Writing in 1848, German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reckoned that capitalism was producing “its own grave diggers”.
This doomsday prediction of capitalism crashing under the weight of its own flaws, however, did not come to pass. Today, capitalism rules the world. In the past half century, market-led economic growth has lifted more people out of poverty faster than ever before.
Capitalism is confronting a triple crisis of its own flaws – widening poverty and inequality gaps, unemployment, stagnating incomes, concentrated wealth – a looming environmental crisis and now the fallout and severity of the coronavirus pandemic.
Globally, the reckoning is fuelling a fierce supremacy battle between the America-led liberal camp mainly in the West and the state-led capitalism mainly in Asia and Africa, increasingly championed by China. In the emerging markets, it is feeding a new genre of wedge politics, likely to fuel post-Covid-19 instability.
In Kenya, considered by scholars as a model of capitalist system in former colonial dependencies, capitalism is unravelling as a result of internal flaws amid the coronavirus crisis and the divisive succession politics in the run-up to the 2022 General Election.
Since 2018, capitalism’s reckoning in Kenya, unfolding as a clash of two schisms within the ruling Jubilee Party locked in a fierce battle for democratic legitimacy and for the soul of the nation, has played out in a public and palpable way. On the one front is a re-imagined ‘nationalist consensus’ coalesced around President Uhuru Kenyatta. In March 2018, Kenyatta made peace (handshake) with the main opposition leader, Raila Odinga, and adopted a reform agenda under the rubric of Building Bridges Initiative (BBI). Since then, other opposition parties have entered into coalition agreements with Jubilee, bolstering Kenyatta as the one solely directing traffic.
Kenyatta’s 57th Madaraka Day Speech, perhaps his best, was a tour de force in defence of Kenya’s capitalist order. The speech traced Kenya’s capitalism back to the seminal Sessional Paper Number 10 of 1965, entitled ‘African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya’, which set East Africa’s largest economy on a capitalist path.
The blueprint blended the traditionalist socialist ideals (the Harambee or Ubuntu spirit) with the quest for an Africanised, locally owned and industrialised economy powered by technology, producing for internal and external markets. But the paper had its fierce critics, too. Among them was Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. In his book, Not Yet Uhuru (1967), Kenya’s first vice-president warned against independence without the economy being in the hands of Africans.
Successively, Sessional Paper Number 1 of 1986, the Kenya Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation, 2003-2007 (2003), Kenya Vision 2030 and the Big Four Agenda updated and implemented Kenya’s capitalist blueprint. Additionally, new Nationalist Coalition is drawing inspiration from the writings and “the dreams of our fathers” to re-imagine the country’s capitalist system in the 21st century.
The refurbishing of Kenya’s capitalism is unfolding at three levels. First is the re-engineering of the 2010 Constitution to bring an end to the senseless cycles of violence that have bedevilled every election since 1992, deepen our democratic credentials and create a much more inclusive society.
Second is the urgency to expand the economic base by building infrastructure, increasing access to land, education and health services to guarantee the freedom of all Kenyans from poverty, ignorance and disease in a modern knowledge-based economy.
Finally, the need to transform the country’s civic order. The overarching idea is to avoid the six vices of a decadent social order: “politics without principle; wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without morality; science without humanity and worship without sacrifice”–to cite Cannon Donaldson of Westminster Abbey. The elite in Kenya’s ‘new nationalist consensus’ are not seeking to replace capitalism with a new model of political economy. Instead, they are re-engineering society to sustain democratic legitimacy while harnessing the benefits of a capitalist market, thus managing the perennial tensions between capitalism and democracy.
A rival camp begs to differ. Since the March 2018 handshake, a rival Tangatanga camp in Jubilee allied to Deputy President William Ruto has pursued an alternative vision of society. They have latched onto the dual crisis of capitalism (particularly unemployment, poverty, inequalities and landlessness and corruption) and the social-economic fallouts from the Covid-19 pandemic as wedge issues to wrest power in 2022. Anti-Covid-19 measures and battle losses for the party, government and Parliament where they were outnumbered and outgunned have slowed their march. In response, Tangatanga strategists have transformed the Kikuyu music industry into a new den of rebellion and militancy, resulting in the most intense political radicalisation of the Mount Kenya region since the colonial days.
A new song by the Benga artist, Muigai wa Njoroge, titled Ino Migunda (these lands) may have gone beyond the pale by courting revolutionary violence, but it reveals the ideological contours of Jubilee’s rebellion. The new song has distinct revolutionary tropes. Its centerpiece is land, a vexing issue in Kenya. “This land will one day be sub-divided equally. A time is coming when the oppressed (“wagio”) will rise up against oppression,” goes the song’s eerie chorus.
But Jubilee rebels are also drinking deep of the Marxist rhetoric of class struggle. The crisis of capitalism in Kenya is unfolding as a class struggle between the ‘haves’ or “dynasties” and the ‘have-nots’ or “hustlers”. “The one you are calling thief will bring an end to the era of looting,” the song chants. The song carries the apocalyptic echoes of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy thesis: “A home in Kisumu will be on fire. In Kabarak, wails will be heard as far as Nyahururu. And in the home of your Grandfather, they will escape on foot.”
While the rebels appear hell-bent on replacing Kenya’s capitalist order, the question is how to peacefully reform the system to make it work for all.
Prof Kagwanja is former Government Adviser and CEO of Africa Policy Institute
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