OPINION: Politics of shareholding in Kenya, and the historic systemic exclusion in development

This is an invitation to a dialectical discourse on the imperatives of national development, and the historical impediments that have informed Kenya’s development trajectory for three score and one year since independence.

Over the last sixty-one years of Kenya’s post-independence construction and development, the flow of events, whether planned or accidental, have continued to demonstrate how unequal Kenya is, and its likely to remain so for quite some time.

No doubt, the patrimonial dichotomy discourse of shareholding and non-shareholding in Kenya is as old as the State itself.

The basis of the twisted politics of shareholding and exclusionary political elitism is understood by peeling and analysing Kenya’s historical materialism and dialectical materialism.

Systemic and systematic exclusionary politics have constructed pillars of misery and shame in the Kenyan nation-state. Kenya’s politics has continued to have structured and unstructured forms of political isolation contained in the polity, further entrenching shareholding ideologies in different forms.

As such, shareholding ideologies are antithetical to the fact that the provenance of national cohesion is unfettered inclusion.

Right from independence, the fall-out between Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta and his first Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga heralded the exclusion of the Luo community as non-shareholders in the government for decades.

Post-colonial Kenya regimes under Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi facilitated immeasurable land distribution and accumulation by significant political elites, to the deliberate exclusion of the post-independence middle class and the lower class, negating the very cause of the MAU MAU struggle.

This kept majority of Kenyans from owning land, a major factor of production. For this reason, economic take-off for millions of Kenyans was not only delayed or impeded, it was curtailed.

Under the Moi government for 24 years of his rule, the court poets and decorate sycophants were bigger shareholders, and the opposition regions remained disadvantaged in national resources allocation for development. The political reward scheme was Moi’s government policy to punish opposition regions and reward individuals and families that supported his administration.

The Nyayo philosophy of “Siasa mbaya, Maisha mbaya” was a shareholding mantra. Those who voiced dissent to his leadership and chastised him for human rights violations were considered hostile politicians and therefore not shareholders in the government. Government was much like his personal property or the property of the KANU party, which he owned and directed.

Further, Kenyan polity since independence has been informed and managed on the basis of ethnocentric and ethno-regional frameworks of political participation, and post-election beneficial interests in government, based on ethno-regional shares.

It is this approach to politics that has kept some regions backward, has led to political assassinations, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and some regions remaining on the lower rungs of successive regimes’ development prioritization.

The New World Order, shaped by the post 9/11 (following the terror attack on America’s Twin Towers), compelled countries, including Kenya, into the boulevard of structured profiling and discrimination enabled by laws and policies aimed at combatting terror and disabling associated networks.

The supervening laws and policies were punitive and discriminatory against persons of Islamic faith, by which measures they were considered lesser shareholders in the liberal spaces of peace, democracy, investment and travel. This can be seen through the experiences of dwellers in the Northern and Coastal regions of Kenya, that still bear the scars.

President Mwai Kibaki’s administration engineered the economic recovery framework, and developed Vision 2030, which I consider as a conscious and deliberate effort to enhance equality, non-discrimination and resources allocation for the benefit of all Kenyans.

As such, Vision 2030 and the institutionalization of the Constituency Development Fund were early baby steps in the desired extermination of the systemic and systematic political taxonomy of shareholding.

In the more recent times under Kenya’s new republic of a new constitutional order, the Constitution of Kenya 2010, and the advent of devolved governance were jointly the answer to the question of unequal development and discrimination, with a structured framework to eradicate the shareholding politics based on political ideals.

Effectively, it was to be the ‘End of History’ for shareholding politics.

As such, postulations and furtherance of shareholding politics inform duplicitous governance, as recently was being advanced by impeached Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua.

All economically active Kenyans pay taxes, and should not be isolated based on region, or from any political opportunities at the national or county level, based on how they voted in the last election.

To do so would be to cheat people and regions out of their political birth-rights preserved by the constitution of Kenya.

It is the brazen advancement of shareholding politics that railroaded impeached Deputy President Gachagua into being a national black sheep.

From 2022, Rigathi Gachagua modelled himself as a symbol and agenda of exclusionary politics in Kenya, keenly advocating for only the narrow interests of his Kikuyu community, and then those who fully supported or voted for the Kenya Kwanza government.

It must not be forgotten that the Constitution of Kenya by way of Article 131, elevates the President, and the Presidency as an institution, as symbols of national unity. This means that the presidency must not only symbolize national unity and inclusion, but actuate it.

President Ruto’s proclamation that Kenya belongs to all, including opportunities to serve in government brings sober satisfaction and that is the country that Kenyans desire.

Systematic and systemic exclusionary politics are antithetical to progressive development, within the framework of constitutional democracy.

Exclusion of any kind opens doors to the worst blights of isolation and discrimination based on political inclinations. Incontrovertibly, any form of shareholding or exclusion is a social injustice and a form of political colonization.

It is therefore an inescapable conclusion that shareholding politics as was being advanced by impeached DP Gachagua should be understood as ideological violence aimed at stifling democracy and freedom of political choice, by bullying citizens into a coalition of one.

Such violent ideology seeks to exclude others from their right to nation-state resources.

[Javas Bigambo is a lawyer and governance expert based in Nairobi Kenya.]