuyu diaspora, Quakers and Salvation Army followers are mainly found in the western part of Kenya, specifically among the Luhya people of Bungoma, Kakamega and Vihiga counties. It therefore goes without saying that some leaders within the NCCK fraternity have been pushing for justice and truth for the simple reason that they hail from opposition areas that have been voting for Raila Odinga since 2007.

The financially and numerically powerful and stronger Kikuyu wing of the NCCK has not made the work of the religious organisation any easier. It has been unrelenting in its dogged determination to marshall support for the Jubilee coalition. A PCEA church elder who attends the church’s Kirk Session in Kajiado County unabashedly said to me, “When it comes to supporting Uhuru, it is not about Christianity but about our political survival: we swore under oath to protect subsequent Kikuyu leadership after Mzee Kenyatta exited the scene.”

Siege mentality

Obsessed with retaining state power at all and any cost, Kikuyu political barons have been bombarding the Kikuyu rank and file with messages of imminent annihilation if they do not band together to rescue the Uhuru presidency. The net result of this brainwashing is that it no longer matters how Uhuru wins the election – so long as he makes it to the helm. The peasant and urban poor Kikuyu are daily being socialised to look inward and to internalise ethno-centric values that inadvertently create a siege mentality. This mentality is then exploited by the political barons who can effectively use it to prey on their own people.

“The Kikuyu siege mentality, which is deliberately being created within their psyche, is preventing them from understanding the rest of the country’s anger about political injustices,” says Eric Wafukho, a leadership and management consultant. “So, with this apparent shielding of the average Kikuyu from the real political and societal problems ailing the country, the ordinary Kikuyu is made to live in a make-believe world, a world he thinks he controls, knows and understands.”

This statement rang true when my friend from Kangemi – a sprawling slum seven kilometres west of Nairobi city centre, who I had interviewed a month before the August 8 general elections, called me, a couple of days after Supreme Court ruling.

“We cannot allow these people to lord it over us and it does not matter that they now have enlisted the help of the Supreme Court – we will defend our leader by whatever means, because that is the only way we can ensure our survival,” said Thiong’o. “Uhuru has many faults and weaknesses, but we must overlook these shortcomings if we are to survive and are not finished by these western people.” To anchor his argument, he quoted a Kikuyu proverb: Iri Gikuyu, itire ukavi, which loosely translates to “As long as leadership is in Gikuyu hands, that is all that matters.”

The Kikuyu “business community” that was unleashed a few weeks ago in the Nairobi city centre and that was captured sporting dreadlocks are Mungiki members from Kayole – a densely and expansively populated ghetto located in the southeast of Nairobi.

I asked Thiong’o what he thought of the “Kikuyu business community” rolling into the central business district to ostensibly defend “Kikuyu property”. His answer was curt and to the point: “That is the way to go. We Kikuyus must defend our property.” Although my friend is nowhere near belonging to the Kikuyu propertied class, he, like many of the Kikuyu ghetto dwellers, have been unwittingly recruited to defend and fight for the class interests of his Kikuyu ethnic elites.

The Kikuyu business community is an euphemism for the notorious Mungiki youth group that cannibalised and preyed on its very own people in the late 1990s and the early part of the 2000s. When the youth group, which in the Kikuyu language means a multitude, descended from its base in the Kikuyu diaspora of the Rift Valley to seek refuge in Nairobi, it settled in the city’s slums, including Kangemi.

I can vividly recall Thiong’o being so terrified of his very own dreadlocked “brothers” who would show up at his house in the evenings to demand “protection” and “security” money. When the former internal security minister John Michuki cracked the whip on the group, he hailed Michuki as godsend. That was a decade or so ago. Today he does not find it a contradiction that the same group that used to send cold shivers down his spine is being resuscitated to surreptitiously defend a predatory Kikuyu elite leadership.

The Kikuyu “business community” that was unleashed a few weeks ago in the Nairobi city centre and that was captured sporting dreadlocks are Mungiki members from Kayole – a densely and expansively populated ghetto located in the southeast of Nairobi. Many of the privileged Mungiki members run the minibus matatus known as Forward Sacco matatus. Their adherents are transported into the city conurbation by these matatus with the sole mission of countering NASA youth mass action demonstrators. Hired expressly by the Jubilee coalition mandarins (this docket is being handled by Moses Kuria), they have been telling all who care to listen: “We the Kikuyus will rule this country, whether you like it or not.”

Enter the Kalenjin

As the Kikuyus are rolled out in the streets of Nairobi and Kiambu counties to defend their stake in the Jubilee coalition government, the Kalenjins have been waging their battle on a different and separate plane. Impeccable sources within Deputy President William Ruto’s camp believe that they are the people in control of the government, “more so now after the temporary Supreme Court setback,” said a Ruto confidante, who has worked in the deputy president’s office since 2013.

The claim that the Deputy President is actually the one running the Jubilee government is one I have heard since Uhuru and Ruto joined hands and formed a coalition government in 2013. As early as mid-2014, core staff in his office believed that Ruto was in control and has been running the show ever since.

The sharpest NASA critics that have been unleashed by Jubilee, particularly after the Supreme Court’s verdict, have been the Senator for Elgeyo Marakwet, Kipchumba Murkomen and the MP for Garissa, Aden Duale. It is not by coincidence that the two are some of Deputy President Ruto’s closest and most loyal foot soldiers. “That tells you just how many stakes Ruto has in the Jubilee Party and the government.”

The claim that the Deputy President is actually the one running the Jubilee government is one I have heard since Uhuru and Ruto joined hands and formed a coalition government in 2013. As early as mid-2014, core staff in his office believed that Ruto was in control and has been running the show ever since.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Kalenjin elite close to the powers-that-be have become even more fundamentally wedded to the belief that without Ruto, Uhuru is a sleeping duck. Among themselves, the Kalenjin elite, in their city hideouts, gossip about Uhuru and his rumoured drinking binges. Ruto, the Kalenjins point out, is a masterful tactician who is just waiting for the appropriate time to unleash his full potential.

A recent incident the Kalenjin elite like reminiscing about is the Mark Too funeral. Too was former President Moi’s trusted acolyte. When he died in December, 2016, many of the who’s who among the Kalenjin business and political class attended his burial on January 10, 2017.

My Kalenjin friends were later to tell me that Ruto, who attended the funeral with President Uhuru, belittled President Uhuru in the Nandi dialect. He ostensibly told the gathered crowd that he was the one in charge of the government and that the Kalenjin nation should stay firmly behind him. The talk of Ruto being in charge has been recurrent among the Kalenjin elite circles for a while now, so much so that they consider Ruto as the de facto president.

To many Kalenjins, the 2017 presidency is a forgone conclusion. “We are already looking ahead to 2022 and nothing will stop us.” Once Uhuru Kenyatta settles down for his final term, Ruto will supposedly roll out his best laid plans, not once, but numerous times, my Kalenjin friends tell me. Ruto, they say, has never deluded himself that the Kikuyus love him. “If the Kikuyus think they can outsmart our man, they are in for a rude shock. We will show them why we have been running the government even when their man has been at State House.”

Extremist Kalenjins like to think that Ruto will rule for 20 years – four years shy of President Moi’s rule, which lasted from 1978 till 2002. “Ruto will have ruled ten years of President Uhuru’s term (2013–2022) and then commence to rule his own two terms (2022–2032). Together with Moi, they will have ruled Kenya the longest time – individually and collectively.” This would be a political record that they are absolutely convinced will never be repeated.

Invariably, for the majority of the Kalenjin people, “the Supreme Court ruling is just a small irritating hiccup that once it is dealt with – and we are confident Ruto is going to fix the mess – Kenyans will have to contend with a long Kalenjin reign.”

By Dauti Kahura
Mr Kahura is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya

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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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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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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya

The violence plaguing the North Rift region in Kenya is complex, as it is caused by a multiplicity of factors

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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya
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On the 14th of February 2023, Kenya held a national prayer day in accordance with our government’s habit of holding ‘prayers’ when certain stressors reach an unbearable level on a national scale. Currently, there are many factors triggering national stressors, and one of them is a complex security issue loosely termed “banditry”, for which our government has no viable solution. So, we pray, declaring war on our people, instead of reflecting on and addressing the root causes of the crisis.

Over the years, these theatrics, which reflect the inadequacy of the government’s policies in dealing with our challenges, have occurred in different forms including ‘prayer breakfasts’, ‘national prayers’, ‘crusades’, and other forms of supplication. And while these functions are met with a wide spectrum of reactions ranging from approval to derision, depending on people’s spiritual or political leanings, it is crucial for us as citizens to realize that as much as these may be expressions of faith at our leaders’ personal level, at the political level they are basically ‘time-outs’ or pressure release valves. Where one has a strategy, time-outs create room for the implementation of plan ‘B’ or ‘C’. However, in the absence of a strategy, time-outs are called in the vain hope that the adversary or adversity at hand will somehow lose momentum.

There is more to the “banditry” phenomenon than meets the eye

There have been violent conflicts of many kinds in northern Kenya for many decades, some driven by terrorism, ethnic animosity, resource conflict, cattle rustling and other factors. Since 2017, however, many Kenyans have had greater awareness of the fact that the violence in northern Kenya isn’t just mere disorder; people have come to terms that there are definite geographical, economic and social patterns to, and causes of, the violence. The ongoing sporadic skirmishes of violence and cattle rustling in the North Rift area are exacerbating the difficulties that the communities there are already facing as a result of a debilitating drought. Most tragically, the violence in the region has led to the death of 16 security personnel and over 100 civilians in 6 months, a period largely overlapping with the first 5 months of H.E. President William Ruto’s time as the president. Sadly, over the years, Kenya had become largely inured to this slow-burning war due to its long duration and the boorish mentality that made the majority of us see certain parts of the country and pastoralists as somewhat ‘backward’ or ‘lesser’ beings. The most harmful effect of this attitude has been the inability or unwillingness of Kenyans to understand the root of this problem.

Things came to a head on the 11th of February 2023 when a group of security personnel on patrol were ambushed on the Lodwar-Kitale highway resulting in the death of 3 officers and the loss of guns, ammunition and patrol vehicles. This daylight highway attack was a huge affront to the authorities, resulting in instant opprobrium from citizens all over the country who wonder why our much-vaunted security agencies still couldn’t subdue these “bandits” after all these years.

Such attacks were turning into exasperating feelings of déjà vu because we see the same places, roughly the same seasonal conditions, the same kind of weapons, and even the same meaningless terminology and knee-jerk government reactions time and again. In every other part of Kenya, when laws are broken, they are investigated and addressed all along the chain from perpetrators, enablers, participants and beneficiaries. Most of the time, cases are brought to logical conclusions, but not in this case. Why?

Insights into the depth of this particular problem came from a very knowledgeable (if unexpected) source. The Governor of Trans-Nzoia County, Mr George Natembeya, came out at the National Prayer Day with a hard-hitting statement, asking the President not to let people around him “shield” him from the realities on the ground concerning the “banditry” in the North Rift areas. He went on to detail the woes of the security personnel working in the area, claiming that they were being sent into a veritable war zone without adequate allowances, equipment and even food supplies. I was personally taken aback because the previous operation took place when Mr Natembeya was the Rift Valley Regional Coordinator (RC), a position he held until last year when he resigned to run for a political office. Ironically, the office of RC is a very senior position in the executive arm of the Kenya Government that placed Mr Natembeya in direct charge of deploying the security personnel who suffered the same deplorable working conditions he was now lamenting about.  In a show of cognitive dissonance that is so typical of Kenyans, the Governor was widely praised for his ‘straight talk’ and honesty in ‘speaking truth to power’. Obviously buoyed by this newfound adulation, he went on to hold a press conference where he robustly advocated military involvement in the operation against bandits, firmly stating that the civilian security apparatus (where he spent the majority of his career before moving into politics) is inadequate to protect Kenyans. This advocacy was worrisome because the use of the loose term ‘banditry’ betrays a lack of knowledge of the identity or objectives of the adversaries.

The first major cause for alarm was the haughty ‘pre-devolution’ tone with which Mr Natembeya pronounced himself on the deployment of the military. He proceeded to even give recommendations on the orders that need to be issued, stating that they should be instructed to “decimate” the bandits. This is a startlingly cavalier term when used by a senior public servant in reference to citizens who haven’t been positively identified in any way. It is a term that could be useful in the primitive theatre of war, where opponents are positively identified by uniforms, positions or other means, but sustainable solutions to the security problems in the North Rift region invariably require more sophisticated approaches that would ensure that innocent citizens are protected and not “decimated” alongside. It would have been much easier for us ‘spectators’ to dismiss these statements as hot air emitted by someone who failed in his earlier responsibilities, but we lost that option when the government moved with speed to implement these external ‘instructions’.

The main cause of a complex issue

The violence plaguing the North Rift region in Kenya is complex, as it is caused by a multiplicity of factors. If it was simple, it would have been solved a long time ago through any of the heavy-handed responses deployed by successive governments against it. My work as a conservationist has given me unique insights into one aspect of it which seems to have been ignored by many.

Northern Kenya has a roughly 5-year drought cycle, and 2017 was a drought year. As a consequence, pastoralists moved south into Laikipia county in search of pasture. They invaded private ranches and provoked an inevitable state response, which resulted in the death of many ranchers, pastoralists, security personnel, and hundreds of livestock.

I headed a team of consultants tasked by an indigenous rights NGO to study Marsabit, Isiolo, Laikipia, and Samburu counties in a research project aimed at uncovering the dynamics and drivers of the southward transhumance and the resultant conflicts. We collected data from hundreds of respondents, including ranchers, pastoralists, government personnel and NGO practitioners. Three things stood out in our findings. The first was the sheer distances covered by the pastoralists with their animals, and the second was the fact that almost all the (government-designated) livestock movement routes have been blocked by private landowners. The most compelling finding, however, was that a vast majority of the pastoralists were from homelands that were now ‘wildlife conservancies’ controlled by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT),( -a conservation NGO. The pastoralists had lost access to their dry-season grazing areas.

After completing our fieldwork and analysis, we planned and held a validation workshop in Nanyuki on the 14th of June 2017. The findings of our report presented at the workshop resonated well with the community members who attended the workshop, some of whom provided us with further insights into the crisis. Our views on NRT were also ‘validated’ by a dramatic moment when my presentation was interrupted by their Laikipia county director, Mr Richard Kasoo, who literally screamed at me to stop vilifying NRT and had to be ejected from the room by the elders present. The top NRT management later called a more cordial meeting at a Nanyuki hotel, asking me as the team leader to expunge certain items from the report, which they felt portrayed them in a ‘negative light’. Much to their chagrin, I declined to do so, out of respect for my team and our respondents. This entire experience was a cameo of what ails us in this arena. Man-made stressors are routinely met with deafening silence and frantic inactivity until we invariably take ‘ruthless’ steps to ‘decimate’ the people we should have engaged before the fighting broke out. As such, those of us who observed the violent resource conflict in 2017 know that it wasn’t brought to an end by any human intervention. The drought ended, the rains came, and people who were fighting simply went back home.

These findings and my views have since been shared with several senior state officials and several non-state actors as well (including the protagonists), but have been invariably met with deafening silence and frantic inactivity. This is not to suggest that this is the only set of causes because the bloodletting certainly predates wildlife conservancies, which only started around 2004. Ethnic animosities that exist in this and other parts of Kenya are realities that we must factor in. The displacement and loss of access to resources also eliminated a lot of the geographical space that typically limited contact and conflict between some communities, resulting in more frequent flare-ups. However, the negative impact of conservation practices on the communities’ ways of life is definitely one of the easier drivers to deal with, so it is difficult to imagine that anyone is dealing with the more intractable and socio-politically fractious ones.

Most notably, the alacrity with which government authorities have embraced the advice of a former RC with a less-than-stellar record to handle a crisis is a worrying indication of not having a plan. One doesn’t need to be an expert to know that militaries aren’t trained to investigate, arrest or prosecute, so we could be courting numerous extrajudicial killings. The Interior Minister speaking in January, added his voice to the frightening miasma, saying that the Government will be ‘ruthless and brutal’ in this operation. We don’t seem to have had a plan for what we are doing now, so it cannot be easy to envision any plan for managing the inevitable fallout of such violence either. We are at war with ourselves in pitch darkness, struggling to finish ‘the other’ before dawn because the light of day might reveal who we really are.

This article was first published by The Pan African Review.

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