How Kenya’s politics undermines EAC progress

(Photo: Courtesy)

Political power play in any country has wide effect beyond the particular country. This is particularly the case when powerful or influential States within certain regional zones behave in an indecisive manner. While the United States is an example of a global power, Kenya is an example of a small regional power and political developments in either affects the world or their neighbours. At times, they both have politicians who specialize in political bad behaviour. They create political chaos and do not care what the effect on their countries would be both domestically and globally.

Similarities

Occasionally, the two countries appear to compete in capturing negative attention. In the United States, disputed elections of 2000 and 2016 exposed it to two ridicules. First, the United States has a habit of lecturing other countries on elections and feels it has a mission to lead even those who do not want to be led. Theodore Roosevelt’s claim that the US had a right to intervene in a country where there was “chronic wrong doing” was reinforced by Woodrow Wilson’s assertion of teaching Latin American voters “how to elect good men” and buttressed by Hilary Clinton’s belief that US prompted elections should ensure that American approved candidates win.

Second, the two elections reduced US moral stature and capacity to “lead” because its believability level scaled downward, especially with its repeated bombastic statements on its purported global mission. The controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s 2016 election affected American regional and global standing. Even the other countries of the Euro mind-frame, often beholden to the United States, started doubting it.

Kenya has received Euro-lectures and advice on almost everything political either directly through official government agencies or indirectly through identified “international” organizations and media, religious institutions, as well as NGOs and civil society bodies acting as proxies.

These proxies go out of their way to penetrate and discredit Kenyan institutions as a prelude to chaos manufacturing that act as justification for forcing “advice” to impose “power-sharing” or even effect regime change. It happened in 2007 and it looks as if it is in the works in 2017 in connection with the perplexing court-ordered fresh elections.

In Eastern Africa, political power play in Kenya puts the East African Community in limbo. While the nullification of Kenya’s presidential election had the hallmarks of domestic and global power play, it tended to intensify the regional stalemate. It is not the first time that domestic politics, peppered with “international” ideological prompting, retarded regional cooperation.  

 At independence, there was deep desire for political ‘shirikisho’, bringing individual countries together to form one big whole and increase the region’s bargaining power. The drive was frustrated by the rise of ‘majimbo’ that stressed splitting individual countries into little nooks for politicians “to look good as leaders”. There was some shirikisho success in the tenuous unification of Tanganyika with the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba whose internal politics remains problematic.

East African Community

The created community of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda barely lasted ten years partly due to domestic political chicanery and regional rivalries in each of the three principal member countries. Domestically, there were serious political feuds between Julius Nyerere and Rashid Kawawa in Tanganyika, Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga in Kenya, and Milton Obote and Kabaka Mutesa in Uganda. At the regional level, there were presidential personal quarrels between Nyerere and Uganda’s Idi Amin, following the ouster of Obote.

Ideological differences also took centre stage as Kenya and Tanzania traded ideological insults and even closed borders but the personal touch between Kenyatta and Nyerere remained close. In Uganda, Obote proclaimed his 1969 Common Man’s Charter and then expelled Kenyans because of their “capitalistic” proclivities. As a result, Unlike Tanzania, Kenya did not reject Amin when he overthrew Obote in 1971.

Kenyan domestic politics is also critical to the survival of the revived and expanded EAC which still experiences some of the challenges that bedevilled the first EAC. Member countries are not paying their financial dues, there is over-reliance on the good will of “donors” for money and occasional advice, national differences playing up in Arusha, and seeming presidential personality clashes. Kenyans complain that they do not receive reciprocity from Tanzania while Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda intensify mutual suspicion. Newly admitted South Sudan is unsure of how to fit in. While such obstacles hinder EAC progress, it is Kenya’s pivotal role that influences regional policy in part because it pays its dues.

 

Professor Munene teaches History and International Relations, United States International University, Africa