Every five years the editors of foreign newspapers remember that Kenya exists. Okay, maybe I exaggerate and do not honor the fabulous work done by athletes to keep their country’s name high in every city that dares to host an international marathon. Yet it seems that every five years, when an election is upon us, the eyes of the world shift to East Africa like vultures circling over a carcass, craving a new clash of titans or a flare-up of violence. The articles almost write themselves – something is said about “tribalism” (sorry, ethnonationalism) and primordial hatreds, a few lines about dynastic competition are inserted and perhaps an allegory is thrown there on the savannah. A long list of clichés that are vague enough to attract the attention of a distant audience who need to periodically recall the tragedies in Africa to feel some emotion and a little gratitude for their fate.
The mistake at the heart of this reasoning is to think that democracy is something that happens at every election. Somehow over the past thirty years, not just in Kenya but around the world, the idea of democracy has been bled out of any real meaning and distorted into the caricature of a black stick figure dropping a piece of paper into a box. . It is the triumph of democracy consultants: successfully translating complex social systems into two-year plans and ten-point performance indicators that must be achieved before the donor’s budget closes.
But it is a tragedy for the people. Democracy is reduced to the moment of voting, meaning is taken away from its role of hard and patient work to build societies that are designed for the people who live within them.
The destruction of a country
Those of us who live in Kenya and care about its fate, so not the mere spectators of the electoral campaigns that take place every five years, know that democracy in the country is in trouble, regardless of what happens on 9 August. Over the past decade, the Jubilee administration led by President Uhuru Kenyatta has governed mainly by decree. The executive has hollowed out key civic institutions in the service of expensive and ill-conceived projects that have taken the country into debt and brought its economy to its knees. And now we are here with expensive junk that has brought billions to foreign companies and governments that have set them up but make no sense in the local context and that we will pay for generations at usury rates. A railway line that runs through only half of the country. An elevated toll road built to meet the needs of expat (who don’t vote and don’t pay taxes), in a city where only 15 percent of people travel by private car.
Popular participation which should bring some form of control over some key laws and public spending is a farce. We write notes that are never read, we go to hearings that are never properly documented, we bring cases to court only for judges to decide according to the law, which is overturned when the law does not approve the executive’s agenda. Only an article published in an international newspaper managed to induce the government to withdraw the plan to cut down a historic tree in Nairobi, older than the city itself. Protests, indignation and court orders were not enough to save the approximately four thousand trees that have been cut around the capital in the last five years.
The school system is in disarray. Against the advice of local experts, the belligerent minister of education has imposed a curriculum that is harming children and parents alike, but the teachers’ unions, whose leaders seem to have forgotten in the election campaign the abuse and violence in they have been subjected to, remain silent. During the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of young people studying in boarding schools were kept away from their families for nearly a year, without consulting their parents and without any measures to help them process the trauma. Thousands of children – almost twice as many girls as boys – have not returned to school. Austerity measures triggered by poor economic planning have meant that the largest university in the country is planning to eliminate its humanities and social sciences departments, while faculty and university unions remain silent. No street was filled with demonstrations to express dissent. And when at least the children protest, the government threatens to identify and penalize them, denying them access to higher education. The only way they get our attention is when they set their schools on fire.
International crises are also knocking on the door. Oil prices are the highest in history. The pandemic still looms. Climate change has produced the fifth drought cycle and the threat of famine hangs over much of the country. The independent media has been emptied of state control and financial crises. Yet none of this is on the agenda in electoral programs. Instead we are drawn into a farce in which leading candidates both claim their supposed successes of the past decade while disavowing the very government they were a part of.
(This is the part where you might say, “But it could be worse, at least you’re not in Other Country X!” It might be worse, but it should be better, and that’s the purpose of democracy).
These elections are not interesting, and it is intellectually dishonest to expect us to make an effort to pretend they are. The most important things in Kenyan democracy have already happened or are happening in places that superficial and simplifying readings will not see: between one election cycle and another, outside the capital, within local governments, in institutions such as trade unions and movements. of protest. Nothing interesting is happening nationwide: A constellation of men who have been chosen for power by an aging autocrat and who have never had a real job use an entire country to not reveal how they live.
Following the model of the clash of the titans is a tedious deviation from the real work of democracy. We’re bored. We have been in this situation for at least thirty years. Thirty years spent watching the same cast of characters spin around each other, promising the world and bringing chaos. Thirty years of pretending that after they finish arguing with each other they won’t meet at the country club and they won’t smile at each other in the bars we are not allowed to enter. Thirty years of pretending that their children don’t go to the same schools or play in the same polo clubs. We’re bored.
And that’s right. Important things can be boring, they often are. Perhaps the biggest mistake the world has made is to want to make politics glamorous. The collective acceptance of the idea that politics should be brilliant has culminated in a culture of disinformation, disordered spending and the reduction of decisive conversations into social media content. Perhaps this idea that politics is an endless supply of material for the media is the reason why the politics of so many countries have ended up in spectacle or pantomime. Maybe politics should just be difficult and boring.
I will vote, because my grandparents and great-grandparents have been denied a vote by a racist colonial government, and this is the least I can do to honor their memory. But I do it knowing that voting and elections do not make a democracy. Let me vote by stifling a yawn and reading a book, refusing to answer 19 questions about “dynastic competition and primal hatred”. The most interesting thing about democracy in Kenya is not these elections.
(Translation by Stefania Mascetti)