Sam Amadi
24 February 2008
opinion
Lagos — At the last African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Kenyan post-election violence came up for discussion amongst African foreign affairs ministers. But, they gave it a short shrift. The ministers preferred to await the presentation of the report by President Kuffuor of Ghana to the Assembly of Heads of States and Government before they can deliberate on the 'ethnic cleansing' in Kenya. Unfortunately, the Heads of States did not get to dwell much on the issue. But, former President of the African Union Commission, Professor Alpha Konare spoke passionately on the need for African leaders to take firm position on the Kenyan crisis. At the end African leaders restated confidence in the Kofi Annan panel of wise elders.
During prefatory statements on the Kenyan election crisis, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, Nigerian foreign minister, made a very radical, profound and unexpected statement. He urged his colleagues to drop all other businesses and discuss the grave tragedy playing out in Kenya. According to him, it would simply amount to depressing shortsightedness and failure of leadership if African leaders turned blind eye to the ethnically-motivated violence and killings in Kenya. Then the Ojo's bombshell: according to the foreign minister, the crisis in Kenya reinforces the fact that as African countries begin to grapple with the demands of multiparty democracy its ethnic and religious fault-lines will become more and more frayed. This statement caused considerable stir, but I doubt if its implications and transformative nuggets were fully realized by African foreign ministers.
The major tragedy in Africa is that these fault-lines, be they fault-lines of class, gender or ethnicity, are being papered over instead of being transformed through social actions. Chief Maduekwe counseled his colleagues not to look condescendingly on Kenya. Kenya is not exceptional in its embarrassing tragedy. It could be said of any other African country: "Here but for the grace of God goes Nigeria or Senegal, etc". The fact that the violence in Kenya could have occurred in many other African countries underlines the similarity of objective conditions and institutional failures that caused the crisis. It also emphasizes the commonality of the interventions and initiatives that will redress Africa's crisis of development and democracy.
It is interesting to observe the pathology of western media and commentators on the disgraceful crisis in Kenya. From the Economist to the New York Times, the dominant mood is that of lament that a buoyant democracy has suddenly come to ruins. These commentators describe Kenya in the best colors as one of Africa's countable stable democracies with a growing economy. The idea is that if Kibaki and Odinga did not lose their nerves, Kenya would have remained a stable democracy offering recreation to overworked and bored Anglo-Saxons. But, is this picture true? Did instability suddenly descend on Kenya? Was Kenya as democratic and stable as western media and their political analysts made it up?
The Superficiality of Neoliberal Economic Reform:
The crisis in Kenya should move Africans and their co-travelers on the road of neoliberal economic reform to deeper thoughts. It is time to rethink neoliberal assumptions about development. Why did Kenya, Africa's tourist haven, go up so soon in flames? It is obvious that Kenya was undone by strong unresolved and simmering ethnic conflicts. Like Nigeria, elites in Kenya have manipulated ethnicity for political leadership. Like Nigeria, Kenya since independence has been ruled by dictators, autocrats and aristocrats- civilian or military- of differing stripes and hues. Like in Nigeria, the people of Kenya have rarely mattered in an election; they have not been accorded the full rights and powers of citizens. All these were lost on neoliberals who praised its economic reform.
The political and social conditions in Kenya before and after Arap Moi are best summarized in the thesis of Professor Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan sociologist cum historian, as 'late colonialism'. Kenya, like every other African country, retains the social structures and institutions which defined and characterized colonialism. These institutions are simply those that either negate or attenuate robust citizenship and democratic accountability. These institutions make it difficult for popular ownership and participation in democratic governance. As Mamdani perceptively opined, where African countries have embraced 'democratic' rule, either in the Nigerian case of transiting from military to civilian rule, or in Kenyan case of moving from one-party to multi-party state, the institutions, structures and norms of governance remained the same. Instead of institutionalizing transformation and democratization these countries succeeded in decentralizing or pluralizing disempowerment.
This is not just a theoretical construct; it is a political reality. The rash of reform programs in African countries fails woefully to connect Africa's economic future to the political crises that afflict the African state. Reforms tend always to focus on African countries as potential factories or extractive sites for raw materials and finished products without paying attention to these countries as human societies. The inability of millions of Africans to be part of meaningful conversation and activities on governance in their countries does not concern the authors and proponents of these reforms. Although they may talk endlessly and romantically about social capital and the culture of development, they overlook the role politics plays in sustainable economic development.
Neoliberals have promoted good governance and rule of law as conditions for the flourishing of economic growth in Africa. But good governance is not the same as democracy. What good governance means is clear from the pockets of changes they promote, changes that essentially make the continent protective of foreign capital and aligned to the global market economy. Claude Ake in his post-humus book, titled 'Democratization of Disempowerment', argues that good government means 'apoliticism rather than the political pursuit of democracy'. To the neoliberals, 'good governance' focuses on effectiveness and functionality rather than empowerment.
Neoliberals want African countries to converge on the institutions of market economy. If African economies must converge on the same set of economic institutions now operative in the west, why can't African societies follow through with the various ideological and political revolutions and social actions that created the political stability and democratic governance of the west? Why can't African societies energize their citizens to political articulacy and activism as the political ferments of the centuries ago did to western society?
The French political philosopher, Alexis Tocqueville, in his classic "Democracy in America" reported that even before the foundations of capitalist economy took hold in the United States, and in spite of the racism of its founding, that country was already in the grip of populism. The beauty of American democracy as Tocqueville reported it is what survives today as the 'Town-Hall'. Democratic deliberation and public participation prepared ground for the ideas and ideals of citizenship which till today continue to inspire moments and rituals of renewal in that country. Imagine, even as the world's only superpower with established economic prosperity, mass-orientation and populist commitments continue to drive politics in the United States. That country's elites continue to reconnect economic development to inclusive and citizen-centric politics. That, at least, is a sensible reading of the Obama phenomenon.
But, Africa is treated different. In Africa Politics is deemphasized, everything is reduced to technical solutions. The conspiracy of misdirection continues to urge African leaders to avoid political transformation of their countries and focus on erecting structures and institutions of free market. The assumption that the market will discipline politics has become holy writ. But as Kenya has shown, politics will always trump market.
I have searched in vain for an analysis of the Kenyan crisis in western media that will locate the crisis to the unfinished work of democratizing the country through the reconnection of politics to peoples' movement. Ethnicity continues to thrive in Kenya and many other African countries because of low-energy politics that has disavowed ideology and transformational vision of the state. The thinkers and intellectuals who should have led transformation away from ethnic politics to a radical alternative have been harnessed to the wagon of the orthodoxy of no-alternative. They are the technical assistants of narrowed political perspectives that fuel the violence in Kenya.
What's the failure of neoliberal reform in all this? The lamentation on Kenya is an indirect admission by the economic hitmen that politics matters. Politics matters, not in the neoliberal platitudes on good governance, which the Nigerian insightful political economist, Claude Ake, pejoratively described as the 'correlate of the market'. Politics matters because the perversity of state failure or endemic corruption or ethnic politics can only be cured by a political mobilization that utilizes the cognition and subjectivity of the people to transform their social conditions. Politics matters because the people matter.
Until African leaders work hard to deepen citizenship and engender popular ownership and control of the putative democratic governance in the continent, indecent and embarrassing violence like the Kenyan will continue to rubbish the praises of neoliberal institutions. Kenya failed because its neoliberal reforms after Arap Moi failed to address the social pathology of virulent ethnicity through deeper democracy.
Davos, Election Monitoring and the 'Fierce Urgency' of Indigenous Knowledge:
While post-election violence raged in Kenya, the leaders of the prosperous countries of the world and the priests of the new order of economic orthodoxy met in Davos, Switzerland under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Some African leaders joined technocrats from global economic institutions and leaders of multinational corporations to envision the direction of economic globalization and proffer strategies for development. In June 2008 the African version of the forum will hold in Cape Town amidst fears of what the future holds for South Africa under the intemperate Jacob Zuma.
What is significant about Davos and the Kenyan crisis is that the crisis did not merit significant considerable even as the attendees talked about economic development in Africa. The sorry spot was simply overlooked and the myth of the market-will-fix-it was restated. In Cape Town, African leaders will be counseled on the urgency of keeping its various market reforms on tract. But, nothing will be said about the fiercer urgency of institutionalizing democratic transformation.
Just as the Davos concave wound down, the Open Society Institute of philanthropist Billionaire, George Soros, held its convention in Dakar, Senegal. Open Society Institute through its initiative in West Africa has done so much to create a vibrant civil society and instigate democratic accountability. As that body reviewed its work and the situation in Africa, I understand that the financier, George Soros, settled on the urgency of election monitoring in Africa. The failure of the presidential election in Kenya and how it has upset the 'stability' of a key ally of the United States in the war against terror may have moved the charitable Soros to conclude that the most urgent work in West Africa should be election monitoring in order to avert future electoral disputation that may engender ethnic violence, which invariably hinders the creation of a free society in Africa.
I have great sympathy for this new commitment, only that it is another neoliberal fallacy. Increased intensity in election monitoring if it does not translate to overt political mobilization will not help to overcome electoral rigging leading to primitive violence. If funding organizations like Open Society Institute continue to stress political neutrality and interpret this neutrality to means not funding overt projects that aim at politically mobilizing the masses to countervail the status quo, then election monitoring will be mere post mortem narration of election rigging and electoral violence. It will not help to heal the social pathologies that burst out as demons of machete wars.
Turning to election monitoring is faddish and derives from fleeting attention to the complexities of politics and the structural dependency of the crisis of power in Africa. I remember reading as a secondary student a book on why some nations are poor and others rich by Miss Barbara Ward, a British economist who later headed the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Her views are interesting. She argued that the west is rich because she has passed through several revolutions, revolutions of ideas and values, violent and peaceful political revolutions that have entrenched the values and practices that conduce to liberal democracy and capitalism. Even if this claim is disputable, it is richer and more helpful than that of Hernando deSoto which the World Bank models, which claims that once you fix the land registry you are coasting home to prosperity like the west.
These simplistic narrations about Africa and development require a counterfactual. This means a flourishing idea industry in Africa. The first imperative of African renaissance is not the various entrepreneurial activities and modeling going on in Africa. It is not the millions of non-profit projects sponsored by benevolent outsiders like George Soros. It is the development of an African perspective to development. African universities and civil society organizations should become centres of African reflections on its social tragedies. This is not a plea for insularity and exceptionality. It is a plea for indigenization of universal knowledge.
Africans should own the process of social discourse on African social crisis. The present condition where we are consumers of knowledge minted in New York or Davos will keep us beggarly and miserable. It does not matter whether the knowledge is those of the high priests of the World Economic Forum or of the Open Society Institute. African reformers and political leaders should not be making yearly pilgrimages to Davos and New York in search of the Holy Grail. They should look inward and hear the voice of the past.
We should begin this indigenization of knowledge by rehabilitating Mahmood Mamdani and Claude Ake and their call for radical transformation. That's how we can get beyond neoliberal fallacy in understanding the tragedy in Kenya
Dr. Amadi is a Special Assistant to Minister of Foreign Affairs.
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