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Speak of Me as I Am: Ethiopia, Native Identities and the National Question in Africa

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Does a country create a people, or do a people create a country? KALUNDI SERUMAGA responds to Mahmood Mamdani’s recent analysis on the political situation in Ethiopia.

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Speak of Me as I Am: Ethiopia, Native Identities and the National Question in Africa
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The Westphalian principles, rooted in the 1648 Treaties signed in the European region of that name, have been monstrously mis-applied when it comes to the African continent, yet they established modern international relations, particularly the inviolability of borders and non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.

The default position of a certain generation and class of African nationalist, is to cleave unto the “new” nation born at Independence, as the only legitimate basis upon which African progress can be conceived and built. Everything else, especially that dreaded category, ‘ethnicity’ is cast as a diversion and dangerous distraction.

This is the tone that runs through Ugandan Professor Mahmoud Mamdani’s one thousand-word opinion piece: The Trouble With Ethiopia’s Ethnic Federalism, published on 3rd January for the New York Times by (and patriotically reproduced in Uganda’s Daily Monitor newspaper), bearing a total of fifty-four iterations of the word ‘ethnic’.

The default position of a certain generation and class of African nationalist, is to cleave unto the “new” nation born at Independence, as the only legitimate basis upon which African progress can be conceived and built.

At Independence, the Westphalia protocols were conferred on to the former colonial contraptions. The results were economic stagnation and political repression. For over five decades, these new nations have been the focus of intellectual and political agitation among Africa’s thinkers. When, after all that rumination and fulmination, our thinkers still get things horribly back to front, we all get stuck at a crossroads.

Mamdani’s essay comes as our current Exhibit A in this long history of intellectual malfunction. Current Prime Minister, the youthful Abiy Ahmed is faced with a many-sided series of demands from a deeply frustrated population. Many of these relate directly to the lack of an economic growth model that palpably raises living standards. Others reach further back to the age-old question of land ownership and reform. Naturally, the demand for greater civic rights to speech and assembly come as a prerequisite. One feature common to these demands is the tendency for the Ethiopians to speak through, and/or on behalf of the various constitutionally recognised native identities within the country. Some may have even formed militias for this purpose.

Mamdani’s essay comes as our current Exhibit A in this long history of intellectual malfunction.

Mamdani engages with this to make an analysis not just of the Ethiopian crisis itself, but of the question of what he terms “ethnicity” which, he sees as the issue – or more accurately, the ‘problem’ – permanently bedevilling African politics. “Fears of Ethiopia suffering Africa’s next interethnic conflict are growing,” he warns.

Prime Minister Abiy has been quick to concede much, and roll out as many reforms as he can. Most notably, he has ended the two-decade stand-off with his northern neighbour, Eritrea.

Mamdani engages with this to make an analysis not just of the Ethiopian crisis itself, but of the question of what he terms “ethnicity” which, he sees as the issue – or more accurately, the ‘problem’ – permanently bedevilling African politics.

This may not be enough, Mamdani tells us. The real problem, as he sees it, is the introduction of ethnicity into Ethiopian governance, and its central position in the Ethiopian constitution. This, Professor Mamdani says, was done by former Prime Minister, the late Meles Zenawi, who served as the de facto Ethiopian strongman from 1991 to 2012. Mamdani describes this as an attempt to replicate a similar strategy of ethnic organization that, in his view, was introduced to Africa as part of the colonial method of governing:

“In most of Africa, ethnicity was politicized when the British turned the ethnic group into a unit of local administration, which they termed ‘indirect rule.’ Every bit of the colony came to be defined as an ethnic homeland, where an ethnic authority enforced an ethnically defined customary law that conferred privileges on those deemed indigenous at the expense of non-indigenous minorities.”

This analysis fails to stop itself there, which would have been bad enough.

“The move,” continues the Professor, “was a response to a perennial colonial problem: racial privilege for whites mobilized those excluded as a racialized non-white majority. By creating an additional layer of privilege, this time ethnic, indirect rule fragmented the racially conscious majority into so many ethnic minorities, in every part of the country setting ethnic majorities against ethnic minorities.”

Describing native homelands as a “fiction”, the Professor goes on to say that while such ethnic labelling and selective privileging may have served the colonial purpose, it had the effect of first, “dividing a racially conscious African population” and second, turning them into people who saw themselves as “tribes” first and foremost.

Thus, he concludes, “Wherever this system continued after independence, national belonging gave way to tribal identity as the real meaning of citizenship.”

Having thus problematized the “ethnic” thing, Mamdani goes on to imply that there may be no peace to come in Ethiopia unless the issue is excised from the Ethiopian body politic in particular, and Africa in general.

These words have many meanings, none of them good for Africans, at least.

First, this is the same thing as saying that before European arrived in Africa, “ethnic” identities were not politicized, and neither were they units of administration. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is to say that there were no ‘politics’ in precolonial Africa, and neither were there forms of administration.

Having thus problematized the “ethnic” thing, Mamdani goes on to imply that there may be no peace to come in Ethiopia unless the issue is excised from the Ethiopian body politic in particular, and Africa in general.

Africans seem to have been roaming the continent as a cohort of an undefined but also homogenous mass, with wholly insignificant identities, which were only solemnised, formalized, and bestowed with political meaning with the arrival of a European power amongst them.

Second, it also implies that only the European had the skill to animate these identities, without them tearing the (therefore necessary) European-planted state apart.

Third, that the tragedy of modern Africa began when the European withdrew his controlling hand. Left to their own devices, the identities he had created, mutated into a Frankenstein’s monster of tribal strife.

Fourth, that there is such a thing as ‘national identity’ that sprung to life fully formed at independence, a good by-product of the European-planted state, and that it is African ‘tribalism’ that destroys it. In other words, European-invented African tribalism spoils the one good thing (nationalism) that Europe brought to Africa.

Finally, that belonging to the European-planted nation in Africa is the only viable means of an African citizenship. But if the British were pre-occupied with “ethnicizing”, and the resultant people’s feelings and loyalties were exclusively ethnic, where then does “national belonging” come from at independence?

The entire analysis of the crisis is a crisis in itself: of naming, histories, theories and practice. It is intellectually disingenuous and patronising, and goes beyond the usual linguistic demotion and belittling one usually encounters from many an expert on Africa.

Naming

Why are 34 million Oromo in Ethiopia an ‘ethnicity’, and 5.77 million Danes a ‘nation’?

Why are the three great wars that shaped modern Europe (Franco-Prussian, the 1914-18 and 1939-1945 great wars), not conceptualized as ethnic conflicts?

Mamdani’s entire analysis of the crisis is a crisis in itself: of naming, histories, theories and practice. It is intellectually disingenuous and patronising, and goes beyond the usual linguistic demotion and belittling one usually encounters from many an expert on Africa.

Why are there only a handful of contemporary states in Africa whose names bear a relation to the identity of people actually living there. Everyplace else is a reference to a commodity, or an explorer’s navigational landmarks.

This frankly malevolent labelling offers the space for the linguistic demotion of entire peoples. To wit: 34 million Oromo, seven million Baganda, 43 million Igbo, 10 million Zulu will always remain ‘ethnicities’ and ‘tribes’ to be chaperoned by ‘whiteness’. 5.77 million Danes, 5.5 million Finns, and just 300,000 Icelanders can be called ‘nations’, complete with their own states with seats at the UN.

Some of these states were only formed less than two centuries ago (Italy: 1861, Germany: 1815, Belgium: 1830), while some of those ‘tribes’, and most critically for the argument, their governing institutions had already been created.

Why has the ethno-federalization of Great Britain itself, not been seen as such, and as a recipe for conflict?

This, in fact, is the real ‘fiction’, and it has led to decades of instability. But just because Westphalia does not see them, does not mean the African nations don’t exist. The denial of their existence is in fact, an act of violence.

This is what led a thus exiled Buganda’s Kabaka Edward Muteesa II to write: “I have never been able to pin down precisely the difference between a tribe and a nation and see why one is thought to be so despicable and the other so admired.”

Many modern Africans, especially those whose identity is a product of the European imposition of contemporary African states, have a vested interest in making a bogeyman out of native African identity. The starting point of this enterprise is to invite the African to agree to see our own identities as a liability to African progress, by labelling them “ethnic”.

When “ethnic” conflicts do flare up, those natives who have refused to jump on to this bandwagon are subjected to a big “I told you so”, as Mamdani’s essay now seeks to do.

Many modern Africans, especially those whose identity is a product of the European imposition of contemporary African states, have a vested interest in making a bogeyman out of native African identity.

This was the position of the OAU member states, and many African political parties, including those in opposition to their increasingly repressive post-Independence governments.

But Ethiopia presents a huge problem for Professor Mamdani’s theory of the colonial roots of “ethnicity”, since its history falls outside the usual African pattern of a direct experience of European colonialism.

Since his initial assertion when introducing the issue of ‘ethnicity’, was that it was a result of European labelling leading to a “divide and rule” situation, Mamdani is then faced with the difficulty of explaining where those particular Ethiopian ‘ethnicities’ spring from if there were no Europeans creating them. Unless, to develop his assertion of homelands being a ‘fiction’, he thinks Ethiopia’s various nationalities are fictional too?

Ethiopia presents a huge problem for Professor Mamdani’s theory of the colonial roots of “ethnicity”, since its history falls outside the usual African pattern of a direct experience of European colonialism

He covers up this logical gap by pre-empting a proper discussion of that history. Then changing tack, he suggests that the presence of “ethnic” problems in Ethiopia, despite the country’s lack of a European colonial history actually shows that “ethnicity” is somehow a congenital defect in the body politic of all Africa.

“The country today resembles a quintessential African system marked by ethnic mobilization for ethnic gains.”

Of course the correct answer to all the above questions is that Africa’s Africans had their ‘ethnic’ identities well known and in place long before the arrival of any European explorer or conqueror. And these were not anodyne proto-identities, but actual political institutions and methods of organization and governance. But this is an inconvenient truth, because then it forces the proper naming of these alleged ‘ethnicities’: nations.

All told, deploying notions of “ethnicity” and “tribe” is a tactic to corral Africans into primordial nomenclatures, thereby avoiding a recognition of their pre-colonial formations as nations. It serves to fetishize the colonial project as the godsend device to rescue the African ethnic strife and predestined mayhem.

But if the 34 million Oromo are an ethnicity, then so are the 5.77 million Danes. More so for our situation so are the English, Scots and Welsh who field national teams during the World Cup and the Commonwealth games. We need consistency, people must be spoken of as they are.

Deploying notions of “ethnicity” and “tribe” is a tactic to corral Africans into primordial nomenclatures, thereby avoiding a recognition of their pre-colonial formations as nations.

Naturally, the emergent Independence-era African middle class was more than happy to go along with this erasure, in what Basil Davidson called an attempt at “the complete flattening of the ethnic landscape”, and even fine-tuned it. Where some concessions had been made to the existence of the old nations, these were quickly, often violently, dispensed with.

In British Africa, the politics of trying to dispense with this reality is what dominated virtually all the politics of pre-independence constitutional negotiations. The question informed even the political alliances that emerged at independence.

In Zambia it required a special constitutional pact between the new head of state, Kenneth Kaunda and the ruling council of the Barotse people – they have recently sought to repudiate it and return to their pre-colonial status.

Ghana’s Asante kings were against the British handing power to Nkrumah’s government. They argued that since they had ceded power to the British via treaty, then the departure of the British meant a termination of those treaties. Logically, therefore, that power should be re-invested in the ones it had been taken from under treaty.

In Kenya, the Maasai and the Coastal peoples used the same argument during the decolonisation conferences at Lancaster House. Significantly, the Somali rejected inclusion in the independence Kenyan state, insisting that they wanted to be integrated into independent Somalia. Unable to resolve the ‘Three Questions’ the Foreign and Colonial Office cynically kicked them into the not-very-long grass for the incoming leadership to deal with. The Mombasa Republican Council of today draws its political legitimacy from the updated colonial-era Witu Agreement of 1906, signed between their ancestors and the independence government.

Histories

To understand the current situation in Ethiopia, one must face up to the challenge of properly understanding any part of Africa, a continent so taxonomised and anthropologised by white thinking that it is barely recognizable on paper to its indigenous inhabitants.

It is a two-stage challenge. First: to understand Ethiopia’s history. To do that, one must first recognise and accept the possibilities of an African history not shaped, defined and animated by European imperatives. Africans, like all people, have been making their own history. And like people elsewhere, this has as much narration of the good as it does the bad.

To understand the current situation in Ethiopia, one must face up to the challenge of properly understanding any part of Africa, a continent so taxonomised and anthropologised by white thinking that it is barely recognizable on paper to its indigenous inhabitants.

Ethiopia’s crisis is a consequence of a century-old unravelling of the empire built by Emperor Menelik II (1889-1904).

As his title implies, this was not a nation, but an Empire: a territory consisting of many nations, brought into his ambit by one means or another.

Menelik’s motives and method can, and should be debated, but the fact is that Europe met its match in the Ethiopian Highlands, and were forced to leave Menelik to it.

Ethiopia’s crisis is a consequence of a century-old unravelling of the empire built by Emperor Menelik II (1889-1904).

Yes. Africans also produce momentous historical events. It is not an exclusive trait of white people.

We must get into the habit of discussing our own non-European driven history as a real thing with real meanings. Just as we may talk about the continuing long-term effects of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the European Balkan region, so can we talk about how the demise of Menelik’s empire continues to impact on the greater Horn region.

If that sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that since Menelik’s passing 120 years ago, Ethiopia has had only six substantive rulers: Zewditu/Selassie, Mengistu, Zenawi, Dessalegn and now Abiy.

On his passing, Menelik left a region covering more than three times the area he inherited. Prince Tafari, upon eventually inheriting the throne as Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930 simply sought to consolidate it.

In his 2002 biography: Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood, the Ethiopian author Nega Mezlekia tells the story of him and his family, as one of many Amhara families that migrate to Jijiiga, a region in the far east of Ethiopia during the reign of Emperor Selassie. This was part of a government programme of Amhara settlement to many parts of the Ethiopian countryside. Jijiiga is home to ethnic Somalis. Amhara expansion, one of several factors, eventually provokes an armed revolt. Ironically, the author in his youth joined the insurgents.

Emperor Selassie can be said to have made some errors, but the context is critical: his reign spanned a period that saw immense changes in global politics, and social ideas.

Consider his life and times:

He witnessed the two great inter-European wars, the fall of its empires (Italian, German, Ottoman, Japanese) and the end of direct European occupation of Africa. He suffered two European invasions of his realm, and lived in exile. He was a regent during the Bolshevic Revolution in 1917, and saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world superpower and the Cold War that followed. He may have been one of only a handful of world leaders to have been a member of both the United Nations, and the League of Nations that preceded it.

This sweep of history also had its impact on the Ethiopian peoples. One response was a growing demand for social, economic and political reform, including loosening the bonds of Selassie’s empire.

By the time of the 1975 coup against him, the world was a fundamentally different one than the one he had met when he took the throne. He was, in fact, so “old school” that his captors were taken aback when he calmly informed them that he had no personal income or savings to look after himself.

He took a hard line on Eritrea, which had settled into an uneasy federation, provoking a war of secession; continued Amhara settler expansion into Oromo and elsewhere; and he failed to manage Tigrayan nationalism, rooted partly in their dynastic loss of the imperial throne to that of Menelik’s Shewa kingdom. Critically, he did not effectively address agrarian land reform, one of the roots of the country’s political and agricultural crises.

So, to sum up Emperor Selassie: ultimately, he neither succeeds to fully consolidate his empire, nor does he re-order the empire’s boundaries and strictures, which he had inherited in a fundamentally different era. He found himself fighting the more conservative elements of his aristocracy opposed to his reforms; the modernist republicans concerned that he was not reforming fast enough; and the increasingly radical nationalists in the regions demanding self-determination.

Enter Colonel Mengistu, something of a zealot, but who, for all his violent tendencies, was more of the “social reform” persuasion, and sympathetic to the “land to the tiller” demands of the early radical youth movements. Having overthrown a monarch, he saw himself in the image of the Soviet Union’s Communist party in Russia which had deposed the Russian King Tsar Nicholas II. His task, as he saw it, was to create a socialist state.

However, Mengistu had basically taken over the same state that Selassie inherited and he was still wedded to it. His modernist concept of history and the world prevented him from understanding that he was dealing with a home-grown imperial history, and that he was in effect therefore, running an empire.

This blinds him to the “nationalities question”, and only intensifies the agitations among the various indigenous nations trapped in his now secular empire.

So, he basically tries to kill everybody opposed to him.

This is the reality Mamdani fails to see, and mistakenly calls Mengistu’s state a ‘unified republic’; interestingly, he does not offer any of the gruesome details of how Mengistu ‘instituted’ this so-called unification. The only places where Ethiopia was unified and a republic was in Mengistu’s mind (and in his armory). What the various territories wanted was recognition of their separate identities, and an unchallenged say over the land of their ancestors.

Mengistu’s response was to raise even higher the levels of violence needed to keep these rebellions in check, simultaneously fighting Tigrayan, Eritrean, Somali and Oromo insurgencies.

Theory and practice.

Ideologically, the leaderships of the Ethiopian insurgencies were taken over by persons claiming to be as Marxist as Lenin was. Eventually, all the belligerents, including the regime, claimed to be Marxist organisations, yet they were in conflict with each other. What intensified the crisis was the conflicting understandings of what Marxist practice should therefore be, in their context. It was at this point that a number of left-ideological debates came into play, and where a lot of left-ideologues lost their way.

Marxist theory, which mobilized millions of people worldwide, and its practical implications, should be examined with some care. History on this point is necessary.

These nationalist struggles based their arguments on the Leninist principle of “The Right of Small Nations to Self-Determination”, which had been partially applied in the Soviet Union from its formation in 1917. After Lenin’s death in 1924, his successor, Josef Stalin, found less time for it, and, in the face of sustained Western European aggression seemed to see it as a liability to the security of the revolution.

The 1975 coup that brought Mengistu to power (or, more accurately, the coup that Mengistu then subsequently violently hijacked) was a response to widespread unrest, particularly among youth and student movements. This led to a number of practical problems on the ground, in relation to ideology.

At the heart of both the Dergue and the later Tigrayan movements was the issue of land reform. Mamdani does note that the initial upheavals of the 1970s were driven by this, but then fails to make the correct links.

For the vast majority of Africans, especially back then, land is not just a place to live, but also a place of work. To be without land is to be without a secure job. Subsistence peasant agriculture is back-breaking, often precarious, and not financially lucrative. It is also – and many progressives fail to recognize this – autonomous. To a very great extent, the subsistence peasant is not dependent on the state or the global economy. If anything, those entities depend on the farmer whose austere lifestyle acts as a hidden subsidy in providing the market with cheaply-grown food at no investment risk to the consumer or the state. Clearly, one thing that can transform and undergird this existence is sensible reforms to the way the farmer secures tenure of the land they work.

But what happens when land rights encounter cultural rights based on land? A “homeland” is certainly not the “fiction” of Mamdani’s assertion. It hosts the identity and worldview of the people that occupy it. It holds their sacred sites, and places marking their cultural consciousness. More so, that culture underpins their ability to keep producing autonomously. To suggest that it does not exist or does not matter, actually shows a complete failure to grasp who black African people are and how they live, and think. It is a fundamentally anti-African statement implying, as it does, that black Africans do not have an internal intellectual and spiritual logic, developed indigenously, and augmented by physical spaces and objects within them, that informs a worldview. Africans, the suggestion is, are inherently transposable, as they are not tied to any thing or any place.

The captains of the old transatlantic slave ships could not have theorized it better.

Coming from someone who lives in Africa, this is a bit surprising. Coming from a professor heading an institute within one of Africa’s new universities, designed to bolster the colonial state’s mission of deracinating the African, perhaps less so.

However, the current crisis in Ethiopia is very real, and failure to finally resolve it holds huge implications for the entire region. That is precisely why a correct analysis is needed. Not a comfortable one rooted in essentially racist tropes.

The allegedly ‘ethnic demands’ were demands for a different type of guarantee to land rights than those being promoted by Mengistu. For example, would an Amhara family like Nega Mezlekia’s, originally settled by Emperor Selassie in Jijiiga, have a legally equal claim to land against the ethnic Somali communities native to the area, just because they now happen to be the ‘tillers’ there? Would there be a hierarchy of claims? In any event, who should decide? A central authority in Addis Ababa, or a federated unit representing the historic native community?

There are no easy answers. But the regime’s (and other ‘progressives’) complete refusal to even consider the issue, is what led to the conclusion that for there to be justice in Ethiopia, the issue of native nationalities, and their land-based cultural rights, would have to be physically resolved first. In short, it became clear that the land reform question could not be effectively addressed without also addressing the underlying question of productive cultural identities and the historical land claims that arise from that.

This was particularly sharp in those areas of the country –such as Oromo and Tigray- that are dominated by pastoralist communities. Historically, much of Africa’s land grabs have taken place against pastoralist communities, the great city of Nairobi being a prime example.

This is the basis of the ‘ethnic’ movements that have so perturbed Professor Mamdani. It was, in fact, a debate of the Left, and not some right-wing atavist distraction.

So, the great irony is that Ethiopia, home to that great bastion of mis-applied Westphalian thinking, the Organisation of African Unity, becomes ground zero for the great unresolved National Question as it applies to Independent Africa: what is an African nation, and is it the same thing as a given African state (or, more accurately, a state located in Africa)?

The armed struggle began in Eritrea, after Selassie’s unilateral abrogation of the federal arrangement. The original fighting group, called the Eritrean Liberation Front was soon violently displaced from the field by a more radical Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front of Isias Afwerki, espousing those aspects of Leninism and Maoism that enabled it to mobilise a broad front of all classes affected by the feeling of Occupation.

The rebels’ demands were clear: a federation of Ethiopia or separation from it; control of their own lands, and an equal recognition of cultures.

For his part, Mengistu, now fighting five separate militant groups, including a very militant hard-line the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Front based in urban Ethiopia, placed all his faith in military might. He ended up building the largest armed force in Sub-Saharan Africa (if not Africa as a whole) of some half- a million soldiers, and being heavily dependent on the Soviet Union, which saw him as a vital foothold in Africa, for war materiel and other supplies. He also received military support from Cuba. It again may not be widely known that at the height of the fighting, these different forces which had grown in to wholesale armies, were fighting some of the largest engagements (including tank battles) since the 1939-1945 European inter-ethnic conflict called the Second World War.

The fight progressively turned in favour of the rebels. With Mengistu’s main arms supplier, the Soviet Union, finally capitulating against the US in the Superpower contest in 1989, his forces were routed and he was driven from the capital in 1991.

The Eritrean armed struggle started in 1961, the Tigrayan one in 1975 and Oromo’s in 1973. All end with Mengistu’s fall.

If Mamdani genuinely believes these nationalities are just “ethnicities”, and that Ethiopia is now running the risk of hosting “Africa’s next inter-ethnic conflict”, then this history shows that Ethiopia has in fact already had the “next inter-ethnic” conflict. Mamdani’s fears, this is to say, are 30 or 40 years late.

To sum up Mengistu: he seized power in response to a severe political crisis, and then, misreading his position, sought to impose his concept of “socialism” on the various peoples still caught in the net of Menelik’s Empire state. This led to a situation of mounting violence, in which he saw just about everyone as an enemy to be physically crushed. His regime eventually succumbed to the overwhelming resistance.

Enter Meles Zenawi, who came out of that generation of student activists who took up the nationalities and land reform demands during the time of the Emperor. To many of them, Mengistu’s high-handedness in dealing with the matter was a disappointment. Tigrayans today do not easily recall that when Meles led the the youth to start the war, they sought refuge in Eritrea, and were nurtured and trained there by Isias Afwerki’s EPLF forces already at war against the Ethiopian state.

The issue of identity does not therefore mean that Africans are perennially and illogically at each others throats in some kind of primordial frenzy. They do politics, and are fully capable of defining their interests and maintaining relations, or breaking them off, as needs may dictate.

Zenawi (to an extent like Daniel Ortega on the other side of the world, and even Yoweri Museveni, in his own way), found himself in charge of a state now encountering a new, neo-liberal global world order being enforced by the only super power left standing. Like Selassie, the circumstances around them had changed greatly from when they had begun their political journeys.

Far from simply “introducing” a federal constitution whose “ethnic” nature Mamdani is problematizing, Zenawi’s regime was finally having the Ethiopian state recognise the long-standing historical realities that had emerged from decades of political and armed struggle.

To reduce the product of all that sweeping history to a notion of “fictions”, is a dangerous over-simplification.

In this quest for erasure, Mamdani applies the same misleading thinking backwards by calling the 1994 Ethiopian constitution a “Sovietificaton” of Ethiopia. The Russian nationalities were no more an invention of Lenin than the Ethiopian ones are of Meles Zenawi’s creation. The various units that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were based on nationalities long in place before the 1917 communist revolution took place there. The responsible thing to do, as a starting point, was acknowledge that fact, which the communists did (and Stalin to a greater extent than Lenin before him).

Yes, Meles was a dictator. And yes, the constitution is based on indigenous nations. That does not automatically suggest causality: Meles Zenawi did not “turn Ethiopia to ‘ethnic’ federalism”. Its long history did.

In fact, events show that Zenawi and the dominant faction he governed with, were no longer in support of the “rights of small nations” by the time they took power.

With the exception of holding the pre-agreed referendum on Eritrean independence (he may have had little choice in the matter: friends in Addis used to like to tell the story of how Meles’ own stepmother, who happens to be Eritrean, and who raised him, left him in his official Addis residence to go and vote for independence in Eritrea, then returned after), he fails to implement the spirit and the letter of the new arrangements that were based on principles forged in the course of the long war.

The best example is found in the very incident that sparked the current uprising: if the regime knew that – as Mamdani points out – the 1994 federal constitution guaranteed the nationalities concerned authority over their land, why then did it try to expand the boundaries of the Federal capital Addis further into Oromo territory over the objections of people there?

In other words, the problem in Ethiopia is the exact opposite of what Professor Mamdani sees. It is not the “ethnic” constitution at fault; it is the failure by the Zenawi regime to genuinely implement it, by negating the spirit of the idea in private, while pretending to uphold it in public.

In particular, Zenawi’s “Woyane” regime repeated Mengistu’s mistake of trying to hold on to Menelik’s state. Critically, he too failed to address the historic issue of land reform that began the whole shake-up of Ethiopia with the student protests against the Emperor. In practice, land is still the property of the state, to be handed out for “developmental” purposes, upholding the Mengistu mentality, but now in the context of global neo-liberalism.

“Derg and [the TPLF] took a very similar approach to the land question. Which is why, three decades after TPLF comes to power, they have still been unable to do land reform, abandoned agrarian reform and ironically, put rural Ethiopian land on the international auction. Something like four million acres of rural farmland, mostly in southern Ethiopia has been leased out to foreign investors since the mid-2000s, ” observes journalist Parselelo Kantai, who frequents the country.

Power comes with its temptations, and a state machine comes with its own institutional imperatives. It would appear that once a group finds itself in control of the apparatus of an empire such as Menelik’s, they become very reluctant to abandon its workings. Perhaps it is only the armed forces in Portugal, having overthrown their autocratic Caetano regime in 1974, that ever went on to immediately dismantle their empire and allow the conquered to go free.

The politics of the armed coalition coming together and finally driving Mengistu out may well have been the moment for this change in attitude to begin, not least because the Meles’ TPLF was by far the militarily dominant faction of the alliance.

To sum up Meles Zenawi: he evolved into what many ‘revolutionaries” became after the Cold War era: a technocratic autocrat placing his hopes in a neo-liberal approach to solving the country’s deep economic problems through a “developmentalist” strategy. He quite literally burned himself out hoping that, by bringing rapid infrastructural development, he could perhaps outpace the historical political claims, and thus render them redundant.

This essentially meant a new form of what Mengistu and Selassie had done before him: overlook people’s ancestral claims to this or that, and simply see the whole landmass as a site for “development” projects, no matter who they may displace or inconvenience.

But “any notion of ‘progress’ or ‘modernization’ that does not start from a peoples’ culture is tantamount to genocide.” the late Professor Dan Nabudere warned us.

Meles Zenawi sought to hold on to the very imperial state he had once fought. His unwillingness to fully honour the terms of the broad alliance of all the fighting groups, and instead consolidated his armed group to take factional control of the whole state and set the course for new upheavals. His sudden death became the opening for these issues to spill out into the streets.

His immediate successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, soon found that the kind of extreme state violence that had served Zenawi, and Mengistu before him, and Selassie before them both, no longer worked, forcing Deslaegn to resign in failure.

Abiy Ahmed must finally deal with these realities. Ultimately, any attempt to do politics based on the imperatives of the Menelik-created state was, and is, going to come up against the fact that this state actually started life as an empire. If the history of Ethiopia has shown one thing, it is that this approach has always provoked rebellions.

Ethiopia, one could say, is back to the pre-war situation it was in just before Mengistu’s coup.

The problem is conceptual; the same one that confronted Selassie and Mengistu: are we running a nation, or a homegrown empire made up of several? 

Mr Abiy Ahmed would be wise not to go down that path.

His challenge is to dismantle the remnants of Meles’ personal military apparatus, genuinely re-orient the country back to its federal constitutional ethos, begin to address the land tenure question, and quickly, before the political grievances – and the economic challenges underlying them – completely boil over.

As the world becomes less secure and with fewer overlords, there will be more and more examples of Africa’s invisible nations asserting themselves to manage control of their resources.

Dismissing them as “ethnic” is simply laying a foundation to justify violence against them.

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Kalundi Serumaga is a social and political commentator based in Kampala.

Long Reads

Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization: Capitalism and Poverty

This is the second of a two-part series that assesses the historical progress of the Pan-African movement and considers the global political economy, the relevance of Pan-Africanism in the 21st century and its potential to impact economic and political development within Africa and its diaspora.

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Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization: Capitalism and Poverty
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In Chinweizu’s “Africa and the Capitalist Countries” found in General History of Africa, Volume VIII: Africa since 1935, the author discusses various aspects and key points in history that have affected African states that pursued the capitalist road to development. The author explains that after WWII, the leaders of the anti-Axis alliance sought to prevent economic rivalries and hostile competition from capitalist countries, and thus a new economic arrangement was created tomanage peace”.

The arrangement,  the “Atlantic Charter”, was outlined by United States President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and instituted multilateral organizations to maintain political, economic, and military control of designated regions of the world. The Charter led to the development of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1945, where several economic institutions were created such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank system, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to manage international economic and political affairs, as well as the United Nations Organization and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which were established to manage world affairs and secure the collective defence of American and European powers, respectively. The European Economic Community (EEC) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) were later instituted to manage commerce, trade, and other economic areas of development.

The aforementioned organizations collectively made up the international structure of rules, laws, and regulations that oversaw the affairs of African states as they were co-opted into them. Moreover, the West was admittedly preoccupied with preventing the spread of Soviet influence in Africa, although such instances exist where African nations received Soviet assistance.

Chinweizu details how the West was determined to maintain its economic order and African dependence on Western powers and how, as a means of reassuring African leadership, it allowed economic development to experience forms of Africanization in order to accommodate Africans who desired political independence. This created a pattern where during the first 25 years of African political independence, any nation’s attempt towards economic development was met with efforts by the West to ensure said development maintained a pro-capitalist form. Despite African nations’ attempts to lead their own economic development in alliance and aligned with capitalists’ interests, they ultimately maintained a position similar to that prevailing in colonial times, and remained the source of economic growth for foreign nations while the economic conditions of African states deteriorated. Chinweizu states that “If anything the colonial economic relations waxed stronger” as African nations did the biding of the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO, end eventually the European Union.

Is Pan-Africanism still relevant in the 21st century

Harris and Zeghidour highlight that internationally there is a need to grow the awareness of the actual numbers of majority black nations and communities, and broaden the awareness of the cultural and social influences of Africans and their descendants as they have roots and are present in South (and North) America, Asia, and the Middle East. They also provide great context about the situation and conditions African states endure in the current global political economy and note that under such conditions it is difficult for diaspora Africans and continental Africans to consistently engage free of external influence such as ideology and national issues. Moreover, the authors declare that African leaders also endure great challenges because they are faced with the prospect of either choosing to serve the interests of African descendants and Africans and affiliating themselves with an international Black network, or aligning themselves with the interest of global superpowers, which were/are apparently against the interests of Africans and African descendants based on deductive reasoning and consideration of historical events.

For example, as noted in “The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, “in 1945, at the end of World War II, some 700 million people around the world lived under imperial rule. They were “subject peoples”, with no freedoms, no parliaments, no democracy, and no trade unions to protect workers. Post-WWII, many former colonies throughout the world, especially within Africa, were motivated to pursue political independence based on the promises of liberation from colonial states who asked for their support during the war, and the betrayal that ensued when colonization resumed after European nations and their allies adopted the newly instituted Bretton Woods system. Harris and Zeghidour conclude by highlighting that, in their modern form, most African nations are only a generation old and that African leaders have been trained by the former colonial powers, which increases the need for Pan-African efforts among continental Africans as well as diaspora Africans, and the need to advance the welfare of Africa and its descendants.

Any nation’s attempt towards economic development was met with efforts by the West to ensure said development maintained a pro-capitalist form.

The only Pan-African Congress that has been organized in the 21st century thus far has actually occurred in phases, since the 8th Pan-African Congress took place in 2014 at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and in 2015 at the University of Ghana. Significant developments of the 8th Pan-African Congress included resolutions which upheld that: Arab and Western countries should compensate with due reparations for the damages inflicted on African people, and this should be pursued vigorously; there should be a day when black workers throughout the world stay away from work to mark the need for reparations; there is a case for reparations regarding the extensive economic and psychological damage that colonialism has done to the African people globally, and which continues today via neoliberal policies; the perspectives, roles, and actions of African women should be considered a foremost priority in all Pan-African movement initiatives; a policy including youth in all phases of future Pan-African work should be established; a commitment should be made to dedicate resources to creating and operationalizing a new Pan-African education curriculum that would not only teach STEM courses but would also teach all African children to see themselves as Africans first, and only secondarily as members of the Wolof, Zulu, or any other ethno-tribal group.

Unfortunately, African nations are only allowed to engage in economic development efforts as facilitated by international overseers such as the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union, and the United States. This point is further exemplified by developments in the international economic order such as the G20 Conference, which has South Africa as its sole African nation. Unsurprisingly, South Africa’s economic policies benefit the racial minority population, which is classified as “white”, even as the nation continues to endure high levels of economic poverty (underdevelopment) and a population that is segregated or socially stratified by income and economic status.

The example above demonstrates the need for collaboration among Africans and members of the diaspora, as opportunities to obtain education and employment in developed non-African states do little to contribute to the development of Africa and the diaspora. No matter how many recognitions of “progress” the African diaspora receives, the first Black or African this or that means very little if those individuals do not critically attempt to contribute to the diaspora en masse. Such examples of “progress” can be deduced to be gradualism and tokenism, as they celebrate “acceptance” from the global political economy, much like the Africans who had the opportunity to receive education and employment in developed nations during the 20th century.

As noted in Part I, Pan-Africanism evolved into two distinctive schools during the 20th century: racial Pan-Africanism, which seeks to unite African descendants based on racial classification and social hierarchy, and continental Pan-Africanism, which seeks to unite around issues facing the continent of Africa and African descendants world-wide. In the 21st century, both schools are more than necessary as the conditions of colonialism, slavery, and racialism have only transformed and adapted to the global economy. Therefore, it is also necessary for advocates of the Pan-African movement to develop their treatments and adapt to the current international economic order.

Pan-Africanism is undoubtedly relevant in the 21st century. However, several internal issues and exogenous factors need to be addressed by the African diaspora and by Pan-Africanists. The issues that need to be addressed are significant because they limit the ultimate capacity of Pan-Africanism and its application within the international global order.

Opportunities to obtain education and employment in developed non-African states do little to contribute to the development of Africa and the diaspora.

Whereas the miseducation of African descendants is a by-product and a necessary condition of the global political economy, this absolute truth is hardly told in public and is usually discussed in closed quarters such as the ivory towers, the policy community, and among non-profit, private, or government officials. That said, advocates of Pan-Africanism bear the responsibility of confronting and removing the self-imposed limitations, as the implications of these issues affect the entire African diaspora directly or indirectly. As mentioned above, the mistreatment and marginalization of women, the inclusion and integration of youth into Pan-African agendas, and ideological differences among Pan-Africanists are three areas of primary concern due to the diverging perspectives. The decision of the 7th Congress to create an international secretariat to manage the day-to-day affairs of the movement is an invaluable step in the right direction as it enables adherents of Pan-Africanism to meet frequently.

Thus far, the 21st century has seen many attempts to practice and operationalize Pan-African political, economic, and social ideals in contemporary society. In addition to various members of the African diaspora who are committed to raising awareness about the importance and usefulness of Pan-Africanism in modern society using digital and mobile applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Skype, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, other advocates have developed websites, podcasts, and dedicated YouTube channels to the Pan-African cause.

Students, activists, scholars, and human rights advocates interested in economic and social justice have utilized the aforementioned applications to organize protests and movements such as South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, Nigeria’s #EndSARS, the international Black Lives Matter movement, and most recently Howard University’s #BlackburnTakeover have all made pan-African demands and declarations. Established in 2011, Black Power Media (BPM) is an example of Pan-Africanists collaborating via YouTube to distribute news and conduct productive conversations from a Pan-African perspective. BPM describes itself as “a Black-radical independent media project” that seeks to “challenge the narrative about Black politics and the [international] Black condition.”

The contemporary era of Pan-Africanism has received significant contributions from members of civil society, elders, activists, advocates and scholars who continued to uphold the ideology and philosophy. A slew of international and national social and political grassroots organizations and campaigns, such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, and the All-African People Revolutionary Party, have organized local sections and continued to advance the movement. As members of the African diaspora continue to engage in world affairs, groups of  private, multilateral, and non-governmental advocacy, policy and economic development organizations have emerged with pan-African aims, such as the African Union, the Pan-African Council and others.

The miseducation of African descendants is a by-product and a necessary condition of the global political economy.

In 2016, the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation was established at the University of Johannesburg as a flagship centre of excellence to conduct research and provide a forum for scholars, practitioners, and members of civil society across Africa and the diaspora to exchange ideas and contribute to the production of pan-African knowledge and culture. Academic journals and conferences around the world continue to receive considerable scholarship from proponents of Pan-Africanism in fields such as African and African American studies, economics, political science, history, public policy, governance, conflict resolution and more. Moreover, publishers in Africa, Europe and the US have continued to discuss the topic and, with the development of the digital era, online publications such as The Elephant have emerged as leading platforms for pan-African discourse, culture and information.

Can Pan-Africanism catalyse development in Africa?

Economic development and policy reform are boosted by political liberation, yet Africa’s new democracies continue to experience economic underdevelopment. In Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat, Peter Lewis considers this the “democracy-development disconnect” in his essay “Growth Without Prosperity in Africa”. Lewis notes:

“Officials and average citizens alike often note the ‘disconnect’ between macroeconomic indicators and microeconomic performance…data on poverty and human development are showing few significant improvements, and citizens report discouragement when surveyed about attitudes and economic conditions… This paradox presents a basic challenge for Africa’s new democracies. However desirable democracy may be in its own right, political liberalization does not ensure economic regeneration or improved popular welfare [and] the tension between democracy and welfare is evident…”

Lewis continues his analysis and suggests that while early observations of democracy in Africa did not outperform non-democratic African governments economically, a recent study by Brian Levy assessed 21 African states between 1975-2000 and found that African states pursuing democracy and economic reforms were more successful than non-democratic states. Despite the metrics used to assess economic growth in Africa, (GDP growth, income per capita, etc.)  – which led to Levy’s assertion that democracies in Africa were economically successful – such metrics are deceiving as they conceal two important limitations. Firstly, African states are under the purview of the international economic order, which ensures that non-African states benefit from African labour more than African states due to the extraction and commodity-based economy. Secondly, democratic African states that experienced “economic progress” according to Levy, also suffered from welfare state policies, as the public welfare of citizens did not improve, which further illustrates Lewis’ point of “growth without prosperity in Africa”.

Pan-African attempts to development are centred around African-led methods to development that supersede the obstructions of capitalism, and seek to improve the political, economic and social conditions of Africa’s states as well as the diaspora en masse, despite geography. That said, one could assume that if African leaders, heads of state, institutions, and lay people within the diaspora were genuinely given the opportunity to collaborate and construct ways to catalyse said development, they would be at least moderately successful. Whereas the continent of Africa is extremely diverse, with varying histories and cultures, absolute consensus is not necessary. Members of the diaspora and Africa’s stakeholders do not need to agree on every aspect of economic and political developmental approaches; they only need to agree to eliminate any obstruction and hinderance to development, whether capitalist or non-capitalist.

Revitalised Pan-Africanism: An egalitarian and humanitarian approach

African states continue to be politically and economically dominated by a minority of global citizens who reside in developed nations (note that some of these individuals take residence on the continent), while Africans are only seemingly valued as labour. Considering the nature of development in Africa, as well as the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary issues of racialism within the diaspora, it is important to consider how the African diaspora’s unique way of creating, surviving, and thriving under extreme conditions can be applied to political and economic development in Africa. Development in Africa in the era of globalization has occurred under the guidance of international organizations and developed nations with either capitalist or socialist economic systems, which ultimately benefits foreign nations, international organizations, and non-Africans more than Africans en masse. This relationship should be mutually beneficial for Africa’s economically and socially marginalized populations to experience uninterrupted development.

In order for the 21st century to witness the improved potential of the movement, Pan-Africanists need to abolish the marginalization of African women and integrate the perspectives and input of women who have lived on the frontlines and at the intersections of the movement for centuries. Historically the role of African women has been reduced yet Pan-Africanists should be aware of the political, economic, military, social, and cultural feats and contributions of African women. Beyond their historical role as woman warrior queens, queen mothers, queen-regents, and commercial and agricultural masters, African women continue to lead, stabilize, restore and heal, and innovate social, cultural, professional, political, and economic processes and activities in nations all around the world. No nation would exist or function without the contributions, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of African women. The movement must consider these facts and reorganize or recalibrate itself so that African women are not only viewed as equal, but also that social and institutional mechanisms support women in the same fashion as women have supported the efforts of male African descendants.

African states are under the purview of the international economic order, which ensures that non-African states benefit from African labour more than African states.

Pan-Africanists must also identify mechanisms to transcend the political, economic, and socially constructed limitations imposed by political, economic, or socio-cultural ideologies and paradigms such as race, class, gender, sex, religion and political party affiliation. For example, the international Black middle class could practice Amilcar Cabral’s theory of class suicide in order to foster connections with members of the diaspora who do not have proportionally higher incomes.

Pan-Africanists must openly and actively discuss the issues brought about by miscegenation (sexual reproduction with people outside of the African diaspora) and colourism, which directly relate to what I consider the “politics of sex” and the “politics of race”. Pan-African enthusiasts need to collectively understand the unspoken rules of so-called “interracial reproduction”, or miscegenation, and social hierarchy based on skin complexion, or colourism, which are socio-political mechanisms to marginalize/reduce, or to domesticate their African-ness/Blackness (Africanity) and draw them closer to people who identify as white.

Lastly, Pan-Africanists must identify mechanisms to reduce xenophobia in all its forms within the African diaspora, including but not limited to: misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ethnic and religious-based discrimination, prejudice against immigrants, elitism, anti-homelessness, anti-intellectualism, gerontophobia (discrimination and fear of aging and the elderly), Islamophobia, and Africanophobia (fear of Africa/n related concepts). 

In order to generate an example of an applicable method of Pan-African development in the 21st century and beyond, a more inclusive and global perspective is needed that incorporates all members of the diaspora. Rather than seeking consensus among supporters of Pan-Africanism, proponents need to understand the aims of the movement, create spaces for all African descendants to contribute, and not perpetuate the dehumanizing practices that were used to politically, culturally, and socially separate African descendants.

No nation would exist or function without the contributions, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of African women.

As an example, this essay suggests “Black Equalism”, which is a human rights philosophy rooted in Pan-Africanism and egalitarianism. Black Equalism seeks to advance the cultural, social, economic, and political parity of African descendants and the world at large, and to inspire and promote egalitarian thought, principles, and practices. Should such a philosophy be utilized and promoted within the diaspora, it could possibly ameliorate the impact of capitalism, which is rooted in classism and imperialism. 

Egalitarianism can be defined as “the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities”. Egalitarianism is the opposite of elitism, promotes a classless society, and advances the notion that “all members of society deserve equity and are equal despite social, political, and economic status”. By synthesizing Pan-African thought with egalitarianism in the 21st century, Black Equalism seeks to advance the cultural, social, economic, and political parity of African descendants, and to inspire and promote egalitarian thought, principles, and practices. Black Equalism seeks to promote and facilitate the development of bonds, paradigms, campaigns, entities and institutions, and social, economic, and political systems that feature, serve, develop, and incorporate all members of the African diaspora regardless of educational background, income level, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, residence, geographic location, and political and/or religious affiliations (otherwise known as social, political, or economic status).

To that effect, should individuals including but not limited to: artists, designers, writers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, performers, musicians, poets, community organizers, business people, scientists, engineers, technologists, teachers, or anyone interested in collective action to change the status quo actually work together, one can deduce that the diaspora and the continent would benefit. 

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Long Reads

Within the Margin of Error? — A Post-Election Polling Retrospective

Assessing the accuracy of survey results and examining the five factors that contributed to pollsters missing the mark in the 2022 elections.

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Within the Margin of Error? — A Post-Election Polling Retrospective
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Now that nearly all of the election “dust” has settled, it is appropriate to revisit the results of the final round of pre-election presidential contest polls that were presented in my last piece. In doing this I shall compare them with the official/IEBC results and attempt to explain the apparent contrasts.

But has nearly all the ‘dust’ really settled?

Before undertaking the main task at hand—analysing the degree to which the last round(s) of surveys generated presidential results that were reflected in those declared by IEBC Chair Wafula Chebukati—it seems necessary to explain the delay in finishing this piece for The Elephant.

Ever since the return of election polls ( themselves coming in the wake of the return to multi-party competition in the 1990s) a major challenge in assessing their accuracy has been the credibility-deficit often associated with the official results. Leaving aside the assumed willingness of survey respondents to “honestly” reveal their voting intentions, as well as the impossibility to exactly predict voter turnout, a number of factors have been identified—and on some occasions, well documented—including: the buying of IDs/voters’ cards, threats to/physical obstruction of would-be voters, intimidation of/interference with campaign activities, ballot-stuffing, and fraudulent vote-counting. As such, one survey firm that had undertaken pre-election polling since 1997 decided prior to the 2013 contest not to do this (at least for public release) “until and unless we are confident that the official results are credible”—although just how this might be determined raises additional issues.

For last year’s election as related to this piece that seeks to assess the accuracy of survey results, it was thus necessary to wait to see if any credible evidence emerged that might at least cast doubt on the official presidential results, especially since, as shown below, nearly all of the final pre-election survey results were “wrong”—that is, not just showing a “different” candidate winning, but also doing so by a  figure that was well outside the margins-of-error of the reported polls. The author therefore paid close attention first to whatever grounds the four dissenting IEBC commissioners had for refusing to confirm the results announced by their chairman, and then to the nine “consolidated” petitions that were taken to the Supreme Court, and the issues that the Court sought to scrutinize and determine. However, the commissioners remained silent, with three of them subsequently resigning, apparently to avoid interrogation by the tribunal established by the president following its authorization by the Kenya Kwanza majority in the National Assembly. Court proceedings also yielded far from sufficient evidence to “prove” that the election was “stolen”, even if not all of the arguments used to overcome these petition challenges were entirely convincing.

As such, it was possible to complete a draft of this piece within several months of the election.  However, almost immediately thereafter, one of the IEBC commissioners, Ms Irene Masit, declared that rather than resign as did her three “dissenting” colleagues, she would contest her possible removal through the above-noted tribunal . In this context, shortly before her first scheduled appearance before it, she announced her intention (in mid-December) to release a “bombshell” about the official presidential results. It was, therefore, rather an anti-climax when she failed to appear at the hearing, instead sending her lawyer, the focus of whose complaint was the composition of the tribunal rather than any substantive refutation of the results.  Indeed, despite several additional tribunal sittings, no such “bombshell” was ever dropped, with Masit remaining silent throughout (even if doing so may have contributed to the tribunal’s ultimate decision to recommend her removal from office), leaving the motivation behind her initial statement quite up in the air.

On the other hand, a different “explosive device” was lobbed by Raila Odinga on 18 January—and repeated several times thereafter in several public rallies and press statements: that a “whistle-blower” from within the IEBC had made available the full constituency results of the presidential contest (which are yet to be posted on the IEBC’s website) showing that Odinga had won with a margin of over two million votes, giving him some 57 per cent of all votes cast.  Just why it had taken so long for these “true results” to be made available (either by the ‘whistle-blower’, or by Azimio depending upon when they were provided) was never explained, however, and a rigorous scrutiny of them by a long-term observer-analyst of Kenyan elections, Dr Charles Hornsby, cast serious doubt about their credibility. Central here was his comparison of the supposedly “true” presidential tallies in a number of key constituencies (“key” in the sense that these results amounted to a complete reversal of the official presidential figures), but where, almost without exception, the parliamentary results, none of which the “whistle-blower” sought to refute, amounted to overwhelming victories for Ruto’s UDA party and its affiliates, thus making such reversed presidential results incredulous. (It is also curious why Masit remained silent about them, whether during the tribunal’s hearings or at any other time, as well as why the “whistle-blower” had not made them available to her or to any of the other dissenting commissioners before they resigned—assuming this was the case.)

Just why it had taken so long for these “true results” to be made available by Azimio was never explained.

Even more recently, the investigative and civic education NGO, Inform Action, released a report that assessed the degree to which last year’s election met the standards demanded by the constitution and relevant statutes. While it identified numerous failings at all stages of the electoral process, none was identified as having significantly affected the presidential results.

In sum, then, no incontrovertible evidence has come to light since the election that calls into question the validity of the declaration of William Ruto as the winner. This includes the claim, also made on several occasions by Azimio leaders, that an exit poll confirmed the results released by the IEBC “whistle-blower”. Yet no figures were released in connection with this poll , let alone the identity of the agency that conducted it or any details of the methodology used (i.e., sample size and distribution across which polling stations, the number and wording of the questions asked, the proportion invited to be interviewed who refused and their distribution over the map, etc.)  Such doubts were magnified by the fact that (especially if the results were favourable to Odinga) the results were not released immediately all the polling stations had closed, as is the general case globally, or at least prior to the announcement of the official results five days later. Further, an effort to obtain such information by writing to a senior Azimio official yielded no fruit.  (Why various media interviews with Azimio leaders since this claim was first made failed to raise any of these questions is also curious.)

No incontrovertible evidence has come to light since the election that calls into question the validity of the declaration of William Ruto as the winner.

With this context (which, it should be noted, however, is at least potentially subject to change), the main issue examined in this piece can be addressed: what (if anything) can explain the significant gap between nearly all of the final round of polls and the official results?

Were the pollsters ‘wrong again’?

Notwithstanding the usual disclaimers from survey firm representatives that their results were “snapshots-in-time” rather than predictions, questions about the accuracy of their work arose immediately enough constituency-level results had been tallied to indicate that even if Odinga was going to emerge the winner—or even whether either he or Ruto would get over the 50 per cent + 1 hurdle—the margin between these two main contenders was going to be far smaller than the final polls had indicated, with one exception: that of Radio Africa, the only one that put Ruto in the lead, although within that poll’s margin of error, as indicated in the following table containing all these results as well as their collective average:

Chart 1
Moreover, and as I have noted in previous pieces in this series, since ballots do not provide any “undecided” or “no response” options (and those left unmarked or spoilt by any “stray” marks are removed from the total of “valid votes cast” that is used to calculate the 50 per cent + 1 requirement), it would make sense this close to an election to also calculate survey results with those no-named-candidate results removed, which are presented in the table below for TIFA (and which were included in its 3 August media release) and the five-survey average, as well as the official/IEBC results:

Chart 2
In other words, Ruto obtained about 6.5 per cent more votes than his five-poll average of 44 per cent, and Odinga obtained about 5 per cent less than his average of 54 per cent.

So, what might explain this “error”? (And note that the margin of error in none of these “incorrect” polls does so.) To answer this question, five factors will be considered: the “evaporation” of expressed support for the two minor candidates; the postponement of gubernatorial contests in two counties; the variable distribution of voter turnout; respondent dishonesty; and a possible late “wave” in Ruto’s favour.

Factor one: burst of the Wajackoyah ‘balloon’

I had previously suggested that the expressed intention to vote for George Wajackoyah—which was recorded at 4 per cent in TIFA’s late June survey—could have been largely “for fun”, and that some, if not most, of those respondents who actually vote would bring themselves to choose between the only two serious contenders.

That this was a likely scenario was suggested by the drop in expressed support for him by more than half (to 1.8 per cent) in TIFA’s final pre-election survey. Given the fact that—as was the case previously—in that survey Ruto had rather more support among voters under 35 and that Wajackoyah had nearly three times more support among such voters than among the more elderly, it can be assumed that on 9 August, Ruto was the main beneficiary of the “evaporation” of Wajackoyah’s votes to less than 0.5 per cent.

Factor two: the two postponed gubernatorial contests

A second factor is the failure to hold elections for governor in two counties where Odinga received clear majorities. As may be recalled, it was immediately clear on 9 August  that there had been a “mix-up” of the gubernatorial ballot papers in Mombasa and Kakamega counties, with the candidates’ images on the ballots failing to match their names. This meant that the elections for these positions had to be postponed, raising the question as to how much that might depress voter turnout in these two counties. That this was a concern on the Azimio side was evident when Mvita MP and ODM gubernatorial candidate, Abdulswamad Nassir, cried foul on the basis that these  “are all ODM strongholds and we read ill-motive to reduce the number of votes in favour of Raila Odinga”, an allegation also contained in one of the Supreme Court election petitions subsequently filed on Odinga’s behalf.

Buttressing Azimio’s argument (though not mentioned in the petition) were the results of a question in TIFA’s final pre-election survey, released on 3 August, which revealed that Kenyan voters perceived the importance of the position of governor as equal to that of president, and thus its absence from the ballot would most certainly have a negative impact on voter motivation.

Chart 3
In its full judgment, the Supreme Court, having first affirmed the IEBC’s authority to postpone elections under various conditions including those at issue here, held that the petitioners had failed to prove that the postponement led to a suppression of voter turnout, and that it was motivated by malice.

Leaving aside the second point about any “malice or bad faith”, a more precise estimate than that which was presented to the Supreme Court helps to reveal the extent to which voter turnout in these two counties was, in fact, depressed, and how this impacted on the presidential results in those counties.

In answering these questions, a more detailed review of the presidential election results is helpful.  First, according to the IEBC, 65.1 per cent of nationally registered voters cast votes, 99.2 per cent of which were valid, making a total of 14,213,137 valid votes.  Of these, 50.49 per cent were cast for Ruto and 48.85 per cent for Odinga.  Ruto’s total was based on receiving 233,211 more votes than Odinga, and 69,573 votes above the 50 per cent + 1 required for an outright win.  However, national turnout was rather lower than it was in the 2017 election (77 per cent).  Among several national level factors that may account for this, most widely acknowledged was the absence of a serious presidential candidate from the Mt. Kenya region, so that voter turnout there was 15 per cent below the 2017 figure.

Kenyan voters perceived the importance of the position of governor as equal to that of president.

With specific regard to Kakamega and Mombasa, five years ago the turnout was 75 per cent in the former and 59 per cent in the latter. This time, apparently (but not conclusively) due to the absence of gubernatorial ballots, these figures were 60 per cent and 44 per cent, respectively. By comparison, the average for the other four counties in the western region was 64 per cent, and in the other five coastal region counties, 59 per cent, both considerably higher than in the two counties at issue.

At the Supreme Court, however, the petitioners used an average turnout of 72 per cent for the last three elections in Kakamega, and posited an average of 56 per cent in Mombasa, yielding a 12 per cent turnout gap in both counties on 9 August. However, given the credibility issues regarding voter turnout in previous elections, using regional county averages from 2022 as well as the differentials between Kakamega and the rest of western and between Mombasa and the rest of the coast region, yields a more accurate estimate of what the turnout in these two counties would likely have been had all six positions been on the ballot.

In order to arrive at such an estimate, the difference in average turnout in the 2017 and 2022 elections for the counties in each of the two regions—aside from the two at issue—was calculated. For the western region, aside from Kakamega, turnout in 2022 was 12.1 per cent below what it was in 2017.  Based on this reality, since turnout in Kakamega in 2017 was 74.9 per cent when all six positions were on the ballot, it may be assumed that in 2022 it would have been about 63 per cent, or 3 per cent higher than the 60.3 per cent recorded on 9 August.

A similar calculation for the coast region (leaving aside Mombasa) yields a figure that is 11.2 per cent below the 2017 level for its five other counties.  As such, taking into account that turnout in Mombasa in 2017 was about 9 per cent lower than it was in the region as a whole (60.0 per cent), it appears that in 2022 it would have been 51 per cent. However, given that the 2022 gubernatorial contest was considerably more competitive (in which Abdulswamad Nassir of ODM defeated Hassan Omar of UDA by a mere 20,000 votes) than in 2017, a slightly higher turnout may be assumed compared to 2017 when Ali Hassan Joho had no serious challenger. Thus, perhaps 53 per cent is a more likely figure, about 9 per cent higher than what occurred on 9 August.

Based on the above pair of assumptions, the disadvantage Odinga suffered through these two postponements can be estimated. For Mombasa, 9 per cent of all registered voters represents 57,813 votes.  Assuming that these “extra” votes would have been split in the same proportions as were the votes that were cast on 9 August, Odinga (having obtained 58.07 per cent) would have garnered an additional 33,571 votes, and Ruto (who obtained 41 per cent) an additional 23,702 votes.  Similarly, in Kakamega, Odinga would have garnered an additional 18,002 votes, and Ruto an additional 7,101 votes, had voter turnout been 3 per cent higher.

Taking these “lost” votes into account, the national totals for both candidates would therefore have risen to 7,206,944 for Ruto and 6,994,503 for Odinga. The quite modest gain for Odinga thereby reduces the overall gap between them from 233,211 to 212,441.  Further, if we assume that the two other candidates would between them have gained another 800 or so votes (based on totals of 0.93 per cent in both counties, giving them a combined national total of 94,756), that would have brought the total national vote to around 14,296,000 valid votes.  This, in turn, means that Ruto would have obtained about 50.41 per cent of all valid votes (rather than 50.49 per cent), while Odinga would have obtained 48.93 per cent (rather than 48.85 per cent).  Overall, these figures would have slightly narrowed Ruto’s margin above 50 per cent: from 69,573 to 58,944 votes.

As can be seen, these calculations do not affect the overall result, but they are measurable, and it may be asked why the petitioners were not more precise in their submission to the Court, if they were going to be presented at all.  At the same time, given the dismissive language in the Supreme Court’s eventual full judgment, it is unclear how large such a turnout gap would have had to be in order for this aspect of the IEBC’s performance to be taken into account, or whether any such gap would have been enough to force such a consideration unless one or more petitioners could have convinced the Court that such errors were deliberate as opposed to being only “accidental” ballot-printing errors by the Greek firm that supplied them.

Factor three: turnout differential – Ruto vs. Odinga ‘strongholds’

The next and potentially much weightier “suspect” for the pollsters’ “error” is national voter turnout, as TIFA emphasized in a “Cautionary Note” that accompanied its 3 August media release: “The outcome of the election depends on voter turnout and this cannot be predicted by surveys.” Even earlier, in several of its pre-election survey-release, TIFA had also made clear that far more respondents were claiming to be registered voters than was indicated by the IEBC’s figures. For example, in its second-to-last pre-election survey (conducted at the household level from 21 to 26 July), 93 per cent of randomly selected respondents claimed to be registered voters, yet based on the adult population as identified in the 2019 Census plus the youth who came of age since the last voter registration exercise was concluded in February of last year, the correct figure is only slightly aove 80 per cent.

Such a “reality-check” is bolstered by comparing the proportions among those claiming to be registered voters in the nine zones used by TIFA in presenting its findings who stated that they would “definitely” or “probably” vote with the IEBC’s actual – and significantly lower – figures:

Chart 4
As shown, while the national level gap is a hefty 30 per cent, it varies across these 9 zones from a high of 34 per cent in the coast region to just 1 per cent in the South Rift.  The key question, therefore, is to what extent the variations in actual voter turnout explain TIFA’s (and several other firms’) “erroneous” final survey figures.

To answer it, we can first look at the voter intention figures from the same late late July TIFA survey and compare these with the percentages actually won by each candidate in the nine zones:

Chart 5In doing so, several points emerge.  First, in the respective home-zone areas (Nyanza and Central Rift) of the two main presidential candidates, the gaps between TIFA’s results and those of the IEBC are minimal (i.e., only 2 per cent higher in Nyanza, and only 1 per cent lower in Central Rift). Second, Ruto did almost as well in the second zone in which he obtained a majority—Mt. Kenya—as he did “at home”: 79 per cent vs. 83 per cent, only a 4 per cent difference.  By contrast, in the zone where Odinga obtained his second largest majority—Lower Eastern—his majority was considerably smaller than it was “at home”: 75 per cent vs. 87 per cent, a 12 per cent difference. As has been noted, Odinga’s running-mate in this election came from Mt. Kenya region, as did Ruto’s, and not from Lower Eastern, the home of Kalonzo Musyoka who had been his running-mate in the previous two elections. Third and finally, Odinga suffered decreases in his actual vote proportions as compared with his TIFA figures in two zones – South Rift and Nairobi—amounting to 18 per cent in total, whereas Ruto’s negative difference-gap in Central Rift was only 1 per cent.

It is unclear how large such a turnout gap in Mombasa and Kakamega would have had to be in order for this aspect of the IEBC’s performance to be taken into account by the Supreme Court.

With these contrasting regional results in mind, does differential voter turnout explain any of the pollsters’ pre-election “error”?  The simple answer is “yes”, but to what extent requires another “deep dive” into the official/IEBC data.

First of all, of all 48 electoral units, Odinga obtained more votes than Ruto in 28 (27 counties plus the Diaspora), leaving 20 counties in which Ruto out-scored him. In the former category, there were 7,968,238 valid votes, while in the latter there were 6,244,799.  However, whereas Odinga obtained only 70.6 per cent of all valid votes in his “dominant” areas, Ruto obtained 78.3 per cent in his.  Or to put it the other way round, while Ruto obtained 28.7 per cent of all valid votes in Odinga-dominant areas, Odinga managed only 21.1 per cent in Ruto-majority areas. In terms of actual votes, Odinga got 5,627,630 votes in his “strongholds”, while Ruto garnered 4,889,909 in his. However, what got Ruto over the line is that while Odinga obtained only 1,315,300 votes in Ruto’s areas, Ruto obtained 2,286,232 in Odinga’s.

What got Ruto over the line is that while Odinga obtained only 1,315,300 votes in Ruto’sareas, Ruto obtained 2,286,232 in Odinga’s.

Such figures underscore the importance of voter turnout in explaining Ruto’s advantage.  Specifically, whereas it was about 69 per cent in the 20 Ruto-dominant counties, it was only about 62 per cent in Odinga’s 27 (leaving out the few Diaspora voters).

This analysis can be extended by answering another specific hypothetical question: what would the results have been if voter turnout had been identical to the national average of 65.1 per cent in all 47 counties? In terms of votes, Odinga would have obtained 7,140,924 as compared to Ruto’s 7,078,521 (with the remaining 98,319 divided between Wajackoyah and Mwaure), thereby pushing the former up to 49.9 per cent vs. 49.8 per cent for Ruto.  Further, when Odinga’s “lost” votes from Kakamega and Mombasa are added, his total would have stood at 50.3 per cent as opposed to 49.7 per cent for Ruto, giving the former an outright/first round win, though with a victory-margin of just over 0.5 per cent, almost equal to that of Ruto’s official win, although still less than what nearly all of the final polls reported.  Why so many more of Odinga’s potential voters failed to show up at their polling stations on 9 August is a question I shall leave for others to answer.

Factor four: respondent dishonesty

An additional factor that could help to explain the discrepancy between the last round of polls (average) and the official results is respondent dishonesty.  It is of two types: unfulfilled intentions and outright falsehood. An example of the latter, as noted above, is respondents claiming to be registered who in fact were not, and thus never voted.  Indeed, in selecting respondents for its two final pre-election surveys, TIFA excluded those who “confessed” to not being registered, although it was not possible to verify the registration claims of the remainder, let alone to match those non-voters with their expressed presidential voting intentions.

TIFA sought to identify the “liars” in its July survey, which was conducted in person at residences, by asking all respondents to name their polling stations, but only 94 per cent could do so. Here it should be recalled that in terms of expressed presidential vote-choice in that survey, Odinga out-scored Ruto by 46.7 per cent to 44.4 per cent, a 2.3 per cent difference. Yet when results are limited to those who could name their polling station, Odinga’s lead shrinks to just 0.2 per cent, from 46.4 per cent to 46.2 per cent, suggesting that there was more “dishonesty” about being registered among Odinga supporters. Moreover, the likelihood that, in comparison with the TIFA findings, Odinga “lost votes” by such dishonesty is also suggested by the fact that among those who failed to name their polling station, far more expressed voting intentions for Odinga than for Ruto (53 per cent vs. 19 per cent), and that another 19 per cent said they were “undecided” as to whom they would vote for, as compared with only 5 per cent among those who did name their polling station.

One other factor that could explain part of the discrepancy between the last round of polls (average) and the official results is respondent dishonesty.

(At the same time, asked about their likelihood of voting, the combined figures of “will probably not” and “not sure” are the same for those expressing vote-support for both Odinga and Ruto—3 per cent—countering an assumption that those not registered would be more likely to express doubts about their participation in the election at all. In light of such issues, it is unfortunate there was no exit poll even if limited to a few counties, since ipso facto it would have involved only actual voters.)

The above analysis leads to an obvious question: why would at least a significant number of survey respondents have claimed they would vote for Odinga when they had decided otherwise?  While this issue could be explored in subsequent surveys, at this point two closely related factors seem to have encouraged at least some “dishonesty” of this nature. One is the visible support given to Odinga’s campaign by the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta government, which according to reliable reports, involved both financial and rhetorical support, the latter including exhortations, if not clear threats, by local administration officials. While the impact of such direct involvement on voting is unclear, it seems reasonable to conclude that it served to intimidate at least some respondents, making them uneasy about declaring their intentions to vote for Ruto even in surveys conducted by non-state entities.

Such a conclusion is suggested by the responses TIFA obtained in its April survey to a question (that had also been included in five previous surveys) asking which presidential candidate, if any, respondents thought President Kenyatta supported. Overall, 73 per cent named Odinga. However, rather more of those expressing an intention to vote for him held this view than did those stating they would vote for Ruto (85 per cent vs. 79 per cent). In other words, the fact that more of Odinga’s expressed supporters believed the incumbent president was supporting him than did Ruto’s may have really been an indication that they were not being “honest” but rather sought to align themselves with incumbent presidential power.

Such ‘unease’ is also indicated by the finding in TIFA’s late-July survey that found that among the substantial minority of those who reported having voted for Odinga in 2017 but who intended to vote for Ruto in this election, two-thirds explained their ‘defection’ from him as a consequence of his ‘handshake’ with President Kenyatta.  As such, even those still stating they would vote for him may have likewise had this as their main motivation for not doing so, but not wanting to ‘confess’ the same to TIFA and other survey firms.

Another related factor is the widespread assumption that Odinga, being the recipient of such state support, would inevitably win (which likewise appears to have contributed to lower turnout in Odinga “strongholds” as already suggested).  As such, even some of those committed to voting for Ruto were likely reluctant to risk getting on the “wrong side” of an expected Odinga government by declaring their true voting intentions, even to private/independent survey firms such as TIFA.

Further, in TIFA’s final survey, a total of 7 per cent of respondents declined to identify their presidential voting intentions, with 4 per cent claiming to be “undecided” and the rest simply remaining silent. Even if 78 per cent of those without a stated presidential vote-preference also failed to identify with any political party (thus suggesting a general lack of interest in politics and thus a lower likelihood of voting at all), this proportion on their own could have been enough to eliminate the polls-vs.-IEBC gap between Odinga and Ruto, and then some.

Factor five: a possible ‘late wave’

Aside from “dishonesty” among those 7 per cent in TIFA’s final survey who declined to reveal their presidential voting intentions, it is possible not only that some of them failed to vote at all, but that others only made up their minds at “the last minute”. Moreover, a small proportion who had honestly expressed an intention to vote for Odinga changed their minds in the intervening period between these final surveys and 9 August, for whatever reasons, and voted for Ruto.  Recall here that according to The Publication of Electoral Polls Act (2012), no such results can be published within five days before election day. This means that even the last such survey undertaken and released in this election cycle was completed a full week before that day. In this case, also, it should be possible to identify at least some of these “last-minute” decision-makers in a post-election survey. And several commentators and political actors indicated that such a “wave” was likely, and after the election, that it did, in fact, occur.

For example, just a week before the election, during a discussion of the most recent polls on one of the morning TV political talk-shows, Dr Peter Kagwanja dismissed Odinga’s modest lead by claiming that in the Mt. Kenya region, at least, “You will see a major swing towards Odinga when the votes are tallied because people from this area, not having a presidential contender for the first time, are determined to be where power will be for the next five years, and it is clear that will be an Azimio government.”  But such a “swing” could have been in the opposite direction.

Indeed, several weeks after the election, one senior Kenya Kwanza leader from this region claimed to the author that “in our final rallies, we could feel the surge in our direction, such as at Kirigiti in Kiambu, which was our last big rally.”

Altogether, then, while impossible to substantiate without further post-election research, such a ‘late wave’ cannot be ruled out, and to the extent it did occur during the final week, it could not have been captured in the final surveys, once again highlighting the value of an election day exit poll.

A few longer-term take-aways

While each of the five factors examined above could have contributed to Odinga’s loss, it is not possible to precisely measure their impact (even if an attempt was made to do so with regard to the second and third of these).  The question that remains is whether, taken together, they could sufficiently explain why the official results deviated significantly from nearly all of the polls conducted towards the end of the campaign period. While the answer must be left for readers to answer, it seems certain that if the outcome had been an Odinga win, even by a narrower margin than Ruto obtained, the media would have most certainly reported that “the pollsters were correct”, even if this result would have been outside these polls’ margins of error!

Even some of those committed to voting for Ruto were likely reluctant to risk getting on the “wrong side” of an expected Odinga government by declaring their true voting intentions.

Whatever the case, and despite the fact that far more use was made of such survey tools by the major presidential campaign teams (and also by many candidates below that level), it seems that “serious” survey firms may have to re-think certain aspects of their methodology, in terms of both the selection of respondents (for example, trying to discover why some people decline to be interviewed in case such non-participation might create a “silent” bias, even within particular ethnic groups) and the reliability of the answers they give to certain critical questions. Likewise, they may need to publish their final results in terms of several potential scenarios, beginning, perhaps, with variable voter turnout figures in both national and regional terms. Indeed, in his last pre-election blog, Hornsby, using such a multiplicity of factors – including the most recent polls – ‘guessed’ that Ruto would win within a 1 per cent margin – which is exactly what happened.

Such considerations raise one question this piece has yet to address: “What about the ‘correct’ Radio Africa/Star poll?”  A valid question, but an answer seems elusive.  In the US, following considerable embarrassment associated with the performance of a number of reputable pollsters in the last two elections, they sat down together to share their thoughts as to what ‘went wrong’, and what steps could be taken – mainly with regard to sampling models – to remedy such errors.  But doing so required a level of data-sharing transparency that has no precedent in Kenya, where the few firms that conduct these surveys have never (to my knowledge) engaged in such a collective exercise, which would clearly have to include a comparison of the ethnic distribution of their samples, given the salience of this factor in voters’ choices.

Recall, however, that an early June poll by Radio Africa gave Odinga a six per cent lead, whereas late-May surveys by Infotrak and TIFA placed him ahead of Ruto by only 4 per cent.  And in April, while a TIFA poll put Ruto ahead of Odinga by 7 per cent, Radio Africa gave the former DP an advantage of just 5 per cent. As such, the basis for Radio Africa’s ‘predictive success’ in that poll remains unknown, least for now.

But beyond any such “errors”, those involved in the conduct, dissemination and use of such data in a still-young democracy such as Kenya must not get distracted from the larger—and, it can be argued—more important question: Do such research tools contribute to the strengthening of democracy, both among those competing for office and those with the power to determine winners and losers—that is, the voters themselves?

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Religion and the Tragedy of the Kenya Middle Class

The Kenyans who are really blinded by religion are not the ordinary ones who are actively religious, but the educated ones who are against religion. It’s an intellectual entanglement so spectacular that would put the emotional entanglement of the Smiths to shame.

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Religion and the Tragedy of the Kenya Middle Class
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When William Ruto won the 2022 general elections to become Kenya’s fifth president, local and international media were awash with discussions of Ruto as an evangelical president. The excitement, however, was informed less by Kenyan religion or politics and more by right-wing Evangelical America and its war on homosexuality and abortion. Le Monde, a major newspaper from a country that boasts of being the home of the Enlightenment, was understandably preoccupied with Kenya’s adherence to secularism. The BBC was curious about the president’s stand on homosexuality, but not about secularism, which would have been strange for the public broadcaster of a country whose head of state is also the head of the Anglican church.

Kenyan intellectuals, who are largely educated on Western liberal values and human rights, were also inclined to focus on concerns about secularism. Editorials of Kenyan media waxed lyrical about the need to separate the church from the state. Other observers, inspired by the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the US, voiced concerns that women might suffer an attack on their reproductive rights under a Ruto presidency.

Much of this analysis misses major nuances of religion and politics in Kenya, and comes from rigid adherence to the false dichotomy which Eurocentrism has placed between reason and faith.

The ambiguity of Evangelicalism

It is important to note that most Kenyans cannot distinguish the doctrines of different Christian faiths. In the 70s and 80s, they might have defined that distinction largely by the concept of “getting saved,” because Catholics stood out as the only branch of Kenyan Christianity that did not believe in salvation from a personal relationship with Jesus. From the late 80s onwards, a Kenyan might have offered a vague distinction of Protestantism from other faiths based on the style of worship, pointing out that mainstream Protestant churches sang hymns, listened to choirs singing in four-part harmony and prayed silently, while Pentecostals and African traditional churches sang vibrant songs to musical instrumentation, danced in the sanctuary and prayed loudly in tongues.

But by early 2000, however, that difference had largely disappeared, because many mainstream churches changed their worship to a more Pentecostal style, thanks to some clergy who felt that the Pentecostal expression was more “spiritual,” and others who felt that adopting the Pentecostal style of worship would prevent the youth from leaving the church. Children who grew up since that time would therefore scarcely know the difference between a Protestant and an Evangelical.

Therefore, there is little clarity in the Kenyan mind about what constitutes the Evangelical church. Most of the churches called “evangelical” in Kenya do not consciously profess the evangelical faith, if by evangelical, we mean those who believe in the centrality of the bible in faith, and who profess to be “born again” after having a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. In any case, the concept of being “born again” was already in Protestant circles in the 1930s, thanks to the East African Revival Movement, and back then,  British missionaries were irked by their African converts who claimed to be “born again.”

But that lack of clarity on Evangelicalism is evident even in academic scholarship. Kenyan scholars who are close to American evangelical circles, and who seem at pains to prove that even Evangelicals are interested in social issues, often cite Protestant clergy and academics who are vocal on faith and society as “evangelical.” They do so even when those whom they cite would not consider themselves Evangelical and are even critical of Evangelicals.

Christianity and the state

Part of this confusion emanates from the failure to appreciate the different political attitudes of American and European missionaries towards the state, and how that difference influences Christianity in Kenyan political life today. European missionaries tended to be driven by liberal ideas and to collaborate with the colonial state in providing education, but they also took a stand against human rights abuse by the colonial government. The American missionaries, however, wanted to keep their distance from the colonial government because they believed that Christian mission work should rely on God (meaning on donations from fellow believers). Neither side fundamentally challenged the concept of colonialism itself.

After independence, the mainstream churches continued their engagement with the ex-colonial Kenyan state, either in agreement or opposition. For instance, in 1969, mainstream churches opposed Jomo Kenyatta’s adoption of the oath to solidify political support of his Kikuyu ethnic group against Kenyatta’s political rivals. That Kenyatta listened to the church shows that his use of traditional spirituality to bind people to his political project, and of the church to maintain his hold on the ex-colonial state.

After independence, however, American missionaries continued to distance themselves from the state. Much of that conceptual work was done through the concept of culture. The argument of American missionaries was that faith was expressed through culture, and no culture was superior to the other. The utopian implication was that under Christ, there was no African or American, no black or white. In reality, however, this focus on culture supported the imperial project of the Cold War by steering African Christianity away from politics. The cultural focus of theology was important for US imperialism to block the development of African solidarity with black theology, which influenced by the Black Panther movement, and liberation theology which was influenced by Marxism.

During the 80s and 90s, as Moi’s rule became more draconian and as the economic conditions deteriorated, mainstream clergy were at the forefront of speaking out against the shrinking democratic space. By contrast, American missionary founded churches like the AIC, Moi’s home church, took the stance that leaders are chosen by God and should be supported spiritually rather than criticized, and that the church should keep off commenting on political matters.

The Evangelical Alpha Male

But as the Protestant churches focused on the relationship of Christianity to the state, the evangelical churches modeled for us how to live as Christians. In the context of Structural Adjustment Programs that gutted down the few public services available, and the rise of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, Evangelicalism gained momentum by offering personal lifestyle responses to social problems.

For instance, evangelicalism filled the intellectual space in the public sphere which had been evacuated by the persecution of academics, students, professionals and artists, and by the reduction of funding for education. As Dr. Damaris Parsitau has demonstrated in her scholarship, that vacuum was rapidly filled by the omniscient Evangelical preacher.

At the same time, a socio-political vacuum was developing due to the privatization of social services. For the youth who were joining the job market and expecting to start families, the charismatic churches provided practical remedies to the social services falling apart. The churches promised private services like homeschooling to compensate for education, miracle healing for failing medical services, and abstention from sex for the HIV-AIDS pandemic.

Thus rose the figure of the pastor as the alpha male. He exuded a positive attitude as approach to all problems in life. He was the intellectual who explained how to navigate the crippling economy. He was the educator who exemplified homeschooling through the work of his wife. He was the model husband who motivated his wife to do that work. He was also the entrepreneur who embodied the promise of neoliberal capitalism, because he had started his own church with a few members and was now living a lavish lifestyle as the head of a mega church.

As such, the word “evangelical”, though not commonly used in Kenya, usually refers to a certain profile of churches and their clergy. The churches which Kenyans call “Evangelical” loosely refer to churches which revolve around the personal enterprise of the pastor in the case of men, or of the pastor and his wife, or sometimes of unmarried women pastors. In such churches, major decisions, including the management of church property and finances, are managed almost exclusively by the pastor, as opposed to an elders’ council or a general assembly, and so the evangelical pastor embodies the figure of the CEO. Most of these churches are morally conservative, but any missteps in their own morality, like fathering children out of wedlock, receives a generous lathering of Christ’s forgiveness to wash away a multitude of sins.

By contrast, mainstream Protestant churches are identified by institutionalization, church hierarchy, leadership elections whose chaos often mirrors the elections for political leadership, and clergy who are likely to take positions on political issues.

This landscape suggests that despite the denominational differences, spirituality in Kenya is one continuous space where Kenyans navigate their political and social lives in the face of local and global dilemmas. That spiritual whole includes local and ethnic African spiritualities, which Kenyans revert to even though they may continue to attend church.

Victorian morality as “African culture”

One major confusion in Kenya that is directly related to Evangelicalism is the discourse of morality. This confusion comes from the fact that Kenya is governed by a rigid manufacture of consent, where public discourse on a wide range of issues is tied to how such matters relate to the state. When it comes to the personal space, especially in matters of femininity and sexuality, this discursive control is expressed as concern for “African traditions,” and often includes quotations from the bible. However, when one scratches beneath the surface of those concerns, one finds what is being called African tradition is closer to Victorian morality.

As such, Kenyans will criticize women for wearing their hems above the knee as flouting African tradition, and have nothing to say when reminded that in many African traditional fashions barely cover the body. Kenyans will share pictures of men on catwalks in Europe wearing skirts and declare that those catwalks flout African morals, forgetting that most African traditional wear for men is in the form of clothes that flow from the shoulder or from the waist.

One must therefore avoid reading statements about African culture as exclusively expressions of Kenyan right-wing conservativism. When Kenyans say that something “is not culturally African,” they could be saying less about African culture and revealing more about the limited intellectual space in which Kenyans can contemplate anything outside what is acceptable to the state. They could be expressing the fear that allowing minorities to have a voice, or their right to life and social services, or autonomy of one’s body or sexuality, requires disentangling many other convoluted beliefs which Kenyans must uphold, if they are to avoid a direct confrontation with what the late ES Atieno Odhiambo famously called Kenya’s “ideology of order.”

This entanglement explains the contradictory signals on homosexuality that confound Western and liberal journalists. Most of the pronouncements by government officials against LGBTI are made in situations of crisis, or in reaction to news reports, or in interviews by foreign journalists, rather than as political campaign issues.

For example, Ezekiel Mutua, a state officer, often weaponized homophobia in his drive to censor the arts in the name of morality. In 2016, his office proposed laws with draconian requirements that would have gagged artists using bureaucracy. When the artists protested, Mutua sought the support of the church by justifying censorship as a concern about morality. He was hoping that the public would pick up the fact that one of the prominent faces in the protest against censorship was gay gospel musician Joji Baro.

However, the state’s issue with the arts is not morality; it’s control. Together with the church, the state has always had a fractured relationship with the arts because of the power of the arts to influence society independently of Kenyan institutions. Arts are an intrinsic threat to the “ideology of order.“ Many artists, of whom Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the most famous, were persecuted for their creative work. Campaigns against arts education have been led by politicians, the media and the business sector who call the arts irrelevant to the job market, and by the church whose schools expel children for drawings which are dubbed “demonic.” Ruto has repeatedly called arts education the teaching of irrelevant facts such as when Vasco da Gama came to Africa, yet his government is actively trying to coopt artists into the state under the banner of the “creative economy.” Mutua’s appeal to homophobia was therefore an additional alibi for the suppression of the arts.

Mutua once again weaponized homophobia to rally the church to endorse state ban against Wanuri Kahiu’s film Rafiki. Viewing was eventually opened up for a week, apparently to help the film qualify for international film festivals. Thus we see an ambiguity that “morality” faces when the state is confronted with the international arena. A similar ambiguity occurred when CNN journalist Richard Quest, who is gay, visited Kenya, and was a guest of the Jubilee Celebration Centre, one of the quintessential “evangelical” churches of Nairobi.

My focus here is not the cliché intersectionality of struggles of class, gender, religion and sexual orientation, which obviously applies. It is that hostility to women and sexual minorities is intertwined with other forms of incoherence in Kenyan life, including our visceral hatred for the youth which is seen in the violence in schools and in extra judicial killings. To challenge these injustices inevitably touches other live wires of social traumas which may not necessarily be an expression of Evangelicalism, even when they borrow expressions from Evangelicalism.

All this to say that the place of the church in Kenyan politics, and especially what constitutes the “Evangelical” church in Kenya, is more fluid than a Euro-American reading would allow. A rigid subjection of Kenyan Christianity to the framework of European secular thought or American Christian fascism, hides the impact of US militarism and capitalism on Kenya through the suffocation of cultures, diversity and ideas. More than that, it is largely a project of intellectual class.

The obsession of the Kenyan middle class with enforcing Enlightenment secularism is an intellectual tragedy of major proportions.

Ruto’s Christianity

Ruto’s faith and political career also demonstrate these ambiguities. In the run up to the 2010 constitutional referendum, for example, Ruto was the most prominent politician in the “No” camp against the constitution, but his interest was largely driven by his own political ambitions. More strange is that his opposition to the constitution was that it was not capitalist enough on the land question.

Meanwhile, the Kenyan pastors who waged war against the constitution voiced their concerns as moral concerns about abortion, and they argued that the inclusion of the Kadhi courts in the constitution went against the principle of secularism because it promoted Islam. The deal with the Kadhi courts was a political one made before independence to maintain Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline as part of Kenya, but the evangelical clergy chose to ignore the politics and restrict the question to religion. What’s ironic is that now, the same clergy who claimed to be concerned about secularism in 2010 are now asking for state appointments. American evangelicals had sponsored some Kenyan pastors to oppose the constitution, on the claim that the constitution promoted abortion and homosexuality, as an extension of America’s own cultural politics.

During the referendum campaigns, therefore, Ruto and the clergy were largely partners of convenience. Mark Kariuki, who would pray fifteen years later at Ruto’s swearing in as president, even clarified that “No yao si no yetu” (Their “no” is not our “no”), meaning that Ruto and the clergy may have been on the same side against the constitution, but for different reasons.

The moral posturing of the clergy was not enough to persuade Kenyans to forget the legal and political agendas that had brought Kenya to this new constitutional moment. Contrary to their expectations, Kenyans – many obviously Christian – ratified the constitution. To date, many Evangelicals, especially professionals, carry that rejection of the clergy’s position as a trauma, as one member of that group inadvertently informed me.

The greater manifestation of Ruto’s faith is in his economic thinking. Four years ago, Kenyan journalist Christine Mungai wrote a brilliant analysis of Ruto’s “gangster theology,” arguing that Ruto’s camaraderie with evangelical churches was a tactical strategy in propping himself up as a hustler. To distinguish himself from Uhuru Kenyatta as a dynasty, Ruto had to portray himself as a person who pulled himself by the bootstraps to become a politician of national prominence. His religion therefore needed to reflect that image of “Kenyan ordinariness.” Aligning himself to a mainstream, stiff-necked institutional church would have been detrimental to his image. He had to align himself with pastors who had begun their churches in abandoned buildings with a few congregants before they became wealthy heads of mega churches.

Despite rooting for hustlers, Ruto is no socialist, as the West initially feared. He hates the arts and believes that science, technology and finance, not social change, are the solution to Kenya’s economic challenges. He has called arts and humanities education useless knowledge that has no relevance to Kenya’s problems. As such, his answer to crippling economic inequality has been to avail cheap micro-credit to the poor, otherwise dubbed as the “Hustler fund,” and promise very little in terms of social support. If the evangelical God blesses individuals for the work of our hands, then that theology perfectly aligns itself with micro-credit as a route out of poverty. It is up to the poor to “work hard” using the loans they receive, albeit at high interest rates, in the same way that Ruto says he rose from a chicken seller to become president, and in the same way pastors became owners of mega churches. In other words, there is an economic, and fundamentally neoliberal logic to the alliance between Ruto and the evangelicals, as opposed to an exclusively cultural, moral and anti-secular one.

To focus on Ruto’s stereotypical answers on women and sexual minorities is therefore to miss the basic gist of Ruto’s politics. That is not to say that the human rights of these groups are not important, or to minimize the spectacular violence that they suffer. It is to point to the socio-economic and political dimensions of this violence – which are the crippling inequality, the narrow public sphere and the cruelty of daily life under neoliberal policies. These dynamics are often obscured when critics engage in moralistic, human rights-centric discourses. Many times, their hard stance locks out potential allies in faith who would also oppose violence against those minorities and would raise concerns about inequality. And most of those who dominate this exclusionary discourse are Kenyans who have received advanced education and are likely to be working in close contact with Western liberal journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates. The possibility that the ordinary Kenyan from outside that class profile, can be religious or not, and can hold politically progressive views, does not feature on their radar, yet those in whose name they speak belong to the same group outside the middle class.

The concern about secularism is largely a form of snobbery that minimizes the sophistication with which ordinary Kenyans without education navigate their lives through religious spaces. For many Kenyans, religion provides the spaces where they can meet without the state shooting them down. It provides the spaces where they get social status and community leadership outside of politics. It’s where they can carry out both traditional and modern rituals like weddings, birth, initiation and death. It’s where they get education, because the government is not providing enough schools and the church has often stepped in to fulfil that role. But many of the Kenyan middle class ignore this material reality and share extreme incidents of abusive pastors, sort of to depict ordinary Kenyans without similar education as stupid for being religious.

A problem within Euro-America itself

This complete misunderstanding of educated Kenyans is a failure of education. The war against arts education, which began during colonial rule and is still waged by Ruto, has denied educated Kenyans a historical understanding of religion, be it in Europe or in Africa. And the greater irony is that Kenyan schools are notoriously religious, despite not teaching anything useful on religion.

As such, educated Kenyans do not understand that the problem here is the fundamentally Euro-American framework in which religion represents the conflict between the traditional monarchy, liberal secularism, fascist conservatism and anti-religion left politics. For Europe, religion has always been read through the lens of the power of the state and its accountability to the people. During feudalism, religion justified the monarchy, and inheritance of power and wealth by birth, as the will of God. After the Reformation, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants was fundamentally a political one on divine rights to power and the people’s right to have a say about power. This new shift caused a lot of bloodshed in Europe, leading to atrocities such as the St Bartholomew Massacre against French Protestants, and the Thirty Years War whose casualties were only rivalled by those of the 20th century great wars.

To protect their revolution from the return of the monarchy, the French literally had no choice but to declare a secular state. Other Western European countries who still have monarchs had to compromise and create state churches, headed by the monarchs, as a compromise to the church’s divorce from Rome. Left politics, which sees religion as a weapon of the ruling class, has been successfully muzzled in Euro-America, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ironically, many Kenyans who would not normally quote Karl Marx cite his statement on religion as the opium of the masses.

For Europe therefore, Christian denominations are necessarily political positions on the relationship between power and the will of the people. In the United States, however, the religious dynamics are different and reveal a struggle over the voice of faith in social life. While European Christians in the US wanted no ties with the state, they were implicated in dispossession of the indigenous people and in the enslavement of Africans. Slave holders justified the enslavement of Africans as biblical, and during the Civil War, some American churches split, because some argued that slavery was not a religious issue, since justice was not a “fundamental” of faith like baptism and repentance. At the other end of the spectrum, white Christians became abolitionists,. Some like William Lloyd Garrison would cite the book of Isaiah in calling the much venerated American constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” after the constitution was amended to institutionally support the enslavement of African peoples.

For the people of African descent, however, expressions of faith are not tied to monarchies and republics but to liberation. For the last four centuries, freedom has been the fundamental spiritual and religious preoccupation of Africans on the continent and in its diaspora. Enslaved Africans sang spirituals as songs of resistance in the plantation. The spark of the Haitian revolution was the Boukman prayer, where the proclamation of freedom was a spiritual articulation about the God “who orders us to revenge our wrongs” and against “the white man’s god who is so pitiless.” The Rastafari movement in Jamaica and the Candomble in Brazil are just some of the many religious articulations that voiced the political aspiration of freedom. In Africa, Kimpa Vita, Simon Kibangu, Elijah Masinde and Lucas Pkech are some of the Africans who used contrapuntal readings of scripture in resisting colonialism.

The civil rights movement in the United States followed the same tradition, for both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X grounded their struggles in faith. If anything, the modern articulation of right-wing, white Evangelicalism has piggy backed on the impact of the liberation theologies and struggles. White racism learned from the victories of the civil rights movement that raw racist ideologies and violence had made the United States a laughing stock of the world and had given credibility to Communism during the Cold War. The American right, led by figures like Paul Weyrich, therefore made a deliberate effort to coopt the Evangelical religion in the fight against the social gains of the civil rights movement while hiding behind the façade of faith and morality. To counter desegregation of schools, the right-wing offered homeschooling and faith schools. In the place of diversity and social welfare, it offered family values. Against the political gains of women, it turned abortion into its rallying cause.

But rather than attack this theology, the Euro-American acolytes of the Enlightenment have blocked the development of theological responses to fascism. In the place of theology, they offer reason, human rights and landmark court cases, claiming that religion automatically made one a conservative, and often implying that peoples of the Global South who wanted to harness religion had failed to decolonize their minds. The silence which they have imposed on emancipatory readings of religion have created space for right-wing, anti-political and hateful theology to gain momentum, and that momentum was used to capture the US Supreme Court. And now, instead of learning their lessons and removing the walls which Eurocentric ideas have constructed around religion, these intellectuals are trying to force African politics and religion into restrictive Eurocentric boxes of constitutionalism and human rights activism.

The anti-colonial alibi

Here at home, educated Kenyans have unsuccessfully tried to adapt European Enlightenment into the framework of anti-colonial struggles. On social media and in their op-eds, their enthusiasm makes them repeat inaccurate facts. A year or so ago, I got into an argument with someone who shared a poster that said that enslaved Africans were forced to read only the bible. I tried to point out that that is not true, that reading in and of itself was forbidden to enslaved Africans. I even urged people to read what Frederick Douglass said about the risks he took to learn how to read. The reaction to my comment was literally hysterical. I was accused of defending Christianity when I was simply stating a fact that slave masters did not want enslaved Africans reading any material, bible or not.

Since then, I’ve noticed many similar posts on social media, such as statements that all enslaved Africans became Christians, suggesting that Africans in the Americas acquiesced to their enslavement because they were stupid enough to accept the white man’s religion. The fact that many of these falsehoods refer to the enslavement in the Americas has made me suspect that these posts are pro-American psyops which are trying to prevent any African connection of religion or spirituality to politics.

My suspicion is strengthened by the way Kenyan theological education was depoliticized in the 1960s. American churches gave scholarships to Kenyan clergy to study biblical studies or missiology instead of theology. In the 1970s, J S Mbiti, whose book “African religions and philosophy” has become a classic, vehemently criticized black theology for being “bitter” and of no use to Africans who now had independent states. Kenyan theological studies are notoriously preoccupied with culture and sociology, rather than with prophetic insights into the impact of state power on ordinary life. This focus on acculturation is consistent with the effort of the US missionaries to distance themselves in Africa from colonial missionaries, and to present American and African Christianities as cultural equals, in order to deflect theological consideration of the role of US economic and military imperialism in Africa. Meanwhile, African and liberation theologies barely feature in the curriculum of Kenyan schools or of the few seminaries that churches have not converted into faculties offering business degrees.

Theology is political

What this middle class activism denies is that interpretation of religion is fundamentally political, because interpretation informs and is informed by decisions we make in society. That reality is not affected by secularism, for as Ali Mazrui said many years ago, the separation between the church and the state does not necessarily translate into a separation between religion and politics. By the same token, blocking discussion of religion is fundamentally political as well, but worse, it depoliticizes people by imposing moral conversations (the goodness of individuals) where there should be political ones (what people should do about power and wealth).

A large part of the Euro-American oversimplification of religion emanates from the Euro-American state’s discomfort with knowledge outside of the rational. Unlike reason, religion and spirituality allow more space for ambiguity, fluidity, contradiction and intersection, which is inconvenient for forms of power that rely on the letter of the law, precision and empirical proof. Add to that racism, which is notoriously impatient with appreciating Africans as complex human beings, and humanity as having limits, especially in the exploitation of the planet. This potent mix produces the misreading of African political theology and an obsession with depicting religious Africans as stupid and colonized.

This delusion leaves the political space for neoliberalism to entrench itself in Kenyan life through religion. To date, there is no pro-poor theology from our pulpits, or pro-poor politics from our political parties, that tackles the question of whether micro-credit is a way out of poverty, or whether deteriorating living conditions should be the price we pay for balancing the economy to please the IMF. Meanwhile, the government is committed to restricting the arts to economics by coopting artists into state appointments, while actively engaging in a war against arts education. The middle class have not understood this larger impact of Ruto’s religion. And the moral superiority with which they refuse to listen to logic is spectacular.

Instead of addressing the plight of the “least of these,” the middle class is wailing about secularism and calling the poor stupid for going to church. So we’re back to the days Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth, where the native intellectuals equated cultural nationalism with anti-colonialism and missed the larger struggle against exploitation of the majority. The Kenyans who are really blinded by religion are not ordinary ones who are actively religious, but the educated ones who are against religion. It’s an intellectual entanglement so spectacular that would put the emotional entanglement of the Smiths to shame.

This article was first published in Wandia Njoya’s blog.

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