When the rich exploit poor Kenyans they are contributing to insecurity

Nairobi; Kenya: Governments are established to keep societies secure. In fact the key function of the state is security, public safety and protection of life. But governments can at times do this with a bias by giving priority to the safety of the privileged social classes at the expense of the poor. The poor then begin to wonder why they should, in the first place, obey government. But do they have a choice?

When I was an undergraduate I got very excited about theories that tried to explain how we came to exist in this world and who, as human beings, we were. What was our purpose in this life? Why do we subject ourselves to authority?

This is not because I doubted the biblical story of our having originated from Adam and Eve but because I realised  there were other religions which did not share the Christian or Moslem belief in the origin of humankind and the world in general. But they all had a god of some kind, and they all tried to explain the purpose of life.

So from whatever religious perspective one started it seemed to me quite clearly that in the beginning there was nothing. Or, to be more precise, we were nothing.

So came Darwin who argued we evolved from lesser forms of existence. We successfully adapted to the changing environment in the universe in which the earth emerged as the only part of the galaxy where life existed. We, thereafter, emerged as a species with intelligence and ability to control, manipulate and change our modes of existence, including creating all kinds of artifacts including instruments for work and social organisations.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then took over from Darwin and identified production, social organisation and the need to control, use, protect and dispose of what we produced as the key to the distinction between human beings and other living things. In fact it is precisely because human beings needed to produce in order to survive that they learnt over time that living in families and other forms of social collectivities was important.

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At the beginning life was as precarious for human beings just as it was for other animals. But human intelligence and its use was perfected over time, and we managed to develop forms of social existence more superior than other beings simply to guarantee our existence. One of these forms was government or the state which was crafted over time and changed over time as production and the use of what we produced also changed. I then read the works of an English conservative philosopher who argued, quite convincingly, that human beings are born naked and innocent: it is society that gives them clothes and eventually civilizes them and teaches them wicked ways.

In other words who we were and our perception of ourselves is given by our experience in this world within the family, village, tribe, nation and so on. We are creatures of society although deep down we have the instincts of animals.

I therefore look at the problems we have with our security today with this background in mind. It is not just a question of the state perfecting the art of controlling people. We talk of how many police vehicles we need, training our policemen in sufficient numbers, getting our intelligence system working properly and so on. Yes: these aspects of state exerting authority over us cannot be ignored. But how did our society arrive at a stage like this where we need an overkill in police force in order to be safe?

The answer lies in what type of society we have been creating over time. How has each one of us, born naked and innocent, been socialised to live in the Kenyan society? Some of us born in fairly well to do families and environments take daily existence for granted. Others born in abject poverty and harsh environments where life is  precarious must struggle to survive, even if it means stealing from their neighbours. When they steal, or attempt to, the issue of insecurity arise since the thief could easily be caught and harmed by the owner.

Extend this to the wider Kenyan society where the thief is not the poor and underprivileged but the rich and powerful who feel they must take more and more from society to become richer and richer. The more they steal the more they create resentment from those who are deprived.

These people have been socialised to believe that the more they have the more they will control society politically and keep on accumulating even more. They do not realise this in itself causes insecurity. A society where there is gross inequality and gross disparity in incomes is, by its nature, a potentially violent society.

Structures of violence, and therefore of insecurity, are given by structures of production, income distribution and social deprivation in society. It does not matter how high our walls are in well to do neighbourhoods: the environments in which we live will still be insecure where poverty is rampant and social deprivation is high. It does not matter how stiff our penalties are for robbery with violence as long as we educate our children without satisfying their aspirations for a better life after schooling.

A time comes when a society must decide to reorganise itself and address the fundamental issues related to the coming together of human beings to exist in any society. We in Kenya tried this in promulgating our new Constitution but we have not completed the journey by addressing the values that we need to instill in our people in order to be born a new Kenya. We seem to have decided to buy a new bottle but pour old wine into it. This will never work.

Somehow we must go back to the basics: why were we born in the first place? What is our purpose in this life? Where is everybody heading to? Does it really matter in the end who is rich and who is poor?

When all is said and done, what really makes each one of us happy? Is your happiness only happiness when you deprive others of their chance to be happy? When we respond to purely individual instincts like other animals do we thereby dispense with our humanity?

These questions apply to the rich and the poor with equal weight.