Kenya: Kenyans Are Fighting Inequality, Not Ethnicity

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The Nation (Nairobi)

OPINION
14 January 2008
Posted to the web 14 January 2008

Rasna Warah

As every middle and upper class Nairobian will tell you, one of the most irritating things about the violence that rocked Kenya in the week after the elections was the fact that many maids, guards and nannies did not show up at work for a whole week.

This was not because they were protesting over their inhuman working conditions or low salaries; it was because many of their shacks had been burned and some were actually living as refugees in various government facilities within the city. Others lived in notoriously dangerous slum areas that had been cordoned off by militia or police.

Yet all I heard from my well-to-do friends, relatives and neighbours in my neck of the woods was how awful it was to do the housework without help, what with all the children in the house during the holidays, and the piles of clothes that needed washing.

NEITHER THEY NOR I BORE THE brunt of the violence that rocked all of Nairobi's slums and some parts of the country last week. We all live in areas where killing your neighbours is not only considered bad manners but bad for business.

We don't look at each other through ethnic eyes, though we do sometimes wonder if the muhindi in Block C bought a new Mercedes through corruption money or if the Luo woman down the road believes in witchcraft.

We decried the inhumanity of Nairobi's wretched slum dwellers, who we concluded were tribalists who could not see the big picture. Why, we wondered, couldn't they remove their ethnic blinkers and see how their activities were affecting tourism and the Nairobi Stock Exchange? And why, for God's sake, were they not reporting for work?

Foreign correspondents, who transmitted the violence in Nairobi's slums for all the world to see, were quick to describe what was happening in Kenya as ethnic cleansing. Like my friends, relatives and neighbours, they totally ignored the social, economic and political forces that were plunging Kenya into mayhem.

They failed to see that the main reason for the violence and protests around the country was not because one ethnic group wanted to forcibly take over the presidency from another ethnic group, but because Kenyans perceived the elections to be unfair.

More importantly, they failed to realise that the root causes of the violence had more to do with the economic and political reality of Kenya than it had to do with ethnic chauvinism (although all three are linked in the Kenyan context, as I will explain).

Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Ten per cent of the country's 35 million people control 42 per cent of the nation's wealth, leaving nearly half of the country's population to subsist below the poverty line.

Inequalities within cities such as Nairobi are stark; Nairobi's ethnically diverse slums, rated as the biggest and most deprived slums in the world, service some of the wealthiest homes and neighbourhoods in Africa.

Inequality tends to manifest itself ethnically and regionally, with some ethnic groups and regions benefiting more from public resources than others.

Because the current constitution bestows enormous powers on the executive and because there are no constitutional provisions to ensure equitable distribution of the country's resources, various presidents have used their powers to accumulate ill-gotten wealth for themselves and their cronies (usually from their own ethnic group), and to allocate disproportionate public resources to projects and regions of their choice (usually to regions where their ethnic base is strongest).

Kenya's struggle is, therefore, more fundamentally linked to inequity than to ethnicity, although wealth and poverty have developed distinctly ethnic tones.

MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, THIS election was seen by the poor and the marginalised as the one that would address past injustices and regional inequalities. In essence, the violence that erupted after the elections was a class war - one in which the impoverished masses took up arms against all those they thought represented the interests of the ruling class, in this case, some of their neighbours, regardless of their political affiliation and despite the fact that some of these neighbours were as dirt poor as they were.

It is no wonder then that the most impoverished parts of the country witnessed some of the most violent clashes. What was most tragic about the violence was that Kenya's dispossessed, instead of uniting to demand justice and equity, turned on each other.

But as the country counts its human and economic losses, there are glimmers of hope and solidarity emerging. As one woman who lives in Nairobi's Kawangware slum told me: "I know that when my child gets sick, I can't call my MP to take him to hospital. I have to call my neighbours. In the end, I have to rely on them to save my child."

Rasna Warah is currently an editor with the United Nations. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the UN. This opinion is part of a collection put together by Concerned Kenyan Writers, a coalition of writers formed to save Kenya in these polarised times in the country's history.

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