Barrack Muluka
Throughout history, social stability in every civilisation has hinged on a class of people whose fuel in life is hope. This is the social middle class that buffers the aristocratic cadres of society from the ravaged poor. For the rich need protection from the poor, without which they will be eaten alive. Societies that have experienced cataclysmic revolutions know this.
When the population is polarised as to be defined as a society of the superrich and the poor, the rich are in trouble. It, therefore, behoves the rich to act consciously to ensure there is a safe buffer, separating them from the poor. They feed this buffer zone on hope and more hope.
This buffer population is a class of social wannabes, as the Americans would say. They aspire and perspire. They live on appetite, dreams and desires. They live on the hope that someday they will join the class of the super rich, if only they stay focused on their dreams and do the right things. But the middle class are also many other things. Traditionally, the middle class has been defined as a class between the working class and the superrich.
But this definition only makes sense in the industrialised world, where the industrial worker of the 18th and 19th centuries was the supposed emblem of penury and indigence. In the African context, the matrix shifts significantly to the extent that even to be a factory hand on a regular payroll is not assured. There is a distorted prism of class division and definition, especially in borderlines.
The middle class in a situation such as ours in Kenya comprises a wide platform of professionals and office workers. Some, like doctors, lawyers, engineers and the like will straddle the middle and upper middle class. Others, like teachers, paramedics and a wide raft of office workers straddle the middle and lower middle class. But one thing stands – they all live on hope and it is this hope that generates social equilibrium. These wannabes work hard. They save. They borrow. They are forever building castles in the skies. Now they dream of owning a farm. Then they are dreaming of owning a modern home.
They want to join exclusive members’ clubs. They struggle to put money together to take their families to a beach holiday, if only for one day. They struggle to take their children to schools that bear the name ‘academy’ and to Module II university programmes. They are the consuming class of society with appetite for the good things of life, this despite the fact that they struggle to consume.
They struggle to own a car and to keep it on the road. These fellows know how to slog in pursuit of their dreams. Occasionally, one conquers adversity to join the superrich, never mind how. Their apparent success becomes the seed of fresh hope among the strugglers who know about them. While others dream to the very end of their earthly days, the critical thing is that the dreams keep society stable. Government is essentially about maintaining and sustaining this social equilibrium. It does so foremost in the interest of the propertied classes, for in the depth of chaos the poor have nothing to lose. That was why in the 19th Century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were saying to the workers of the world that they should unite to overthrow the owners of capital. "You have nothing to lose, but your chains," they said.
The true moment of rapture is when the middle class sinks into poverty, their hopes and dreams dashed to the extent that they now see that they have nothing to lose. The middle class disappears as its former members fuse with the poorest of the poor. Kenya is, at least for the time being, drifting in that direction. It is not that the economy is not growing, for example. Sometimes economies have grown apace, to the detriment of the majority. It has happened in slave economies and in colonial economies.
It is nonetheless one thing for economic dynamics to erode the hopes of wannabes and quite another for Government to deliberately demolish such hopes. Indeed, it is bad enough that the cost of living has gone through the roof and people are having to cast their sights lower. At the end of this pipeline sits social unrest, of the kind that you are beginning to be witness to, even in western societies that have been economically stable after the Second World War.
Things shift significantly into troubled waters when bulldozers arrive overnight, to demolish the dreams of a lifetime. The on-going demolitions in Syokimau are emblematic of destruction of the dreams of Kenya’s wannabes. It matters that the Government has outlawed the title deeds that were issued from Government offices, in the first place. If citizens cannot trust one document from the Government, why would they want to trust another one? Where is the legitimacy of a Government that has no control over its documents, or respect for its institutions?
By all probability, we are talking about stolen public land. Yet men and women of goodwill will want to ask whether the Government had gone on pilgrimage when State land was ostensibly being stolen. Whatever the case, public faith in official documents is shaken. But even more shaken is the comfort zone that cushions the aristocracy. In its own interest, the aristocracy must address the plight of the middling citizenry whose hopes are dimming and dying apace. It is normal for the fortunes of an individual to dim and die at one point or the other. Life goes on for the majority, regardless. However, when the dreams of the wannabes of this world are dashed by erratic State agents, then tragedy beckons on a grander scale. There is need to be afraid, very afraid. This is especially when you think that you live well.
The writer is a publishing editor and media consultant
