DRAFT
Programme of the Communist Party of Kenya
|
PREFACE:
The
following draft programme of the Kenya Communist Party is the outcome of an ongoing process of
discussion, debate and reflection which has often elicited feisty, robust and
frank comradely fisticuffs among a group of Kenyans who are united by their
vision of a new Kenya that is more
just, egalitarian, equitable and politically progressive. They do not share
ideological beliefs on each and every subject under the sun. On the contrary
some of deep theoretical and ideological cleaves rise to the surface from
time. The glue that binds this core group of the revamped Kenya Communist Party is their
abhorrence for the twin evils of sectarianism and unprincipled populist
opportunism and demagoguery.
In
its present form, the draft itself will no doubt become a locus for
collective reflection and struggle as the Kenya Communist Party endeavours to forge a common
vision for all its militants, cadres and followers.
The
following draft takes as its starting point that the ideological identity of
the Kenya Communist Party of Kenya must be anchored in an unequivocal identification and
embrace of the socialist path. This is by no means a view that is unanimous.
There are valuable members and veteran allies of the KCP who are of the firm
belief that any flirtations with “socialism” is inherently adventuristic,
anarchical and political dangerous. A counterpoint to this position is the
proposition by some of the more radical and militant elements within the KCP
who aver that the MINIMUM basis of unity is a commitment to socialism.
It
is our hope that the vuta-nikuvute between these two apparent poles
will be determined DEMOCRATICALLY through collective study, debate,
reflection and discussion.
Some
cautionary words froma world-renowned revolutionary about the challenges of
compiling a history of a revolutionary movement: Here is the Italian Marxist-Leninist
leader Antonio Gramsci writing in
the Prison Notebooks eons ago:
To write the history of a political party, it is
necessary in reality to confront a whole series of problems... In what will
the history of a party consist of? Will it be a simple narrative of the
internal life of a political organization? How it comes into existence, the
first groups which constitute it, the ideological controversies through which
its programme and its conception of the world and of life are formed? In such
a case, one would merely have the history of certain intellectual groups, or
even sometimes the political biography of a single personality. The study
will therefore have to have a vaster and more comprehensive framework.
The history will have to be written of a particular mass
of men who have followed the founders of the party, sustained them with their
trust, loyalty and discipline or criticised them realistically by dispersing
or remaining passive before certain initiatives. The history of a party, in
other words, can only be the history of a particular social group. But this
group is not isolated; it has friends, kindred groups, opponents, enemies.
The history of any given party can only emerge from the complex portrayal of
the totality of society and State (often with international ramifications
too). Hence it may be said that to write the history of a party means nothing
less than to write the general history of a country from a monographic
viewpoint, in order to highlight a particular aspect of it. A party will have
greater or less significance and weight precisely to the extent to which its
particular activity has been more or less decisive in determining a country’s
history.
We may thus see that from the way in which the history of
a party is written there emerges the author’s conception of what a party is
and should be. The sectarian will become excited over petty internal matters,
which will have esoteric significance for him, and fill him with mystical
enthusiasm. The historian, though giving everything its due importance in the
overall picture, will emphasise above all the real effectiveness of the
party, its determining force, positive and negative, in having contributed to
bringing certain events about and in having prevented other events from
taking place.
In
keeping with the above Gramcian observations, although the underground
political formations and movements had diverse ideological orientation and
tendencies, and certainly less successful in Kenya; the history of these
formations was not only intricately interlinked with the history of the rise
of an authoritarian neo-colonial state in Kenya, but also with broader
ideological and intellectual currents of resistance during the Cold War
era.
In
struggle,
Onyango Oloo
Kenya Communist
Party INTERIM MEMBER
Thursday, August 3,
2017
12:22 PM
|
Section
1
1.0.
Introduction: What is the Kenyan Communist Party?
1.1.
This programme reflects the concentrated experience
and insights of Kenyan social democrats who have been part and parcel of the
ongoing national struggles for democracy, social justice and national
sovereignty. Since its formation in 1996, the KCP has evolved from a convenient
electoral vehicle for mainstream politicians seeking parliamentary and civic
seats into a small but principled entity which foregrounds issue based politics
and fights for the rights of Kenyan workers, small farmers, women, youth,
pastoralists and cultural, religious and ethnic minorities, small business
people, patriotic and progressive intellectuals and all other marginalized and
disenfranchised people in Kenya.
1.2.
The KCP sees itself as contributing to the
historic traditions of yesteryear’s Kenyan wazalendo like Mbaruk al Amin Mazrui who led a year long uprising against British
imperialist incursion in 1895-96; Mwangeka
who led the Dawida people to resist foreign domination around the same period; Waiyaki wa Hinga who was buried alive
because of his resolution opposition to colonial rule; Koitalel arap Samoei who provided visionary and unwavering stewardship during the 10 year Nandi War against British
imperialism; Me Katilili and Manje who led the peasants of Kilifi
and Giriama land in saying to forced
labour and compulsory taxation in 1913-14; the tens of thousands of Kenyan
youth who refused to help build the railway and later bolted from conscription
during World War One; Moraa wa Ngiti,
Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, Syotuna and other
Kenyan patriotic women who galvanized entire communities in resisting
British colonialism; Muindi Mbingu,
James Beuttah and Harry Thuku; Makhan Singh, Chege Kibacia and Fred Kubai and their visionary
leadership in helping to lay the
foundations of the Kenyan trade union movement from the early 1930s reaching a
peak with the heightened political militancy of Kenyan workers in the 1950s; Pio
da Gama Pinto, Anubhai Patel, the Vidyarthi
family, Jeevanjee, Fitz De Souza and a host of radical Kenyans of South Asian descent; the Kiama Cia Muingi and their able leaders like Dedan Kimathi wa Waciuri, General Muthoni, Karari Njama, General
Tanganyika, Bamuinge and other sterling “sons and daughters of the soil”
who contribute life and limb during the gallant Mau Mau War for National Independence; Jomo Kenyatta, Bildad Kaggia, Achieng’ Oneko, Paul Ngei, Kungu Karumba,
J.D. Kali and all other Kenyan political prisoners of the 1950s; Argwings
Kodhek, Ronald Ngala, John Keen, Martin Shikuku, TM Chokwe, Arthur Ochwada and
other stalwarts of the early 1960s. In lauding the patriotic efforts of several
of the above names, the KCP is also keenly conscious that some later on turned
out to be opportunistic turn coats who reneged on their earlier proclamations,
sold out the aspirations of the Kenyan wananchi and actually sold out to the
very imperialists who had imprisoned and persecuted them earlier in their
political lives. The KCP seeks solace in the fact that the toiling and
struggling wananchi have been remarkably consistent in fighting for national
independence and deepening of democracy throughout Kenya’s modern history. The KCP
particularly feels connected to the legacy of the anti-imperialist
revolutionary nationalists like Jaramogi
Oginga Odinga, Mzee Bildad Kaggia, the socialist martyr Pio gama Pinto, the progressive writers
Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo, radical parliamentarians
like JM Kariuki, Chelagat Mutai, George
Anyona, Jean Marie-Seroney, Mark Mwithaga, Mwashengu wa Mwachofi and his six
other “ Bearded Sisters”. The KCP
cannot forget the roles of principled and fearless journalists like Salim and Patricia Lone; Mrs. And Mrs. Nyamora-the founders and
editors of Society magazine; Gitobu Imanyara-democratic lawyer and
the publisher of Nairobi Law Monthly
not to forget the many unheralded reporters, correspondents and columnists who
unreservedly spoke truth to power, exposed cases of grand graft, dastardly
political plots, human rights abuses and terrible working conditions. Nor can
the KCP ignore the valiant role of generations of militant and patriotic
students and youths who demonstrated and remonstrations against a host of
societal ills-despite the police truncheons and canisters of tear gas. The KCP
has also been made richer ideologically from the lived collective experiences
of a series of underground movements and
clandestine groups that organized,
using covert and overt methods, against the calumny of the KANU one party state- beginning during
the Kenyatta era with groups such as the
2nd of March Movement
(formed after the grisly state slaying
of the populist parliamentarian JM
Kariuki in March 1975) to the
collective that produced the anti-imperialist manuscript Cheche Kenya in 1981 before they
fearlessly launched the underground cyclostyled pamphlet Pambana! as the organ of the banned December Twelve Movement; to the DTM which emerged after the
post-1982 coup attempt crackdown before morphing into the controversial Mwakenya Movement which co-existed with
other Marxist oriented clandestine groups such as the Kenya Anti-Imperialist Front, the Me Katilili Revolutionary Movement
and Harakati ya Kupambania Demokrasia Kenya during the 1980s and early 1980s. Kenyans abroad have
also played a very big part in the struggle for a New Kenya-dating back to Jomo Kenyatta’s Pan Africanist salad
days in the 1920s and 1930s to the solidarity campaigns of Joseph Murumbi in the 1950s and the formation of the Committee for
the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya by among others- the late Wanjiru Kihoro, Abdul Latif
Abdalla, Micere Mugo, Yusuf Hassan, Shadrack Gutto, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wangui wa
Goro and others-in 1982. Many of the
founder members and current leadership of the KCP were on the very frontlines
of the struggles to entrench political pluralism in Kenya from the late 1980s and among
the core of the movement for a new democratic constitution which has gained
strength from its origins in the 1990s. Here we must single out stalwarts of what has
become known in Kenyan parlance as the “Second Liberation”- names like George Anyona, Raila Odinga, Wamalwa
Kijana, James Orengo, George Kapten, Katama Mkangi, Kenneth Matiba- although
names of Leftists like Oduor Ongwen, Mwandawiro Mghanga, Kariuki Gathitu, Wahu Kaara, Chitechi
Osundwa, Kishushe Mzirai,Omondi K’abir, Njeri Kabeberi, Zarina Patel, Zahid
Rajan and others are frequently omitted when that history is recounted.The
downfall of the 39 year old rule of the KANU despotic kleptocracy could not
have happened in 2002 without the active participation and strategic leadership
of many who now call the KCP home.
1.3.
The Kenya Communist Party is a political
party that has made a decisive break with the motley crew of other so called
“parties” that are little more than convenient and ephemeral electoral
vehicles” for mainstream politicians seeking a ticket to parliament where they
seek to entrench themselves either by joining the government of the day as a
cabinet member/assistant minister OR by horse-trading, in cahoots with other
MPs for salary hikes and other perks- all borne by the long-suffering Kenyan
taxpayers. The KCP is a political party that seeks its mandate, guidance and
membership from ordinary members of the Kenyan people, especially from the
working class.
The Kenya
Communist Party seeks to widen the meaning of democracy to include its
economic, social, cultural, gendered and technological elements and aspects
which prioritizes the right to decent, affordable and healthy food; adequate
and affordable shelter; the right to decent work- all this forming a basket of
inalienable civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights that
should be guaranteed to every Kenyan citizen and resident.
The
Kenya Communist Party, unlike its mainstream Kenyan political party
counterparts, sees political power in dramatically different terms.
Political power is
not a greedy quest for an individual politician to be the next tenant of State
House-before embarking on an orgy of self-aggrandizement, looting and offering
plum positions to close relatives and hangers on, while plundering of state
coffers continues unabated.
Rather, to the KCP,
political power is first and foremost about empowering the wananchi to
collectively take proactive action to transform Kenyan society in a sustained
and democratic fashion.
That is why the
principal task of the KCP is to sensitize, mobilize and organize the Kenyan
wananchi to eventually take control of state power in order to liberate Kenya by
destroying neo-colonial relations and transforming Kenyan society by undergoing
a national democratic revolution whose ultimate goal is socialism.
In leading the fight
for a new society, the Kenyan Communist
Party is acutely cognizant of the fact that the major enemies of the Kenyan
people are NOT individual and transitory political figure heads like Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi, Mwai Kibaki or Uhuru Kenyatta, but on the contrary, the nefarious forces of international
finance capital, multilateral institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO
that are unleashing neo-liberal policies and other pillars of imperialist
globalization. The KCP understands that the Kenyattas, Mois, Kibakis, Uhurus and Rutos are at best, nyaparas
and plantation managers overseeing the running of the Kenyan neo-colonial state on behalf of their imperialist bosses.
This realization compels the KCP to look at the ills of Kenyan society from a
wider prism that incorporates what is happening to other countries in the Global South. We therefore hold that we
can not separate our struggles in Kenya
from other struggles in other African countries and other global fights taking
place in Asia, the Middle East, the
Caribbean and Latin
America. Nor can we ignore the plight of other victims of
corporate capital like for instance
workers, immigrants, women, youth and other marginalized social groups
in the “South in the North” all over the
United States, Canada, Britain,
Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Australia and other capitals of capital. We know that there is a “North in the South”
which is part of the motive forces of world monopoly capitalism. We are watching
keenly the unfolding transmogrification of China
as it peddles its “market socialism” variant studying its thirst for oil and other energy and natural resources
before we decide which side of the fence the
so called “ People’s Republic” lies. Therefore, our political and
ideological alliances will traverse and transcend national boundaries and will
go deeper than superficial personal hatred against this or that individual
Kenyan politician merely because they are, have been or wannabe the head of the
Kenyan state.
1.4. The Kenya
Communist Party has risen to the historic challenge of spearheading the
fight for a New Kenya: a new Kenya with a new democratic constitution; a new
Kenya which recognizes its responsibilities in Africa; a new Kenya that stands up
to imperialism; a new Kenya that carries out far reaching agrarian, economic,
social, cultural and political reforms geared towards bringing the humble
Mwananchi to the foreground our national development process; a new Kenya that
recognizes and works for the equality of women and men; a new Kenya that
redresses the decades-old litany of historical injustices, including bringing
to book the notorious political assassins, land grabbers and looters of state
coffers; a new Kenya that works boldly with other Southern countries to fight
against the IMF, the World Bank and the imperialist domination of structures
and processes like the WTO; a new Kenya that elevates the working people, the
poor and marginalized people of this country to take control of state power and
use such power to transform our nation; in short, a new Kenya that makes a
radical, decisive break with the trajectory Kenya has been on for over one
hundred years. That is the historic mission the KCP has set for itself- that is
the task we are confident we shall achieve with the support and involvement of
the wananchi of Kenya.
Section 2
2.0. Contemporary Kenya: The
Nature of the State and Analysis of Classes and Social Contradictions
2.1.
What Kind of State Do We Have in Kenya Today?
There is considerable
confusion about the nature of the state in Kenya today.
The first source of
confusion is a semantic one.
There are those who
use the words “government”, “nation” and “state” interchangeably as if they
mean the same thing.
Then they are those
who refer to Kenya as an “independent”
state; while some call Kenya
a
“failed state” or a “stable
democratic government” or “peaceful nation” etc.
Within Kenya these
semantic and conceptual confusions are compounded by the fact that in Kiswahili
it is near impossible to distinguish between “government” and “state” because
one word-“serikali”-is used to
describe both.
Yet there is a
crucial and fundamental difference between the “government” and the “state”.
Here is a concrete
example:
Since December 12, 1963, there have been
several governments in Kenya-the first Uhuru government headed by President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta with Jaramogi
Oginga Odinga and his deputy; the post 1966
KANU-KADU government headed by Kenyatta
with Daniel arap Moi as his deputy; the 1979-1984 government with Moi, Njonjo and Kibaki as leading figures; the 1984-1988
government of Moi with Kibaki
remaining as vice president and new figures brought in; the 1988-1991 Moi government with its
changing musical chairs; the 1992-1997 Moi-KANU
regime with a multi-party opposition; the 1997-2002
sunset years of the Moi-KANU
dictatorship; the 2002-2004 NARC
ruling coalition and the post 2004 so called “Government of National Unity” featuring elements of the former DP,
the nascent NARC-Kenya, elements of the Raila
Odinga led Liberal Democratic Party
a big chunk of FORD-People and FORD-Kenya not forgetting Charity Ngilu’s NPK. Of course in 2013,a tribal coalition known as Jubilee brought to power Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.
On
the other hand, there has been ONLY ONE STATE in Kenya since December 12, 1963- the
neo-colonial state that segued from the British administered colonial state
which lasted from approximately 1895 to 1963.
In other words,
“government” refers to those structures that publicly administers the state
while the term “state” itself refers to the instruments of coercion like the
armed forces, the laws of the land, the public administration system, the
courts, the prisons, the organs of propaganda and other means through which the
ruling clique/dominant classes in Kenya ensure that they rule over the wananchi.
If one understands the
crucial distinctions between these two concepts, it then becomes easier to
grasp why, for instance, former
President Moi is collaborating very closely with the man who humiliated him
at the 2002 polls- current President Mwai Kibaki. It will also help to explain
why Charles Njonjo, the alleged
“Duke of Kabeteshire” who was hounded out of high political office in the mid 1980s by
Daniel arap Moi remained a very close business associate of the former
President throughout the 1990s and into the first years of the 21st Century or why cabinet
minister and billionaire businessman Simeon
Nyachae is still a partner of Moi and works in tandem with his alleged
nemesis, the late Nicholas Biwott in
defending the current ruling clique around Mwai
Kibaki. Since they all belong to the same comprador bourgeois stratum they
have a vested class interest in defending the current Kenyan neo-colonial state
because they will be directly materially threatened should that state be
overthrown or transformed into something else.
On the other side of
the coin, we saw disparate (if not exactly desperate) elements within the ODM cluster clinging to each other like
sardines in a can despite their earlier acrimonious history because they have
reached a broad rapprochement and consensus in forming another government WITHOUT transforming or
destroying the existing neo-colonial
state-primarily to defend their collective comprador/petit bourgeois class
interests and aspirations within the rubric of the status quo.
Why do we say that Kenya is a
“neo-colonial state”?
Is this an attempt at
being politically cute and bombastic?
Whatever else one may say about the Kenyan state, there are certain things that
it is NOT.
First of all, it is
NOT an “independent” state.
Most, if not all, of
the major policy decisions in Kenya- be they about politics, economics or even
culture- are informed by diktats that come from the capitals of capital-Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo
etc- either directly or indirectly. The IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO regularly arm twist whatever
excuse of a “government” prevailing in Kenya.
One of the most
spectacular manifestations of these was the IMF snake oil prescription for
“structural adjustment” in the 1980s and their dire and devastating
consequences in terms of health, education and employment since then.
Another one is the
imperious demand for “privatization” of the public sector of the economy and
the resultant retrenchments of tens of thousands of Kenyan workers.
Related to that are
the neo-liberal strictures to allow blatant repatriation of transnational
profits in Kenya
and the accompanying tax holidays and lowering of the existing abysmal labour
standards that gave rise to slave like conditions in the EPZs for example.
Over the last forty
years NATO powers have arrogantly
abrogated themselves the luxury of setting up military bases in Kenya without bothering to consult with the people
of Kenya and going further
to use entire regions like northern Kenya as zones for intermittent
military exercises. Cases of mass rape by British soldiers of Samburu women for
instance have continued with impunity. In 1976 Israeli commandos used Kenyan territory
to plan their invasion of a sovereign neighbouring African country-Uganda. In
2003 the allegedly “independent” Kenyan government collaborated with a battery
of CIA, MOSSAD and Turkish
intelligence and special forces to abduct PKK
Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan from the sanctuary of the Greek embassy in the heart of Nairobi. In the post 911
paranoid atmosphere where every Muslim is a potential Al Qaeda cell member, the Kenyan government has looked the other
way as FBI and other American agents sneak into Kenya and abduct Kenyan youth from
the Muslim communities at the Coast, North Eastern and elsewhere for secret
interrogations where claims of torture have been made. And with the 2011
invasion of neighbouring Somalia, we
have witnessed the atrocities of the Jihadist terrorist formation of Al-Shabaab.
A casual glance at
the fare offered on Kenyan TV, including the state run KBC, confirms that our
“preferred” cultural “entertainment” consists of discarded and cancelled
programs from the ancient vaults of American and British media networks. The
foul mouthed pornographic recycled and unoriginal musical trash blared from a
hundred thousand matatus every day confirms that US led cultural imperialism
has captured the souls of even the youngest Kenyan.
In the sphere of
higher education “our own government” gleefully trumpets the benefits of
seeking expensive university education overseas while ignoring the parlous
conditions at the public universities within the country.
When it comes to
health care our heads of state either make a fetish of retaining private and
foreign doctors or hop on to the next European flight heading for the most
expensive clinic every time they catch a cold.
In regard to textiles
, the allegedly “independent” Kenyan government prefers to encourage its
subjects to don previously loved hand me downs from Toronto, Dallas, Prague, New York, Melbourne and Frankfurt with the
further mitumbanization of Kenyan
commerce and industry rather than revive
the collapsed indigenous textile industry- that is when the more upscale
members of society are busy rummaging through Harrods, Phat Farm, Sears, H&
M and other mega department stores and fashion outlets overseas.
Secondly, despite its
loud proclamations to the contrary, the current Kenyan state is NOT democratic.
It is true that every
five years there are indeed, elections for parliamentarians and for the
presidency. It is also true that Kenya boasts a vibrant press and
that unlike the days of yore, Kenyans are quite vocal and fearless in
expressing themselves. There are over sixty registered political parties. One
could cite other manifestations of formal “democracy” in Kenya.
The reality check
seeps in when one examines how the Kenyan state has intervened over the years
in undermining all these fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed rights and
freedoms.
In the recent past,
there have been outrageous attacks on the media. Two incidents will suffice to
illustrate this point.
In 2005 First Lady
Lucy Kibaki raided the Nation Centre-the headquarters of Kenya’s largest
media house- in the wee hours of the night to unleash an unhinged rampage
culminating in a torrent of abuse and slapping of the journalists present with
the whole spectacle recorded for posterity by live television cameras. The
Attorney General later blocked the prosecution of the president’s wife.
In March 2006, hooded
guns who turned out to be a phalanx of police commandoes commanded by a duo of
mysterious European mercenaries invaded the downtown offices of the Standard
Group- the second largest media house-
beating and confining security guards,
damaging equipment, shutting down the independent television station run by the
Standard Group and finally taking that day’s newspapers and incinerating it in
a wild bonfire- again with the whole ordeal carried live by the other media
houses. A few days later the country’s Internal Security minister arrogantly
admitted that it was the government which had organized the attack because the
media house had “rattled a snake”. Attacks on Kenyan journalists by state goons
and confiscation of cameras, video tape and note book has been a regular
feature of state/media relations.
Over the last four
years the ruling clique has come under severe criticism by its opponents as the
government of the day poaches individual opposition MPs while flagrantly
bypassing the party structures on whose tickets the MPs were elected.
In the run up to the
2007 elections there have been other indicators that the fragile multi-party
experiment is under severe attack as the state supervises or condones the
registration of pro-government factions to take over the leadership of the
official parliamentary opposition party. The involvement of forces allied to former President Moi in
propping up the ruling Kibaki regime are seen as pointers of an attempt to
reintroduce the discredited one party rule under which both presidents thrived
for decades before the 2002 elections.
The Kenyan state is
notorious for using live bullets, police batons, tear gas, water pipes and
other methods to violently break up peaceful pro-democracy protestors and
dissenters.
It has forcibly
destroyed the homes of forest dwellers, urban workers and other communities.
Slum residents have
borne the brunt of state troops whenever they organize against the sordid
living conditions.
EPZ wage slaves have
confronted the naked terror of the state whenever they have dared to strike
against poor pay and rampant exploitation.
Small farmers opposed
to the paltry compensation packages of the Tiomin mining corporation have found
themselves at wrath of the high court which have countenanced state take over
of their land and forcible eviction from their ancestral homes.
Pastoralists and
minorities, especially those subsisting in the historically marginalized and systemically
ignored northern reaches have endured decades of special state led military and
police operations that have often led to massacres, rapes and destruction of
entire villages.
Urban based hawkers
and small traders are treated as vicious criminals for having the temerity to
attempt earning an honest living.
Historically, the
Kenyan state has been indicted by history for its blood-stained record of
torturing, imprisoning and even killing its political honest with the case of
the Nyayo House survivors one of the most recent chapters.
The numerous cases of
state-organized fascism have historical roots planted during the colonial era.
There are undemocratic and repressive laws which remain on the statute books
today in the 21st Century from their promulgation over half a
century ago.
It is partly because
of these colonial holdovers that many observers and analysts refer to the state
as a NEO-COLONIAL state.
The term
neo-colonialism was coined to describe the phenomenon whereby formal
colonialism was ended by the former imperialist powers to usher in a new era
where imperialist rule survived albeit via the local management of the state by
a coterie of pro-imperialist collaborators who mouthed nationalist platitudes
even as they supervised the opening up of the country to OTHER imperialist
powers to perpetuate foreign domination of the supposedly newly “independent”
state.
In
Kenya’s case, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, a former Pan Africanist icon and nationalist
hero who sold out to the British during his stint in prison led a bunch of
Black former colonial functionaries, home guards and sell outs to take over the
administration of the newly set up neo-colonial state while banishing and
silencing patriotic stalwarts like Makhan Singh, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Bildad
Kaggia and Pio da Gama Pinto. Among the key architects of the first
neo-colonial regime were the youthful CIA backed trade unionist and right wing
nationalist Tom Mboya and pro-Western conservative politicians like Njoroge Mungai,
Mbiyu Koinange, Paul Ngei, Daniel arap Moi and Ronald Ngala-not to speak of
actual former homungati and colonial era policemen, soldiers and prison warders.
More fundamentally, US led imperialism made a significant
foray into Kenya,
sucking the country into the smouldering ideological cold war, ghost writing
the infamous Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 and restructuring those aspects of
the state that would serve their interests. Other Western powers followed suit
some more subtly through their corporations (e.g. Italy’s Agip, Canada’s Bata,
Netherlands’ Royal Shell and the German
and Japanese automobile and electronic firms like Mercedes, Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW, Toyota, Nissan, Suzuki, Honda,
Mitsubishi, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Sanyo, Siemens, Grundig, Aiwa and Nintendo) while Western satellites like Israel took over the training of special
forces like the GSU and the country’s dreaded secret police.
Bilateral agreements
between the fledgling neo-colonial local underlings and Western states-including
the social democratic ones from Scandinavia-planted
the first seeds of what later became the huge debt burden.
Western controlled
multilateral agencies like the IMF and the World Bank began their chequered
history of dictating to Kenyans what our “development priorities” were-damn the
social and economic consequences.
At the United Nations and other world bodies,
representatives of the Kenyan neo-colonial state continue to vote (more often
than not) as Washington and Whitehall instructs.
Whatever semblance of
democratic credentials the Kenyan state possesses almost exclusively emanate
from the accumulated struggles of the Kenyan people over the last half century.
The above ground
Kenyan reform movement which arose in the late 1980s evolved from the clandestine
mobilizations of the mid 1970s and early 1980s.
Together, these
covert and overt fight backs forced the neo-colonial ruling clique crystallized
in the KANU one party dictatorship to concede to certain limited reforms like
the repeal of Section 2A of the
constitution in December 1991 that
paved the way for the reintroduction of multi-party politics the following year
and the 1997 IPPG deal that slightly
widened the democratic space on the one hand while curtailing even more radical
democratic proposals championed by the NCEC-NCA
movement.
There
was an important and historic break-through in 2002 when nation-wide
mobilization led to the downfall of the 39 year-old KANU dictatorship and the
ushering in of the NARC coalition which was elected on a popular mandate to
spearhead sweeping reforms including the promulgamation of a new constitution,
the setting up of a truth and justice commission and implementation of poverty
eradication strategies.
The new Kibaki-led
NARC regime quickly reneged on these pledges and it was not long before it
consolidated power along elitist and ethnic lines and quickly became a virtual
clone of its KANU predecessor.
The decades-long
quest for a new democratic constitution culminated in the year-long national
constitutional conference at the Bomas of Kenya between 2003 and 2004.
The true character of
the Kenyan neo-colonial state reared its ugly head again when the newly minted
local managers of the state led by Mwai Kibaki rebuffed and rejected the new
draft constitution that had been overwhelmingly endorsed by the Bomas delegate
thus throwing back the country into a political stand-off that reached a
dramatic climax when Kenyans rejected the Wako Draft prepared by the present
ruling cabal during the November 2005 Referendum.
In the context of the
character traits of the Kenyan neo-colonial state sketched in the preceding
paragraphs, it is ironic and mystifying to hear of the same state sometimes being
dubbed a “failed state”.
The whole notion of
“failed states” is horribly unscientific and terribly ahistorical.
It misses by a thousand
kilometres the true meaning of the term “state”-understood in historical,
political and ideological terms.
The classic
definition of the state clarifies that it is an INSTRUMENT of COERCION through
which one class (or cluster of classes and strata) impose its political will
over the rest of society.
Among the components
of the state are things like the armed forces, the prisons, the police, the
public administration and other arms of the executive, the legislature, the
judiciary, the battery of laws, the propaganda arsenal including the print and
electronic media and so on and so forth.
Given the amount of
state terror unleashed on the Kenyan people and the roughshod tactics of an increasingly
arrogant and detached ruling clique, it would take a very big stretch of the imagination
to identify the Kenyan neo-colonial state as a “failed state”.
In Kenya, the state
has NOT “failed” to bolster the rule of the present governing clique; it has
NOT failed to advance the interests of imperialism when it comes to
privatization, spiralling debt, exploitation of workers, displacement of
pastoralists and minorities; protection of foreign corporations;
marginalization of women and youth, suppression of the opposition and
criminalization of dissent.
On the contrary, the
present Kenyan state has very much “succeeded” in living up to the job
description of a neo-colonial state.
What is ALSO true is
that the Kenyan neo-colonial state HAS
failed the Kenyan people by thwarting our democratic aspirations, failing
to complete the struggle for national independence and failing to build a
peaceful, prosperous and harmonious democratic nation built on the tenets and
precepts of social justice and progressive ideals.
It is for this reason
that the Kenyan Communist Party of Kenya has resolved to lead the popular fight
for a different kind of state in Kenya.
A state that is the
very anti-thesis of the repressive, elitist and undemocratic neo-colonial state
that currently lords over millions of Kenyans.
Such a state, in our
present historical circumstances can only be a national democratic state that
is oriented towards constructing socialism in Kenya.
2.2.
Class Formation and Class Struggles in
Kenya
The
condition of the working class
Because of its
history of orthodox colonialism and neo-colonialism meant that we do not have a
sizable proletariat- in the classic
industrial working class meaning of the term. Colonialism confined Kenya as a
tea estate, coffee plantarion and agriculture based peripheral conduit serving
the British metropolitan economy. Such activities as diary farming, ranching, wheat and maize
production were there for the capitalist market Things like flower farming and
horticulture helped as an adjunct to the export economy. With the onset of
neo-colonialism, there was a gradual shift to import substitution. Most of the
ruling members of the regime over the last fifty years made a big deal of the
informal “jua kali” economy which confined Kenyans to low paying wage
occupations.
With the austerity
measures fostered by the IMF and World
Bank, there was a plethora of export processing zones which further
marginalized Kenyan workers. What was considered the “industrial areas” in
urban centres like Nairobi, Mombasa,
Nakuru, Eldoret,and Kisumu consisted
of factories manufacturing blankets, iron sheets and house hold products.
Despite its
incredible militant history which produced leaders like Makhan Singh and the Labour Trade Union of Kenya and later the East
African Trade Union Congress, the onslaught of imperialist agents like Tom Mboya who did the bidding of the CIA and ICFTU meant the anti-communist
hysteria led to the decimation of the indepependence of the trade unions
especially when Mboya became the powerful Secretary
General of the ruling KANU party
and one of the chief ideological architects of the economic blueprints of the
post-colonial government known cynically as Sessional
Paper Number 10 on African Socialism- which laid out in conjunction with a
right wing US professor a road map for capitalism in Kenya. The fact that Tom
Mboya achieved instant martyr when President
Jomo Kenyatta had an assassin murder him at the tender age of 39 obscured
his CIA and imperialist connections including his role in recruiting the late Jonas Savimbi of UNITA and
Angola into the pay of US imperialists along with the active help of Errol Brown and the AFL-CIO. Ironically, one of the people
that Tom Mboya airlifted to the United
States in the early sixties- the father of the former US President Barrack Hussein Obama-who was the original
owner of the name popularized by his famous son published and early critique of
African Socialism from a Marxist
perspective called Problems With Our
Socialism published as a monograph in 1965.
Without taking into
account social classes and their relationships, power dynamics and
contradictions, it is IMPOSSIBLE to fathom the many complex issues that affect
our nation of Kenya.
Of course, there are
those who would rubbish the very concept and existence of social classes in Kenya as a “foreign
Eurocentric notion” that has no relevance or application in our country.
Let us look at the
stubborn realities in Kenya.
Whether one lives in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Limuru, Garissa, Malindi
or any of the major urban areas of Kenya, it would be difficult to deny the
fact that not all Kenyans are the
“same”. And here, one is NOT referring to variegated ethnic backgrounds or
diverse religious callings.
At the most simplistic
level there is a clear demarcation between Kenyans who are rich and Kenyans who
are poor.
The First Family does
not live in Korogocho-they reside in
the posh gated enclvaves of upper-middle class Nairobi. Indeed if one contrasts
the ramshackle structures of Korogocho,
Kaiyaba, Kibera, Mathare and Huruma
to the plush digs of Muthaiga, Mountain
View, Lavington, Kitisuru and Runda,
one gets the impression that there are indeed two, if not more Kenyas. The same applies to Chaani and Nyali in Mombasa,
Kondele and Milimani in Kisumu and
so on.
Sometimes these
social distinctions are spread out regionally-for instance the conditions
prevailing in most of northern Kenya
as compared to other areas of the country.
Many observers have
simply divided Kenya
into two- the “haves” and the “have nots”.
While appealing, the
binary depiction is way too basic.
Often one finds white
collar senior clerks and young lawyers lumped together with the Manu Chandarias,
Simeon Nyachaes, Dalmas Otienos, Chris Kirubis, Bayusufs and Biwotts merely because the white collar
worker and fresh faced lawyer happen to live in a rented three bedroomed flat
as opposed to subsisting in a slum dwelling. Indeed, the phenomenon of high
unemployment of Kenya
has led to a section of the jobless viewing poorly paid fellow workers as
“privileged”. In the countryside, poor agricultural workers and peasants will
sometimes view the local headmaster or the neighbourhood pastor as “rich” because the headmaster or
pastor drives around in an old beaten up VW from the 1960s which he parks
outside his mabati roofed brick house.
Sometimes the indicators of wealth in these rural contexts may include the fact
that one household can afford to drink chai
na maziwa pamoja na blueband kwa mkate . There are cases where nephews have
raided and violently attacked their uncles because the former received a 1,000
shilling hand out from an urban-based offspring.
It is important
therefore, to interrogate the notions and perceptions behind “rich” and “poor”.
This forces us to look beyond the superficial attributes that often leads to
very skewed notions about the so called “haves” and “have nots”.
Since the advent of
capitalism a few centuries ago, societies around the world have been divided
into social classes.
There are those
pundits who would use income as the indicator of class.
Thus you will find
them talking about the “upper class” “middle class” and “lower class” with
salary/wages and remuneration levels as the major demarcator.
Using this yard stick,
an unemployed secondary school leaver who still lives with his parents in Karen
will be considered less privileged than a watchman who earns 8,000 shillings a
month guarding the palatial digs next door.
Obviously, the above
notion is totally off-base.
Vladimir
Lenin’s classic definition of social classes has passed the litmus test
of time:
Paraphrased, Lenin emphasizes that classes are large groups of people who are
distinguished from each other primarily by the relationship and positions vis a
vis a historically determined mode of production. In other words, you do not
define classes by looking at incomes, but rather by looking at HOW people
PRIMARILY earn their living within a certain economy.
For instance, a
shop-keeper is distinguished from a worker in the sense that the former is a
petty proprietor and the latter exists by selling his or her labour power to an
owner of capital. Of course, things are not so cut and dried: many workers run
small dukas on the side.
In the age of
imperialism the inner logic of capitalist development has ensured that the
major classes in society are capitalists on the one hand and workers on the
hand. Between these poles, there are a number of intermediate classes and
strata of classes. Some classes which used to be huge in earlier historical
epochs like the peasantry for instance are disintegrating with certain elements
forming components of the rural petit-bourgeoisie; others the rural and
agricultural workers and others becoming part of the lumpenized elements
déclassé.
The situation becomes
even more complex when one applies that class analysis for neo-colonies like Kenya.
Is there, for
instance a real INDIGENOUS capitalist or bourgeois class in Kenya?
Are the workers of Kenya the
proletariat that Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote about in their works of the
19th and early 20th century?
The answer to this
question is buried in our history.
When
the British imperialists colonized Kenya, they rudely interrupted the
course of our internal growth and development yanking most Kenyan communities
which were in the communal and semi-feudal stage of development into the
capitalist vortex. Given the logic of monopoly capitalism at that time, Kenya was
assigned a peripheral role as a supplier of raw material and potential market
for capitalist goods. In our specific situation, our political economy was
dominated by the demands of the European settler farmers who grabbed chunks of
Kenyan land.
These led to a gross
distortion in our economy which was subordinated to serving the interests of
the British bourgeoisie in the UK
and the local settler community in Kenya. Firms like Brooke-Bond were
more concerned with harvesting Kenyan grown tea for overseas market than
ensuring real economic growth within Kenya.
The existing colonial
laws expressly prohibited the growth of an indigenous capitalist class which
would have gone against the diktats of world monopoly capitalism at the time.
Thus what emerged over time and was consolidated in the years immediately
following formal flag independence were not capitalists as such but local
agents of transnational corporations. This was an experience which had been
first observed in pre-revolutionary China. There, the local agents were
given the Portuguese moniker–“comprador”.
Today the term still applies to local agents of imperialism who by themselves
cannot develop into a proper bourgeois. Many of them are from the
petit-bourgeois elements of society. Their chief conduit to economic prosperity
and personal wealth is the neo-colonial STATE which mediates the interests of
world monopoly capitalism via the agency of the comprador bourgeoisie.
It is no wonder that most
of the prominent business tycoons are more often than not past or present
cabinet ministers, politicians or senior civil servants.
Is it a mystery why Nominated Senator
Beth Mugo is the second richest woman in Kenya after Mama Ngina Kenyatta? Is it a mystery why Uhuru Kenyatta and his siblings have extensive holdings in land,
real estate and the dairy industry? Is it a mystery why Simeon Nyachae is both a powerful cabinet minister and very
prosperous business magnate?
On November 16, 2003,
the NATION, Kenya’s
largest selling weekly profiled the twenty wealthiest families of the country.
The following extract from that story will serve to illuminate the nexus
between the neo-colonial state and the core of the Kenyan comprador
bourgeoisie:
..1. The Ndegwa family-key players Andrew
and James Ndegwa. Ruth and Alison Ndegwa; flagships: First Chartered
Securities and Lion Place; interests: insurance, real estate development and
marketing; manufacturing; shipping, banking; agriculture, horticulture,
international investments;
2. The Kenyatta family- key players Muhoho
and Uhuru Kenyatta. Flagships: Enke Management; prominent investments:
Heritage Hotel and Brookside Dairy;
3. The Moi family- key players: Daniel arap
Moi and Gideon Moi; Joshua Kulei. Interests: banking, insurance, large-scale
farming, real estate, tourism, ranching, communications, aviation,
international investments;
4. The Nyachae family. Key players: Simeon
Nyachae, Charles Nyachae and Lee Nyachae. Flagship: Sansora Group through
which family has substantial interests in banking, insurance, large scale
wheat farming, food processing, transport, printing, real estate, construction,
aviation, coffee and tea farming, horticulture, etc; most prominent business
partner: Daniel arap Moi;
5. Chris Kirubi. Flagship- International
Life House. Most prominent business partner: President Mwai Kibaki.
Interests: real estate, manufacturing, agro-chem, pharmaceuticals,
supermarkets, insurance, investment, banking, international courier service,
media etc;
6. The Njonjo family. Business interests:
banking insurance, real estate, manufacturing, communications, tourism,
agriculture, horticulture, motor industry, aviation etc; key players: Charles
Njonjo and his wife Margaret Nisbet; Key partners: Daniel arap Moi, Joshua
Kulei, Jeremiah Kiereini, the Philip Ndegwa family, PK Jani and the late
Bruce McKenzie;
7. James Kanyotu. Interests: tourism and
hotel industry, large-scale coffee and tea farming, real estate, banking,
insurance, manufacturing, motor industry etc; key partners: Daniel arap Moi,
Charles Njonjo, Jeremiah Kiereini, GK Kareithi, Naushad Merali, the Kenyatta
family and Kamlesh Pattni;
8. Nicholas Biwott. Interests:”Biwott is a
secretive in his business operations as he has been in his politics. He is
reputed to be one of the wealthiest Kenyans with substantial interests in
petroleum, real estate, insurance, banking, manufacturing, agriculture etc.
Biwott’s interests are said to spread in the region and abroad. Friends in
high places: Daniel arap Moi";
9. George Saitoti. Interests: like Biwott,
equally secretive. Among richest Kenyans with interests in horticulture,
manufacturing, mining, real estate, agriculture, etc. Substantial investments
outside the country;
10. Dick Evans: interests: through
Homegrown, Dick Evans is the leading Kenyan player in the horticulture
business.
11. Allesandro Torriani: interests-Swiss
born, Mombasa based with investments in Funzi Kenya Resort
in Kwale; fish, tea and coffee exports; property tycoon. Holding company is
called Power House Ltd;
12. Joe Wanjui. Interests: insurance,
supermarkets, banking and manufacturing, real estate, large-scale agriculture
and ranching, horticulture, energy etc; Flagship: UAP Provincial Insurance;
Close friend: President Mwai Kibaki.
13. Manu Chandaria. Interests:
manufacturing, banking, insurance; Companies: Comcraft Group operates in six
continents as holding company for almost 100 other companies like Mabati
Rolling Mills, Galsheet Kenya and Kaluworks;
14. Naushad Merali. Business empire: The
Sameer Group with interests in manufacturing, banking, insurance,
construction, heavy steel manufacturing, motor assembly, large-scale coffee
and tea farming, ranching, real estate, telecommunications, IT, overseas
investments etc. Latest acquisitions- Kencell Communications. Partners:
Daniel arap Moi, James Kanyotu, the Kenyatta family, the Ndegwa family,
Horacious Da Gama Rose etc;
15. The Bayusuf Family. The brothers M.O. and A.M. Bayusuf have one
of the largest heavy commercial transportation fleets in East and Central Africa with more than 500 trucks. They have
also invested heavily in real estate and ranching.
16. Rashid Sajjad. Interests: owns Milly
Grain Millers, Milly Glass Works, Milly Fruit Processors, import company
Fehmi, a tannery in Athi River and prime properties in Mombasa and Nairobi.
Biggest strength: high level political connections during the KANU regime.
17. The Zubedis. The brothers Mohamed (MP,
East African Legislative Assembly) and Hakim own Gulf Electronics, a major
importer of leading electronic brands like Samsung, LG and Aristo.
Headquartered in Mombasa but operations extend
to Nairobi
and Eldoret. Just added the Nawal Centre to their stable.
18. The Bawazirs. Interests: used to be a
partner of Rashid Sajjad. Mohamed Bawazir keeps a low profile. Involved in
the international commodity trade and has substantial investments in prime
properties and land.
19. John Harun Mwau. Interests: many but
shrouded in mystery but included the fast expanding Nakumatt Holdings, Wines
of the World, Green Corner Restaurant Ltd and the Pepe container freight
station.
20. Njenga Karume. Interests: tourism and
hotels, transport, large-scale coffee and tea farming, real estate. Friend in
high places: President Mwai Kibaki.
(Source:
Sunday Nation, November 16, 2003)
|
Over the last two
decades, a newly rich clique of parvenu comprador elements has burst on the
Kenyan scene. Prominent names among them include Eddy Njoroge, Margaret Wambui
and the principals of the Transcentury Group. The one thing they share in
common is their proximity to former President
Mwai Kibaki and his kitchen cabinet. In fact some of them, like the first two,
werre part of that very kitchen cabinet.
The Kenyan
neo-colonial state is the ladder as well the milk cow for those who wants to
scale their heights of wealth accumulation in Kenya. That helps to explain why so
many business people delve into politics and why so many politicians have such
vast business interests. At our present conjecture it also serves to explain
why so many tycoons burn the mid-night oil to conserve the status quo because
they do know that if the neo-colonial state is smashed, their vast economic
interests would be at peril. When one looks at former President Moi’s public re-entry into the political
controversies of the day, one gets an inkling at the motivating force that
compels and propels him to do so: he is
a comprador bourgeois who would be doomed if neo-colonialism was
vanquished in Kenya.
In the age of
globalization, the comprador bourgeois elements of Kenya live a various precarious
existence. A slight change in the global capitalist economy can mean sudden and
devastating ruin. One good example which did not have totally devastating
consequences was the 2002 rapprochement between South African Breweries and East
African Breweries which signified an end of the over-hyped beer wars
between the Guinness controlled products like Tusker and SAB owned Castle label.
In a flash hundreds of Kenyan workers at the Thika Castle plant were out of a job and local tycoon the late Njenga Karume gawking at an investment
gone terribly wrong. Of course Karume was able to recoup his losses after he
was catapulted from the opposition benches into cabinet from where he was able
to resume his history of state connected wealth accumulation.
On
the other side of the class divide, Kenya was never able to reproduce an
industrial working class such as exists in Canada, Germany, Japan, Belgium, the
United States, Ireland, Italy and so on simply because once again, it was NEVER
a priority of the British colonialists to launch a people centred, sustained
industrialization of Kenya.
What emerged was thus
directly linked to the demands of British colonialism and the interests of the
local settler community. It is not an accident that the railways, ports, the
post office, the police, the army, the prisons, the provincial administration,
local government, the major agricultural plantations, the white suburban homes
and farms were among the largest employers of local Kenyan labour. Because of
the “Colour Bar” (equivalent to the racist Jim
Crow laws of the United States)
the work place was also segregated along racial, religious and ethnic lines
which persisted for decades after formal flag independence. Thus the working
class which emerged in Kenya
during colonialism and neo-colonialism are directly connected to our history of
foreign domination at the hands of imperialists and their local comprador
agents.
The disintegration of
the Kenyan peasantry has followed the hallowed “laws” of social development.
That peasantry has split up into a rural petit-bourgeoisie, an agricultural
component of the working class, a core of small farmers and a motley crew of
lumpenized elements déclassé.
Petit bourgeois
elements in Kenya
range from small business people to members of the professional and academic
elite who are NOT to be confused with the more heeled comprador stratum- unless
one is well connected to the powers that be.
There are times when
some observers list the “youth” and “women” as a separate “class” category.
This is not the case.
Young people are to
be found in all the major social classes- so are women- notwithstanding the
unique experiences and challenges of these two groups in society.
Often at public
forums we hear gender activists say:
“Let
the Kenya
women show the way because the Kenyan men have failed!”
That is when we are not hearing youth
activists scream:
“Let
the Uhuru Generation lead because the old guard has become political deadwood!”
Unfortunately they
are both wrong.
Why?
Simply women and
youth in Kenya
are not monolithic.
Women and youth
belong to various social strata (layers) and classes in Kenya and do
not have identical interests across these class cleavages.
A very wealthy Kenyan
businesswoman living in Runda or Mountain View has
very little in common with her live-in housemaid apart from the fact that they
are both women and sharing the same roof, to give an obvious example.
A rich Kenyan brat
lazing around in Loresho is a world
apart from a ghetto youth struggling to stay afloat in Mukuru Kwa Njenga, to give another obvious example.
But having said the
above, it would be a reductionism if we completely discounted the impact of
gender and generational divides in Kenyan society.
Often the word
“gender” is equated with women. This comes from a gross misreading of the
meaning of the term itself. A very
useful and lucid understanding of gender has been provided by the African National Congress of South
Africa in one of their seminal policy documents:
…1. Sex Roles and Gender Roles
In understanding triple oppression, it is first important to situate the
debate within an understanding of how gender is constructed. In other words,
gender is not a natural phenomenon, but is created by societies to order the
roles of men and women, and it is bound up with political and economic
objectives.
There is a difference between sex and gender. Sex identifies the biological
make up and difference between the male and the female.
Gender is constructed socially and identifies the relationship between men
and women in the context of power relations. Gender is not natural or
god-given, but is created by society through socialization using institutions
such as the family, the church and religion, school and education and the
state and laws. Gender relations can therefore be changed by the very society
that created them.
Gender roles exist in all spheres of society starting with the division of
labour in the family. For example, in the family, women are allocated the
role of being child rearers and are given the duties of cleaning and cooking.
In fact, women are allocated the tasks of domestic chores as if it were
natural for them to have to do this. This work is hidden and not paid for. It
is not registered as work within the tools that we use to analyse the working
of the economy such as in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures. What this
hidden, unpaid labour serves to do is prop up the capitalist economy. Workers
can be paid less if they do not themselves have to pay for domestic work. For
most women in this country, domestic chores are additional to the work that
they do outside the house. This means that women have very little spare time.
This is known as the "double bind".
These socially determined roles for men and women are culturally or socially
created and are given the status of being natural and normal as if they
"have always been" and "will always be". From these
gender roles, certain characteristics are expected of men that are a
reflection of what it means to be male or to be masculine while other
characteristics are attributed to women as a reflection of their femininity.
The notions of masculinity and femininity define how men and women must
behave and how they must look. They refer to physical appearance,
psychological states, sexual orientations, intellectual capability and
emotional states. For example, men are supposed to be natural leaders,
decision makers and providers in society beginning within the family while
women are the caregivers, supporters and followers of men.
2. Gender Relations
Gender and gender roles define the way women and men behave in society and in
relation to each other, the way in which they perceive themselves and their
attitudes. Gender relations affect the unequal power relations in society.
The essence of unequal power relations is the domination of men and the
subordination of women. These gender relations shape the ideas, knowledge,
values, culture, attitudes, the structure of society and, in essence, social
life itself. Gender roles and the stereotypes that structure the roles of men
and women are reinforced in books, history, stories, songs and the media.
3. Patriarchy
Patriarchy is the system of male domination and control at all levels of
society based on these socially constructed notions of gender, gender roles
and gender relations that we have discussed above.
Not all patriarchal societies are the same and the oppression of women in
various formations differs based on the economic and political differences of
those societies. For example, patriarchy will manifest differently in
advanced capitalist societies to traditional rural societies where economies
are structured differently. Patriarchy has not always existed, and can also
be dismantled. In addition, patriarchal control is linked up with the type of
economy, political system and cultural objectives of particular societies.
Patriarchy is reproduced through a web of laws and private and public
institutions such as the family, religious and traditional beliefs, practices
and norms. It is also reproduced through ideological apparatuses such as the
school, education in general and the media. Violence against women is an
expression of an extreme form of reinforcing patriarchal control of women.
SOURCE: Towards
a Gendered Perspective, ANC policy document
|
In the Kenyan context
we know that over 52% of Kenya
is female. And most Kenyan women and girls are based in rural communities. The
bulk of food production in the country is due to the labour of women. Women in Kenya are
confined to menial, low paying occupations-not just in agriculture but in the EPZs, domestic work and service
industry. In addition women bear the brunt when it comes to child care and
raising of families. Because of patriarchy, it is women who do the bulk of the
house work which remains additional unpaid labour in addition to whatever else women do inside and outside
the home economically. All Kenyan communities are permeated through and through
with conservative and traditionalist notions on the role of women in society.
Capitalism itself has reinforced these traditionalist sexist notions and
ensured women in Kenya
are still paid less than their male counterparts while being exposed to the
daily outrages and occupational hazards of sexual harassment, rape and other
forms of gender discrimination and violence.
Apart from gender, Kenya is also
stratified along generational lines. One striking fact about Kenyan society is
that the vast majority of the population is under 30 years of age. The youth in
Kenya
suffers from high unemployment, lack of involvement in major political
processes and almost complete marginalization when it comes to sharing
resources and controlling the economy. It is important to stress that one has
to bring in again the question of class which means that depending on one’s
socio-economic background there will be important distinctions between a young
person from a wealthy background and another one from a poor family.
Even after we have
factored in class, gender and age, we must also cite the fact that
ability/disability helps determine one’s status in Kenyan society because it is
a powerful barrier. People with disabilities are treated differently from their
able bodied compatriots.
Because of the legacy
of colonialism and neo-colonialism, there are very powerful regional
disparities in Kenya-the most obvious being the condition of the minority and
pastoralist communities of northern Kenya who still wallow in pre-colonial
conditions of poverty, underdevelopment and marginalization in Marsabit,
Garissa, Turkana, Pokot and Wajir.
Increasingly, there
is another social phenomenon that is creating even further cleavages in Kenyan
society. This is the process of lumpenization.
Without going into too much technical detail this is where people are alienated
from the mode of production to the extent that they become what the French
refer to as elements déclassé or “ declassed elements”. For instance if one
surveys a big chunk of the inhabitants of Nairobi’s 199 slums and informal
settlements, one notices that apart from the workers and semi-proletarians,
there are those Kenyans who do not have a formal connection to the political
economy. One is referring to the beggars, the street children, the prostitutes,
the petty criminals, the idle youth who are often recruited by politicians,
gang members and the neo-colonial state itself to wreak havoc within these very
communities. Components of the informal settlements like the hawkers and
matatus touts for instance straddle the fence in the sense that they often find
themselves as semi-proletarian lumpen elements who eke out a difficult
existence wallowing in poverty but determined to stay out of the criminal
demimonde that they are often forced into because of dire economic
circumstances.
Due to their often
conflicting interests and aspirations, the various Kenyan classes, strata and
sections of society are in a state of perpetual tension, strife and struggle.
There is a fundamental
divide between the rich and the poor in broad terms.
In Kenya today
there is a fundamental contradiction between those classes and strata that
BENEFIT from imperialism and neo-colonialism and those that are exploited and
dominated by the same forces of international finance and monopoly capitalism.
The majority of
Kenyans are dominated by imperialism and neo-colonialism. And here we are
referring to the vast majority of Kenyans who are workers, small farmers, poor
women, pastoralists, minorities, people with
disabilities and the lumpenized sections of society.
The petit-bourgeoisie
are in a dilemma. On the one hand their socio-economic status make them want to
aspire to join the rarefied ranks of the Kenyan comprador bourgeoisie as they
struggle to buy property in the suburbs, grab land in the countryside and
acquire material wealth all over Kenya. At the same time the forces of
imperialism and sub-imperialism work daily to take over or destroy their small
businesses reducing them to minor cogs in the world monopoly capitalist
machines. That is why we see that petit
bourgeois elements vacillate between the pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist
camps all the time. A very vivid manifestation of this petit- bourgeois
wavering is the shameless opportunism of Kenyan mainstream politicians who say
one thing today and do the complete opposite the next day. For this reason, it
is quite dangerous for the Kenyan people to pin their hopes of political salvation
and national liberations on the shifty petit bourgeois elements who often
arrogate themselves the roles of
“natural leaders”.
Turning to the youth,
the first point to be made is that this is a multi-class, multi-racial and
multi-ethnic category which includes females and males and people with different
sexual identities and orientations. There is also the question of
ability/disability, region and religion. This obvious point has to be made in
the light of the dangerous assumption that the “Kenyan youth” is entirely
composed of twenty-something African heterosexual males. Likewise politically
and ideologically the Kenyan youth are diverse.
When it comes to the
question of tribe and ethnicity, it is also time to shatter a few myths and
shibboleths. This is largely a colonial
created social construct. Contrary the mainstream perception that Kenya
consists of “42 tribes”, the reality is more complex because this omits “super
minorities” like the Ogiek, Awer,
Ilchamus, Nubians, Suba and others bringing the grand total to at least
EIGHTY TWO. The recent inclusion of so
called “Indians” as the 44th tribe has been resisted by been
resisted by members of Kenyan South Asian community on many grounds including
collapsing Goans, Sikhs, Hindus, Bohras,
Memons and other distinct groups into one reductionist melting pot and
overlooking the fact that they are KENYANS and not “Indians”. Similarly, the
fact that they are Kenyans of Somali ethnicity has often led to state pogroms
targeting people from Somalia,
Somaliland, Djibouti, Ethiopia and even those who have become citizens of Canada, the USA, Britain, Sweden, Denmark,
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
Muslims-be they Sunnia, Shia, Ahmaddiya are
discriminated against despite the fact that they are at least twenty per cent
of the population- especially in the wake of the recent so called “ war on terror” focusing on Al Shabaab.
The
question of sexual orientation and
identity is a touchy one. The Kenyan
Left has been notorious in its homophobia
despite the active presence of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered
people in its activist ranks.
Section
3:
3.0. Ideological
Lessons for the Kenyan Left
Some of us, in touch with Communist
comrades from India, Sudan,Egypt, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Burkina
Faso, Ghana and elsewhere are frequently confronted with the challenge:
WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE
KENYAN ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUUGGLE?
They are of course familiar
with the Mau Mau War for National Independence, the efforts of Makhan Singh,
Cege Kibacia and others in building a vibrant trade union movement, the
nationalist strivings of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Bildad Kaggia and Joseph
Murumbi and the struggles of Ngugi, the December Twelve Movement
and Mwakenya.
One persistent question they
nag us with is this:
How come the Kenyan progressives have not yet formed
a Communist Party?
This is a question which
leaves some of us embarrassed. Sometime we point to the SDP, DTM or Mwakenya
as formative attempts to do precisely that.
But on the whole, this
challenge leaves us tongue tied.
A few of us have lately
decided, in a spirit of ruthless self-criticism to look at the history of the
so called “Kenyan Left”.
The one big anomaly we find
is that is that there have been virtually NO ORGANIZING among the Kenyan
working class- this despite the history of Makhan Singh, Cege Kibacia, Fred
Kubai, Bildad Kaggia and other stalwarts from the trade union who also
contributed to the patriotic nationalist struggle.
From the 1980s at least,
Kenyans who consider themselves “Left” have been confined to the universities
and other sections of the middle-strata. They have been basically recruiting
among themselves- the petit bourgeoisie,
Secondly, the fact that many
of them, especially the early leaders of the movement came of age politically
during the cold war period characterized by the Sino-Soviet schisms and the US
led anti-communist red baiting coloured their ideological perspectives. Because
many of them learned their Marxism from North American, European and Chinese
sources affected the way they looked at Kenya.
The Kenyan Left
suffered because of Maoist delusions largely influenced by the Mau Mau armed struggle
which some romanticized and lionized.
Related to this is the
national reality of ethnic, regional and religious identities. Some of have
witnessed comrades who swear that the only way Kenyan progressives can unite is
if all males were circumcised! Others
have reduced their tribes into classes by quoting Colin Leys to justify why for
instance, Luos are the proletariat arraigned against the Agikuyu. Muslims have
justified their support for Khomeini because they are convinced that what
happened in Iran was a revolution.
Another factor was the
relationship between African and South Asian comrades with some of the racial
and class stereotypes coming into play.
But the elephant in the room
for the Kenyan Left has been patriarchy, sexism and misogyny. Largely because
the movement has been male led, some men have abused their privileges to
mistreat women. In the underground years of the 1980s,it was SISTERS who kept
the clandestine fires burning when their brothers were incarcerated. Yet, what
some comrades got was ABUSE. One woman commented that what Kenyan women got
from the struggle was a series of cancer.
Section
4:
4.0. Of
Financialization, Monopilization and Globalization
Imperialism or
international capitalism, has undergone a lot of permutations in the course of
its tortured evolution.
Looking at the world
today in the year 2017, we see that the capitalism we have is very different
from what was the case in the 19th
century during the heydays of industrial capitalism or even later, at the time
of the Berlin Conference and the European Scramble for Africa which led to
orthodox colonialism. It is qualitatively different from the situation which
prevailed after the Second World War, the cold war period when the USA was asserting
itself as the world’s policeman. Things have changed since the collapse of the
Soviet era in the 1990s and the series of “colour revolutions” in the 1990s and
the wave of Third Way experiments of coming with an “acceptable” face of capitalism in Eastern and Central
Europe, Asia and Africa at the beginning of this millennium. There were hopeful
developments in Latin America in countries like Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia but events over the
last few years have seen reversals especially with the death of Hugo Chavez and unwelcome developments in Brazil. The
whole BRICS experiment has not
removed countries like India and South Africa from the vortex of capitalism.
In China despite its rapid economic
development where it has emerged in the last decade to become the second most
powerful economy in the world, problems remain. Despite the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, there is an
open question whether China remains committed to socialism, especially with the
emergence of Made in China overnight billionaires. Africans in particular are
concerned about the emerging tendencies when it comes to the trade and economic
policies of the Chinese government. In Kenya we are seeing the repressive
Jubilee regime take some of its top functionaries to Beijing to be trained on
improving their methods of political coercion even as the Chinese authorities
benefit unduly from usurious loans and vanity projects like the Standard Gauge Railway which has
saddled millions of
Kenyans with debts in excess of one trillion Kenyan shillings. In the run up to
the 2017 elections, there are credible reports of the massive importation of
heavy duty riot gear and police equipment from China to stave off democratic protests.
When we talk of imperialism today, the
watch words are financialisation, monopolisation and globalisation.
This has affected Kenyans greatly.
In the global division of labour the
Kenyan neo-colonial economy has been assigned then role of a minor
sub-imperialist cog with some control over the East and Central African corner
holding sway over countries like Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Rwanda and
Uganda- although these neighbouring states-especially Rwanda and Tanzania are
increasingly assertive in affirming independent positions. The power of Kenya
pales in comparison to South Africa,
Nigeria, Ethiopia in the continental plane.
We frequently hear
that we all live in a “global village”.
We are told that we
must accept globalization because it is an inevitable and irreversible trend.
We hear exhortations to adjust to global realities.
Often these are
euphemisms brainwashing us to accept the domination of our economy by
transnational corporations and the diktat of multilateral institutions such as
the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO that often coerce our leaders to lower
labour standards, open our public sector to privatization and force our small
farmers to accept unfair conditions of international trade. Even as the
proponents of globalization trumpet the benefits of surfing the internet, the
ignore deliberately the reality of the digital divide where the vast majority
of Kenyans cannot afford to own computers or maintain regular access to the
internet.
Globalization has
forced a significant percentage of the most
highly trained Kenyan brains to emigrate from the country in search of
greener pastures in Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, the United
States, Britain,
Italy, Spain, France,
Sweden, Denmark, Norway,
Germany, Austria, India,
South Africa
and elsewhere.
And it is not only
the academics and professionals, but young workers and increasingly talented
athletes who have been regularly “defecting” to the oil rich sheikdoms of the
Middle East like Qatar and Bahrain. There
is currently a crisis in the nursing profession as many of its members flee to
the UK and North
America because the Kenyan government cannot afford to pay them a
decent wage.
James
Petras
has provided perhaps one of the most incisive overviews about the imperialist
underpinnings of globalization:
…Globalization
at a minimum involves the creation of a world economy that is not merely the
sum of its national economies, but rather a powerful independent reality,
created by the international division of labour and the world market which,
in the present epoch, predominates over national markets. Large scale, long term
flows of capital, commodities, technology and labor across national
boundaries define the process of globalization…Contemporary globalization
retains many of the key features of the earlier phases of globalization: the
driving forces are centred in the imperial state and the multi-national
corporation and banks, backed by the international financial institutions.
What is significantly different are the scale, scope and speed of the circulation
of capital and commodities, particularly financial flows between deregulated
economies. The technological changes, especially in communications
(computers, fax, etc.), have been a prime factor in shaping the high velocity
of movements of capital.
The
scope and scale of movement of capital and commodities however, are due less
to technological than to political changes.
A
historical analysis of the phases of globalization allows one to refute some
of the ideological claims of its proponents. A retrospective analysis reveals
that globalization has been cyclical in world historical development. There
were periods of high globalization, moments of crises and periods in which
economic flows turned inward. There is no universal inevitable tendency toward
globalization. Inter-imperial wars resulting from global competition,
internal crises of overproduction and more important social and political
revolutions have all affected the trajectory of globalist nations and
classes. The cyclical nature of globalization allows analysts to identify the
internal/external weaknesses of the globalist project and identify the
alternative strategies that emerged from the crises of global projects in
earlier times.
The
very idea of globalization as a historical necessity is questioned by its
cyclical history. The notion that we enter a new period is also dubious:
foreign trade and overseas income were a greater percentage of GNP in Europe during the late 19th century that at the end of
the 20th century. The idea that technology drives globalization omits the
point that most of the new technologies emerged before the current globalist
phase and are compatible with expanding domestic production and popular
consumption.
The
globalization idea is itself suspect. In its most widely expressed usage, it
argues for a universal incorporation to the world marketplace and the spread
of benefits throughout the world. The empirical reality is neither universal
incorporation nor the spread of benefits: there are wealthy creditors and bankrupt
debtors, super-rich speculators and impoverished unemployed workers, imperial
states that direct international financial institutions and subordinate
states that submit to their dictates.
All
the imperial powers throughout history were never globalized; they became
globalizers (imperialists) precisely through the development of the home
market. Globalization was an instrument to expand and deepen the home market
and develop the forces of production. Globalization was given a universal,
virtuous character in each epoch of outward expansion, either in terms of
moral values (extending Western civilization) or as an opportunity (to become
modem). To the degree that contemporary globalization leads to the internal
exploitation of labour and state resources within the imperial centres, it
has awakened a labour opposition that creates an objective and subjective
basis for internationalist working-class action.
The
history of globalization is fraught with inter-imperial rivalries that
struggle to displace competitors and impose the rule of particular national
multi-nationals and state rule. The selective anti-imperialism of local
clients facilitates the entry of imperial latecomers. The reconstruction of
the Left cannot be rooted in becoming the plaything of rivalries between
ascending and declining imperial powers. In the present context, there are
several issues: the U.S.
exploitation of the Asian crisis to enhance its position relative to Japan, South Korea, etc.
The
temptation among some Leftists is to defend "state-centred capitalism
against" neo-liberalism; for others, the alternative is to accept the
harsh prescriptions of adjustment from the IMF in exchange for employment,
etc…
The
basic facts are that capitalism cannot sustain growth and rising income
levels: that welfare and capitalism are a product of a special balance of
class forces that no longer exists. The existence of a revolutionary
socialist alternative was the basic reason forcing capital to make reformist
concessions in Europe and Asia. It was the
existence of revolutionary socialist regimes that forced the imperialist
countries to tolerate state-directed growth in Asia
and "showcase" their performance.
Only
the re-emergence of credible revolutionary alternatives might allow reformist
and state-centred technocrats to negotiate concessions. As matters stand
today, the real choices are between a capitalism that strips labour of all
its social attributes, monopolizes public revenues and appropriate public
enterprises and minerals and the socialist alternative--that needs to be
reconstructed….
Crucial
to the task of constructing the socialist alternative is to recognize the
globalization parabola in the current period: the ascendancy in the
seventies, its consolidation in the eighties and early nineties and its
decline over the last several years, beginning in Asia, Latin America and
spreading to North America and Western Europe. The second-biggest capitalist
economy, Japan,
is in a terminal tailspin, accompanied by its Asian clients. In China,
stagnation and mass unemployment has set it. The Russian economy has
collapsed. The U.S.
and European economies will soon feel the reverberations as corporate earning
declines, and exports collapse and speculative capital cannot find new
lucrative outlets.
Globalization works
in reverse. The extraordinary profits based on capitals appropriation of
speculative returns no longer fuel the American and European stock market and
giant financial monopolies. The worldwide bankruptcy of capitalism--its
inability to reproduce itself-poses a major opportunity to argue for a
socialist transformation and against strategies focused on adaptation and
merely defensive struggles. Adaptation to austerity leads to new, regressive
policies. The argument for one more adjustment is an unending melody. There
is only more pain, not prosperity, in this never-ending tunnel. Defensive
struggles, while necessary for sustaining elementary living conditions in the
face of the economic collapse, provide short-term victories yet prepare strategic
defeats, given the non-viability of the historic capital-labor partnership
under present circumstances.
SOURCE: James Petras, Globalization: A Socialist Perspective, 1999
|
From the
foregoing, it is crystal clear that globalization is neither inevitable or
irreversible.
Kenyans need not succumb to the diktat that condemns
us to the mitumbanization of the
Kenyan economy; we need not mindlessly endorse the orgy of privatizations and other neo-liberal
interventions that lead to the further impoverishment of the wananchi. We need not kow tow the
pressure to introduce GMOs into our Uchumis and Nakumatts nor must we agree to the further growth of EPZs in this country.
Kenyans can take hope and seek courage in the fact
that all over the world, the agenda of
globalization is being vigorously fought and opposed. In Africa we can trace
these anti-globalization struggles to the
so called “IMF riots” in Sudan and other African countries from the late
1970s and early 1980s; on a world scale,
the massive mobilization symbolized by Seattle in 1999, Quebec in 2001 and
Genoa a few years later point to an ideological tectonic shift. The upsurge of
left wing politics in places like Argentina,
Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil and
especially Venezuela point to an
emerging ideological counterpoint to imperialist globalization, the Washington Consensus and other
proponents of neo-liberal policies.
Sad to say but the reality that in Kenya itself, the NARC regime led by Mwai Kibaki was ravenous in its mad embrace of neo-liberalism with
all its devastating consequences when it comes to national sovereignty,
cultural integrity and economic sustainability.
It is no accident therefore that while the ruling
clique trumpets an often contested 5.8% growth rate, brand new Kenyan children
come into the world with a debt burden of at least 33,000 Kenya
shillings each. It is no surprise therefore that as the ruling clique of
the day boasts of its promotion of East African unity, Kenya is used by the United
States and her allies to undermine the internal stability
of neighbouring states like Somalia
using spurious “war on terror” excuses.
The challenge for Kenyans, especially those of a
progressive mien is to come together to counter the global imperialist project by pushing for true international and global solidarity
based on the principles of peace, international friendship, respect for
national sovereignty and equality at the world level.
The Kenya
Communist Party will continue to
expose the true agenda of imperialist globalization even as it forges genuine South to South cooperation, true
bilateral relations between North and South and lasting bonds among Kenya and all
her African neighbours.
When Uhuru-Ruto
and Jubilee came to power, the economy took on a more blatant nature. There
has been a spate of overnight billionaires- some of them former hairdressers-
who cashed in corruption, tribalism and temderpreneurship- taking their queue
from William Ruto, Anne Waiguru, Chris
Okemo and Gichuru and massive,
open looting by individuals close to Jubilee- including blood relatives of Uhuru Kenyatta and other top government
officials.
Section
4:
4.0.
Climate change and the environment
Unlike benighted Donald
Trump, the Kenyan Communist Party
knows about the painful reality of global warming and other devastating
consequences on the environment. We are committed to the sentiments captured in
the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol,
agreements reached at Rio de Janiero
and other international gatherings.
Section
5:
5.0. The National and
Democratic Tasks of the Kenyan Communist Party of Kenya
Millions of Kenyans continue to live
in a beautiful but tortured that is weighed
down by crippling debts, ravaged by poverty, terrorized by rampant crime
and insecurity, sapped by endemic corruption, torn asunder by state-sponsored
tribalism, tainted by regional disparities, hamstrung by technological
backwardness, haunted by environmental degradation and beholden to the agendas of the World
Bank and the IMF and the machinations from the capitals of capital.
These political, social, economic,
cultural, technological, environmental ills and misfortune are neither divine
visitations nor innate to our country because of its African identity as
observers often claim in their idle flights of fancy.
Kenya, like many other African and
Third World nations can trace the
origins of their national woes to specific moments in historical time like the
Transatlantic (and East African) Slave Trade, the 1884 Berlin Conference and
the ensuing kinyanganyiro for Africa
and her resources; the scourge of orthodox colonialism and the pestilence
of ongoing neo-colonialism and the
emerging trends of recolonization.
This is NOT
to take off the hook the home-grown kleptocrats like Mobutu, Moi and other
African tin pot dictators. Nor is it to sweep under the rug the local king pins
who plan and execute the Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing and other graft scandals.
What we are trying to say is that
there is a history of poverty, crime, corruption and general underdevelopment
in Kenya.
Without understanding this history, it will be near impossible to craft lasting
solutions to our national malaise.
Kenya can be described as a
nation that has yet to throw off the yoke of imperialism. Even though we made a
partial historical advance when we
lowered the Union Jack and exchanged a colonial governor for a neo-colonial
President in December 1963, the fact of the matter is that the late Jaramogi
Oginga Odinga was right after all these years: It is Not Yet Uhuru in Kenya.
We therefore have the unfinished
business of winning true national independence.
The fact that Kenyans STILL DO NOT
have a national democratic constitution means that Kenya can not yet be described as a
true democratic society even within the African context of emerging
democracies.
The KCP has therefore the additional
task of consummating the national democratic tasks in Kenya.
It is important to recognize that the
BIGGEST OBSTACLE standing before Kenyans and true independence, genuine
democracy and the onset of ongoing social liberations remains the NEO-COLONIAL
STATE and its local comprador bourgeois nyapara
caretakers.
Flowing from
the above, Kenyans must somehow SMASH the existing neo-colonial state and set
up a NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC STATE in this particular country in East
Africa.
This will take a major shift in class,
social and political relations in Kenya because it will entail a
situation where the vast majority of the wananchi turn the tables on the
comprador bourgeois clique.
Speaking simply and bluntly, Kenyans need a REVOLUTION of a NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC
character to achieve our objective of national independence, national democracy
and national and social liberation.
Now, it is understandable that the
mere mention of the “R” word-i.e. “revolution”- will immediately propel some
Kenyans into paroxysms of panic, pandemonium and paranoia.
One way of calming these frazzled
ideological nerves is to soberly deconstruct the meaning of the word
“revolution”.
We are fighting for a National Democratic Revolution in Kenya.
Now don’t get scared now, even if you
are liberal parliamentary
advocate.
Each word is chosen for a purpose.
The “National” obviously refers to the
fact that we can not fight for the liberation of Turkanaland, Masaailand,
Luoland, Gikuyuland and Gusiiland separately in isolation and to the exclusion
of other parts of Kenya.
Neither can we fight for the tribal or regional hegemony of one part of Kenyan
society to the exclusion of other parts. We are fighting
for the whole of Kenya.
The “Democratic” aspect defines the
main content of our struggles. We are deepening the spaces to be occupied by
the popular social actors and here we mean the social forces: the workers, the
small farmers, the poor, the women, the youth and all the wananchi who have
been so far marginalized from the political mainstream.
The “Revolution” aspect underscores
the need to go beyond PIECEMEAL REFORMS. We need a fundamental shift and
reorganization of Kenyan society.
Not ALL
revolutions are VIOLENT.
A revolution is simply a moment or
process in time and space where one group of rulers (not individuals but social
groups and/or classes) are replaced in terms of political power by another,
previously marginalized social group/ class/alliances of various classes
who then proceed to undertake a fundamental restructuring of that society.
It flows from this definition that a
revolution is not an elitist conspiracy but a dramatic moment in history when
millions and millions of ordinary wananchi are galvanized by a well-organized
political and social movement with a strong leadership achieve ownership
and immediate agency in enacting new pathways to the future.
So, yes, we in the Kenyan
Communist Party are talking about a National
Democratic Revolution in Kenya.
By its very nature, given the fact
that we have defined the main obstacle as the neo-liberal universe of
international finance capital, our national democratic revolution in Kenya will
have both a patriotic and an anti-imperialist character and will be an ongoing
process that deepens and ripens over time.
It will be in this context, a “Left oriented” National Democratic
Revolution with an orientation towards scientific socialism.
5.1. Steps to Be
Taken By the KCP to Realize the National
Democratic Revolution in Kenya
Mapinduzi sio ngoma ya lelemama…-Swahili saying.
Fundamental political changes and lasting social
transformation does not come about by happenstance.
Seizing state power is never a spontaneous stroke of luck.
In the Kenyan milieu those who want to preserve the
neo-colonial status quo will never deign to give up their privileges without a
vicious tussle.
They will lie, they will cajole, they will cut deals,
they will bribe, they will twist arms, they will blackmail, they will threaten
and intimidate, they will hurt and maim, they will kill and destroy.
As was evidenced in Salvador Allende’s Chile,
the forces that backed the late unlamented General
Pinochet to seize power were not going to allow even an unmistakable
electoral victory and clear democratic mandate to wipe away their class
privilege and class power.
That is why there is a difference between being
elected into office and seizing political power to unleash radical, pro-poor
policy interventions that lead to a rapid transformations in social relations,
economic dynamics and political interactions in a given society.
It is for this reason that the Kenya Communist Party while recognizing the importance of elections
and democratic reforms, stays focused on the larger picture: how to harness the
patriotic and revolutionary energies of the Kenyan wananchi to build a new
society, a new Kenya.
Kenyans
should NOT be looking for a would be messiah, a Joshua to lead them to Canaan.
It is true that without outstanding leaders there can
be very little political headway.
These leaders however must rise to the historical
occasion and exhibit leadership in the very way they facilitate or do not
facilitate the development of courageous, militant, patriotic and revolutionary
organizers and social justice architects from the very ranks and depths of the wananchi.
“...
A revolution is not a coup d’etat; it is not the outcome of plots. It is the
work of the masses. Hence, the mobilization and rallying of the mass
forces... is a fundamental and decisive problem. This task must be approached
in a vigorous and sustained way both throughout the period when a
revolutionary situation has not yet appeared and the period when such a
situation has arisen and matured. To realize this task, one must mingle and
be active with the masses in everyday life, even within enemy organizations.
One must keep abreast of the situation in the enemy’s camp as well as ours,
correctly appraise all schemes, moves and capabilities of the enemy,
accurately assess all changes developing in his ranks, and at the same time
be fully aware of the state of mind, wishes and potential power of the
masses. In this way one can put forward appropriately incisive and timely
slogans which will arouse the broad masses to action, direct them from lower
to higher forms of struggle, ceaselessly heighten their political
consciousness and help expand the army of the revolution both in scope and in
depth. On the road to the seizure of power, the only weapon available to the
revolutionary masses is ORGANIZATION. The hallmark of the revolutionary
movement...is its high organizational standards....”
Source:
- Le Duan, The Vietnamese Revolution: Fundamental Problems and
Essential Tasks, New
World Paperbacks, New York,
1971
|
“.....Men make their
own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it
under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the
dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just
when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating
something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to
their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order
to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and
this borrowed language....”
SOURCE:
Karl
Marx: The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
|
“...The
more powerful enemy can be conquered only by exerting the utmost effort, and
by necessarily, thoroughly, carefully, attentively and skilfully taking
advantage of any, even the smallest, ‘rift’ among the enemies...by taking
advantage of every, even the smallest, opportunity of gaining a mass ally,
even though this ally be temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and
conditional...”
SOURCE:
- Vladimir Lenin, Left-Wing
Communism, an Infantile Disorder, International
Publishers, New York,
1940, p.50
|
“... Far from
pinning our hopes on antagonisms within the ranks of the enemy, we are fully
aware that the development of these contradictions and the extent to which
they be capitalized upon are in the last analysis determined by the strength
of the revolution. The experience of all genuine popular revolutions shows
that the stronger the revolutionary forces become and the higher the
revolutionary tide rises, the more the enemy’s ranks are torn by
contradictions and are likely to split Ultimately the time comes when these
conflicts have grown so exacerbated as to render impossible all compromise
between the various enemy factions. This constitutes one of the unmistakable
signs of the maturity of the revolutionary situation. The revolution then
breaks out and the enemy’s rule is overthrown in decisive battles....The
victory of the revolution depends primarily on a correct determination of the
general orientation and strategic objective, as well as the specific
orientation and objective for each period. But just as important as defining
the orientation and objective is the problem of how to carry them into effect
once such decisions are made. What road should be followed? What forms should
be adopted? What measures should be used? Experience has shown that a
revolutionary movement may mark time, or even fail, not for lack of clearly
defined orientations and objectives, but essentially because there have been
no appropriate principles and methods of revolutionary action. Methods of
revolutionary action are devised to defeat the enemy of the revolution, and
in the most advantageous way, so that the revolution may attain its ends as
quickly as possible. Here one also needs wisdom as well as courage; it is not
only a science, but also an art. Decisions over methods of revolutionary
action require, more than in any other field, that the revolutionary maintain
the highest creative spirit. Revolution is creation; it cannot succeed
without imagination and ingenuity. There has never been nor will there ever
be a unique formula for making a revolution that is suited to all situations.
One given method may be adaptable to a certain country but unsuitable in
another. A correct method in certain times and circumstances may be erroneous
in other situations. Everything depends on the concrete historical
conditions..... It is a matter of principle that either in the daily policies
or in the practice of revolutionary struggle... a revolutionary should never
lose sight of the final goal. If one considers the fight for small daily
gains and immediate targets as ‘everything’ and views the final goal as
‘nothing’... then one displays the worst kind of opportunism which can only
result in keeping the popular masses in eternal servitude. However, it is by
no means sufficient to comprehend only the final objective. While keeping in
mind the revolutionary goal, the art of revolutionary leadership lies in
knowing how to win judiciously step by step. Revolution is the work of
millions of popular masses standing up to overthrow the ruling classes, which
command powerful means of violence together with other material and spiritual
forces. That is why a revolution is always a long-term process. From the
initial steps to the final victory, a revolution necessarily goes through
many difficult and complex stages of struggle full of twists and bends,
clearing one obstacle after another and gradually changing the relation of forces
between the revolution and the counter-revolution until overwhelming
superiority is achieved over the ruling classes...”
SOURCE:
Le
Duan,
The Vietnamese Revolution: Fundamental Problems and Essential Tasks, New World Paperbacks, New York, 1971, pp22-27
|
If we accept the thesis that the task at hand for the Kenyan Communist Party in Kenya is
spearhead the process leading up to the realization of a national democratic
revolution in Kenya, it therefore follows that the KCP cannot do this on its
own.
The task implies a national, patriotic constellation
of democratic forces.
It
should be underscored that this IS NOT synonymous with cobbling a coalition of
INDIVIDUAL POLITICIANS lumped together solely to create a patchwork quilt sewn
together by the flimsy fabric of ethnic arithmetic.
What
we are talking about is a national mseto of PROGRESSIVE and PATRIOTIC social
forces led primarily by the working people of the country and revolutionary
democrats drawn from the petit-bourgeoisie and the middle strata.
In other words the main organizational form that will
galvanize the wananchi is the United
Democratic Front. The KCP has the unique
historic opportunity of creating the momentum and providing the impetus that
will bring progressive and patriotic Kenyans who may NOT necessarily share
ideological ideas on each and every aspect and facet of politics, economics,
social policies and cultural ideas.
For instance it is obvious that today in Kenya there is
a widespread pro-social democratic current sweeping the nation. At the same
time it is equally clear that not all social democrats, not all revolutionary
democrats, not all progressive nationalists and not all left-leaning liberals
are confined to the one party. In fact a few are to be found scattered among the
mainstream electoral vehicles like ODM,
Wiper, Amani, FORD-Kenya, Chama Cha Mashinani Jubilee and even KANU. The task of the Kenya Communist Party is to lead from
the front in a flexible, non-dogmatic,
non sectarian fashion that will persuade all these “homeless” social
democrats and progressive forces to gravitate towards the KCP led Kenyan United Democratic Front.
The Kenyan Communist
Party can do this by being the most articulate, the most consistent and the
most resolute advocate for national and social democratic concerns in all
spheres of Kenyan life. It must be the first to denounce retrogressive domestic and foreign policies. It must be the
unchallenged champion of squatters,
oppressed communities and marginalized ethnic and cultural minorities. It must
be at the forefront of shunning and denouncing Big Tribe Chauvinism and the first to defend workers facing
retrenchment and arbitrary sackings. The
KCP must be the recognized voice of small farmers, youth, the exploited and
underpaid academics and the fledgling small business people threatened by the
machinations and encroachments of transnational corporations. The KCP must be
at the frontline of peace campaigns and conflict transformation processes. The KCP
must advance the most progressive positions of Pan Africanism, South to South
solidarity and internationalism.
By being persistently and courageously on the trenches
of democratic struggles and social justice mobilizations, the KCP will without
doubt gradually become the political party with most integrity and the most
respected political force in the country even if it does not form the next
government in Kenya.
The KCP’s main strategy will be to first win
HEGEMONIC leadership over the wananchi and let this gradually evolve into an unstoppable momentum for
wresting the levers of state power from the mainstream comprador political
charlatans who masquerade as the “governments in waiting”.
Section
6: Regional and Internationalist Tasks
6.0
Commitment to Human Rights and Social Justice
Many of our members achieved prominence as activists
fighting exploitation, police brutality, violence against women, corruption,
tribalism, homophobia, ableism, environmental degradation and other
socio-economic and cultural ills. The Kenyan
Communist Party is firmly wedded to these ideals.
Section
7: Regional and Internationalist Tasks
Away from the FAKE
“Pan-African” rhetoric of the Jubilee
regime, the Kenyan Communist Party
is committed to a consistent internationalist policy that binds Kenya to first
of all other African countries as well as other parts of the South like Latin
America, the Caribbean and Asia without forgetting that North America and
Europe are part of the world atlas.
In this connection we must go on the record as also condemning
in the strongest possible terms the recent decision by NASA flag bearer Raila
Odinga who was accompanied by none other than Jubilee Secretary General Raphael Tuju on a trip sponsored visit to
Western Sahara at the invitation of
the King of Morocco who has annexed
this country when the African Union
and most nation-states on the continent recognize POLISARIO as the genuine representative of the Sahrawi people. The Kenyan Communist Party also denounces the visit
by the NASA flag bearer to Apartheid
Israel on the very day he was named the opposition flag bearer as a
slap in the face of the suffering Palestinian people.
Speaking of Kenyans,
we are aware that tens of thousands of Kenyans live and work in Euope, North America, the Middle East, Asia,
other parts of Africa and the rest of the world and we view these as members of the wider Kenyan Diaspora an active citizens of the country.
Section
8:
8.0. A Look at 2017 Electoral Realities
Talking of the exact moment,
in the run up to the August 8th, 2017 elections,
The Kenyan Communist
Party, in the context of struggling for a national democratic state
believes that we must avoid any temptation at some holier-than-thou sectarian
sentiments.
We must unite with the
massive democratic outrage against the discredited, corrupt, tribalistic, lying
and pro-imperialist Jubilee ruling clique.
This means that the Kenyan
Communist Party must stand up to be counted.
We consider ourselves part
and parcel of the millions of Kenyans-inside and outside the country-who are
patriotic, peace loving and democratic who have said NO! to tribalism, the
discredited “ tryranny of numbers” and the “digital” dictatorship of Uhuru
Kenyatta, William Ruto and Jubilee who, if left unchecked will drive
Kenya further and deeper into neo-colonialism.
NASA is not a “socialist” project. We do not believe
that Raila Odinga is Kenya’s answer to Fidel Castro. We are
painfully aware of the historical and ideological limitations of Kalonzo
Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi, Moses Wetangula and Isaac Ruto-mainstream
politicians who cut their political teeth in Moi’s KANU.
But we are convinced that at
this moment in time NASA and its leadership constitute the most viable
instrument to break the shackles of Jubilee led oppression, repression and
dictatorship and wanton criminal acts such as the recent callous murder of Chris
Musando and Ms. Anne Wanjiru.
We are therefore ENDORSING
without any reservation, NASA to win the 2017 Kenyan elections.
Posts
