We need leadership that is not tainted by political bad manners

A protestor braves teargas along Moi Avenue, Nairobi, during anti-government protests on July 16, 2024. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]

Although the Ruto administration has become the punching bag for the 2024 Gen-z revolution, the young people’s uprising is a repudiation of a post-independence political order that has evolved in the last 60 years.

Just as the breaching of the Berlin wall by thousands of East Germans was a repudiation of 70 years of communist experiment, the 2024 mandamano by Gen-Zs is a confirmation that our 60 year old post-independence political order has come to the end of its shelf life.

According to the angry Gen-Zs, problems with the Kenyan nation stems from State capture by selfish political class that is engaged in an orgy of primitive acquisition. Not only have the profligate ways of the political “lootocracy” resulted in high unemployment and indebtedness, the greedy political class have, without any shame, decided to vomit on our shoes to boot.

In their own words, the revolution is a patriotic generational effort to drain the swamp of a cabal of political minders who lost sight of their civic responsibility a long time ago.

While the Gen Z’s impatience to change a dysfunctional political order is understandable, to be fair to the Ruto Presidency, the ills of his administrations are the fruits of a political economic order that was planted 60 years ago. For at independence and in their quest to inject African values into a post-colonial political order, the founding fathers sought to create a guided capitalist economy that includes heavy involvement of the government in key sectors of the economy.

The founding fathers, in their considered opinion, believed it was necessary to moderate the harsh realities and individualism of the western capitalist system they inherited with the humane spirit of the African communalism. Additionally and given unequal development of the various Kenyan communities, they thought it was imperative to use the visible hand of the State to allocate resources to ensure efficiency and equity. 

In the 60 years since independence, however, heavy involvement of the visible hand of the government in the economy created opportunities for rent-seeking and corruption such that the civil service and politics became Kenya’s fast track to riches and fame.

Given the organic nature of a capitalist economy, corruption and outright theft became a massive leakage for public funds necessitating perpetual borrowing from within and without in order for the government to meet its constitutional obligations. The net effect was to deprive the private sector the requisite funds and market efficiency to generate enough employment opportunities for a growing population.

On the political front, the high rewards in the public service transformed Kenyan politics into an avenue for competing cartels to access economic largesse. To succeed, politics evolved into a devious game whose end is to serve the interest of the political class and favoured tribesmen.

Using vintage Machiavellian principals, politicians perfected the art of using religion and tribe to hoodwink the masses while political parties became vehicles for bringing together politicians with shared economic interests. The poverty of this political order has just been illustrated by the alacrity of opposition leaders to join Ruto’s government. Clearly their opposition of Kenya Kwanza administration was not ideological but personal.

While the Gen Z uprising has done a stellar job of bringing attention to the failure of this post-colonial economic model, the hard part will be to undo a political culture that has been 60 years in the making. With 20/20 hindsight, Kenyan moral reconstruction must start by correcting the ideological foundations that birthed our mixed capitalist economy.

Just as Karl Marx turned Hegel the right way up, Kenyans have to correct the thinking of our founding fathers by creating a new political order that is human-centric rather than cultural-centric. In their quest to structure an African post-independence social order, the founding fathers failed to understand that its human beings that create culture and not the other way round.

The consequence of this paradigm shift will be to create a secular capitalist ethics that has been missing in our post-independence political order. This anthropocentric perspective makes human freedom the ends of politics and therefore the moral imperative of those in leadership.

More importantly, this moral standard makes it reprehensible to engage in corrupt practices because it undermines human capacity to grow and actualise to full potential. This perspective also shifts our minds from identity politics because it provides an overarching value system that transcends ethnic identities.

Creating this capitalist ethics will of course take time and will require a deliberate and intentional process of education. In the short run to satisfy the Gen Z demands, Kenya needs to invest in new leadership that is untainted by historical political bad manners.

Towards this objective, Kenyans will have to decide on whether this will require calling fresh elections immediately or waiting until 2027. Creating a broad-based government of national unity that none has requested is just kicking the can down the road.