Kenya’s Leadership has bred Poverty since 1963, and is reaping Riots
Kenya’s antigovernment protests continues into the second month and are similar to Ghana’s in 2022, as both started from over taxation and worsening living standard, problems absent in South East Asia (e.g. Vietnam), which was also colonized. Kenya, Ghana, and Zambia have attempted development for 6 decades but lag behind Vietnam, which started developing under 4 decades ago. Clearly, Kenya and African countries need to change their development model from the World Bank/IMF’s neoliberal Ponzi for enriching western corporations.
Dispossession –Poverty -Protests
As Kenyan’s antigovernment protests continue into the second month, participants’ idleness and poverty resulting from unemployment is being identified as a key driver, even as some groups participate to loot (here). President William Ruto, noting the role of idleness, has been commissioning large construction projects to employ hundreds of young people (here) but in vain, since more remain due to long-term inequality that was created by the founding president, the UK government, and US corporations. The aforementioned took large pieces of fertile land for their use and hence robbed Kenyans of livelihoods at independence, while succeeding governments have continuously sidelined victims from economic opportunities, such that close to 80% of Kenyans remain poor or vulnerable (here), 61 years on.
As Mr. Ruto blamed the Ford Foundation for funding the ongoing protests (here), the real reason for their persistence is unemployment and poverty, which Washington has been helping its ‘allied’ Kenyan government to create, but is now taking advantage of; there is surely no honor among thieves. Resultantly, unemployed Kenyans in their 20s have recently found the thrill of engaging the police in running battles while looting everything from bread, gas cylinders, to electronic devices. Unfortunately, some enjoy the adrenaline rush as they face serious injury and death, the same way as players of rodeo, bungee jumping, or Russian roulette, making them even more reckless. These young people, as Kenya’s future, are forced to grow in an economy that gives them no path to social and economic advancement, yet actors from the Washington Consensus have been complete okay with it.
The Washington Consensus of Doom
The World Bank and the IMF have been the main apologists of Kenya’s political elites, and the three form an effective trio of breeding poverty. Oppositely, The World Bank criticized Vietnam, which lifted 40 million people out of poverty in a decade, claiming that minorities were lifted at a lower rate (here). Meanwhile, Kenya, which has been independent since 1963, has close to 40% of its population in poverty, while Vietnam, which emerged from a brutal US-led war in 1975, has only 4.2% (here). However, the World Bank praises the former and not the latter, showing that neocolonial institutions prefer Kenya to remain poor. Kenya’s wrong trajectory is approved further by the west as it is ranked higher than Vietnam in The West’s ease of doing business indices (here), since multinational corporations have easier time making profit but not the citizens. Oppositely, the Human Development Index (HDI) shows that Vietnam, in which western multinationals on average find harder to do business in, have a high score. Kenya’s HDI is 0.601, signifying middle development, while Vietnam’s is 0.726 (here) signifying high development. The latter ranks 6th in its region that actually develops after emerging from western colonialism and wars from mid-20th century, just like Africa. It also has a lower debt problem. It is therefore sensible for Kenya and Africa to adopt a developmental model from a region that has been developing.
The key difference between Kenya’s economic model and Vietnam’s is that the former has attempted adopting neoliberalism with the government existing largely to facilitate large corporations in the name of enhancing ‘ease of doing business’ while the latter runs a mixed economy allowing free enterprise while also maintaining robust state enterprises and social welfare state. As a result, western institutions favor Kenya for giving global corporations a free reign as a World Bank report (here) as it apologizes for Kenya’s political elites’ corruption, and poor governance, while absolving them off responsibility. The same report claims that Kenya’s pre-COVID-19 growth was caused by public sector spending, and resulted in debt vulnerabilities, attempting to hide how the real problem was that a large percentage of the amount borrowed by the government was stolen, (here, here, and here) which caused the said vulnerabilities. The World Bank recommends that the government should take more steps to attract private investors, which means further enhancing corporations’ wellbeing and not citizens’. The World Bank shifts goals and pontificates for Kenyan politicians claiming how they took significant political and economic reforms that have contributed to sustained economic reforms, social development, and political stability, and ignores the reality that these did not resulted into perceivable benefits to citizens. Talking about Kenya’s political stability, it will be interesting to see how the biased World Bank will report now that Kenya is crossing into the second month of protests and riots. Predictably, it (the World Bank) passed the ball to its sister, the IMF.
Colonial Collabo
The World Bank’s sister colonial entity, the IMF, was very quick to air its unsolicited intervention after Kenya’s protests (here), first condoling with those killed or injured while also explaining why the government was not responsible for poverty or unemployment, claiming that the current situation is caused by funding “squeeze that is currently being experienced by low-income countries”. It leaves out context to mislead audiences that the government came into existence recently and had no opportunity to steer the country out of low-income status or prevent the so-called funding squeeze. In reality, Kenya’s politicians could have steered the country to rise above low-income status, as Vietnam’s leaders did. It is clear that the World Bank and the IMF, with the assistance of gluttonous African leaders, are breeding poverty in Africa.
Africa’s Development Model is Broken, It is time to Change it.
The challenge of under development is not only seen in Kenya but also in resource-rich African countries such as Ghana and Zambia with HDI scores of 0.632 (here) and 0.565 (here), despite being the leading gold copper producers respectively on the continent. Ghana, which is also rich in energy resources and has strategic ports on the Atlantic, is also neck-deep in debt and needed IMF-sponsored restructuring. The problem in Africa is definitely related to developmental model over and above past colonialism, noting that the South East Asia has progressed much better despite western colonization, and wars of plunder, for instance, which Vietnam emerged from a decade after Kenya, Ghana, and Zambia. With particular reference to the resource-rich countries of Ghana and Zambia, in the African case and equally resource-rich Vietnam in South East Asia, the former features under development and debt while the latter has enhanced human development. Therefore, there is a need for African countries to seek alternative developmental approach to what they have applied to date, which have clearly failed.
Simon Chege Ndiritu, is a political observer and research analyst from Africa, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
