Can real secessionists please stand up and be counted?

During the recent meeting in Kilifi to discuss secession, NASA leader Raila Odinga walked out as Governor Amason Kingi started to give details of the plan. Raila did not endorse the plan, and instead, called for dialogue with the Government.

While this may have been as a result of NASA’s lack of a clear strategy – especially since Raila’s boycott of the repeat presidential elections on October 26 – it was also part of a longer tradition whereby politicians from Kenya’s dominant ethnic communities, especially Kikuyu and Luo, have more often than not favoured a powerful central Government, as opposed to extensive decentralisation and/or complete secession of certain regions of the country.

As such, Raila’s misapprehensions with the secessionist demand reveals insincerity, hollowness, and a lack of genuine concern with the historical aims of secessionism (or strong local Government) by a section of NASA’s leadership.

It should not be forgotten that the real battle for Raila and his political base in Luo-Nyanza has always been about the capture of the central State based in Nairobi, not the presidency of the so-called (and incoherent) Peoples Republic of Kenya.

The real secessionists, I argue, are communities that have not been interested in the dominant Kenyan vision that was offered at the dawn of independence in the 1960s, a vision whose physical appearance is still manifested in Nairobi, the hotbed of the Kikuyu and Luo political imagination.  

In other words, Kenya’s real secessionists are those communities that have resided out of what economist David Ndii has referred to as the “chlorophyll zone,” an area lying 10 km on either side of the Kenya-Uganda railway, and which has been prioritised in terms of public investment since the colonial era.

The construction of this zone, dominated by up-country and predominantly Christian communities, has meant that development is prioritised in a very small part of the country – about 13 per cent of Kenyan territory – where those with wealth and privilege are concentrated, and that the rest of the country, particularly Northern Kenya and the coast, have consistently been neglected.

The concentration of wealth and power in this zone has been foregrounded by an overly centralised national Government, the brainchild of Kenya’s first president and father to the current, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kenya’s first vice-president and father of Raila, Jaramogi Oginga.

This concentration of wealth and privilege explains Kenya’s biting inequality. For instance, in 2013, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) revealed enormous regional discrepancies when it reported that 12 per cent of people in Kajiado (a county neighbouring Nairobi) lived in abject poverty while the equivalent figure in Turkana was 94 per cent. According to another report published in 2015 by the Africa Policy Journal, the top 10 per cent in Kenya – concentrated in and around Nairobi – earn 40 per cent of national income, while the bottom tenth earns less than two per cent, making Kenya one of the most unequal countries for thousands of miles around.

Concerned minorities

This is why the dominance of this zone in Kenya’s political economy has concerned minorities throughout the country’s history. For instance, as early as the 1950s, a group of Arab-Swahili political organisations at the coast were demanding autonomy for the Protectorate of Kenya, a narrow strip of the Indian Ocean coast stretching from Lamu to the Tanganyika border. Britain had administered the protectorate, but per an 1895 treaty, the Sultan of Zanzibar had retained nominal sovereignty.

In his maiden speech in Parliament in May 1961, a young Sheikh Abdillahi Nassir, who was then the MP for Mombasa, explained, amid jeers and heckles, that many in the coastal strip believed (and they continue to do so) that postcolonial domination by an up-country government would prove disastrous for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

Leading the pack of Nassir’s hecklers was a young Tom Mboya, who referenced Nassir’s partial Arab ancestry and roared across the chamber, “Go back to Arabia!” Nassir responded in kind, by alluding to Luo claims to have migrated south from the Sudan, and countered that by Mboya’s assertion, he could go back to the Sudan.   

As this was happening, a proposal for the Northern Frontier District (NFD) bordering Somalia to join, not an independent Kenya, but a ‘Greater Somalia’, was popular amongst the Somali population of Kenya, and the refusal by the Kenyan government to adhere to this demand led first to a boycott of the independence elections in 1963 and later, an insurgency commonly known as the Shifta conflict. A state of emergency in the region was declared, and then lifted 27 years later. 

The hostility at which Jomo Kenyatta’s regime approached the coastal strip and NFD question was also applied to proposals for strong regional governments, called Majimbo, that were being spearheaded by the political leaders of the Maasai, Mijikenda, Kalenjin, and Luhya communities during independence constitutional talks.

These leaders, such as Ronald Ngala and Daniel Moi, feared that members of their communities would not fare well in an independent Kenya dominated by the Luo and the Kikuyu, as the latter were better mobilised, educated and more urbanised. Elites from the two communities had not only dominated Nairobi, but before 1969, had also dominated the Government. Resuscitating

Resuscitating

In fact, Kenyan politics, since the 1950s, has revolved around the question of who’s turn it is – between Luo and Kikuyu elites – to capture the reins of the centralised State that is based in Nairobi and hence, ‘eat’ resources at its disposal.

In this way, these elites, including Raila, cannot fully grasp the pain of exclusion that results from being distant to power, privilege and status, as compared to others from the Coast and Northern Kenya.

In fact, the task of dismantling Majimbo in the 1960s was taken up by Jaramogi, who frustrated the operation of the regional governments by denying them crucial public revenue. When he became President, Moi, a Tugen from Baringo, was constantly rebuked and mocked by Kikuyu and Luo elites, and he was told that he was a “passing cloud”.

For the rest of his presidency, Moi grew more and more paranoid, and with the return to multi-party politics in 1992, he was effectively locked out of Nairobi, and as a result, resuscitated the Majimbo project in the same regions – the Rift Valley and Coast – where this idea had been popular in the 1960s. 

In these regions, the Majimbo idea regained prominence in the 1990s, but was accompanied by massive violence targeted at Kikuyu peasants and Luo workers. A brief union by Luo-Kikuyu elites in 2002 removed Kanu and Moi from power, but left deep scores in Kalenjin areas, which were exposed in the 2007-08 post-election violence.

In fact, it is the electoral experience of 2007 that showed Kalenjin elites that they too, could join the national big league of ethnic electoral pacts and capture the central state. With this, they abandoned the Majimbo project.

It is under this context that the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC)’s demand for Coastal secession after the 2007 elections gained wide public sympathy on the Coast, where feelings of exclusion from national political proceedings deepened. These feelings continue despite the promulgation of a new Constitution and introduction of county governments. These structural changes have not addressed communal feelings of exclusion amongst Kenya’s most ardent supporters of strong local government, including secession.

Multiple voices

The recent meeting in Kilifi revealed NASA’s many voices. While others insist Raila should be sworn-in as president before the year ends, others are calling for dialogue with Uhuru’s regime. Others, are demanding electoral justice or else, threaten to push for secession.

It is time that these multiple voices within NASA separate, so that the real secessionists can be seen. Perhaps, it is time for coastal political elites to begin charting their own path, and stop playing second-fiddle to up-country elites who may not have the region’s best interest at heart. 

 Chome is a PhD candidate at Durham University, UK.