Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 150
November 10, 2020
Slam democracy
Image credit Guerchom Ndebo.
One thread runs through the education system of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): authoritative knowledge should not be questioned. The groundwork was laid during Belgian colonialism and refined under the autocratic regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko. The successive Kabila regime continued this tradition.
During colonial times, the promotion and development of a very basic education infrastructure served a broader aim of the colonizing mission: A higher level of education was neither considered possible nor desirable because it could unleash revolutionary potential among the oppressed.
With the country’s independence in 1960 and then especially under Mobutu���s ���authenticity��� policy, education was to be decolonized through reforms to curricula. Future citizens would be raised on a nationalist discourse and practices such as praising national heroes and raising the state flag every morning before school.
In 1971, Mobutu���s party, the Mouvement Populaire de la R��volution (MPR), initiated the complete nationalization of the education system. With this control, Mobutu also pursued the goal of supporting his autocratic regime: by creating youth sections of his party in schools and universities, or by replacing the course of political education with Mobutism.
The legacy of colonial paternalism, and the behavior of those later in power to put their own welfare above that of the population, continues to have an impact on education today. As Depaul Bakulu, of the Goma Slam Session, says: ���We are not taught that the authorities owe us anything. I personally graduated from high school without a single teacher talking about the mechanisms to make demands when our rights are violated.���
Image credit Guerchom Ndebo.The Goma Slam Session is a collective of spoken word artists that aims to promote critical thought and freedom of expression through the art of slam. In addition to their own creative work they offer free writing and performance workshops. What started in youth centres and youth prisons, developed into an intensive focus on schools.
The collective thus represents another tradition in the DRC���s school system: that often in the history of the DRC, educational institutions were places of resistance, particularly in the 1980s when structural adjustment slashed the education budget. To this day,��teachers are demanding better wages, and debates on education policy are lively.
The Slam Session meets Saturday mornings in a house in the middle of a busy neighborhood in Goma. The attendees perform their self-written texts that deal with various topics, such as women’s rights, COVID-19, love, or Congo���s independence. The purpose is to improve each other���s work through mutual learning via fruitful criticism.
In addition to these weekly slam sessions, the house is used for organizational meetings or workshops, and it is open to everyone to rehearse, write, and exchange ideas. The members of the collective stress that their Espace Slam is not an office, but a self-governing space and that they work within a horizontal framework. Through a joint decision, the money they received for their performance at the Amani Festival 2020���an annual festival that takes place to promote peace in the region���was invested for the first six months of house rent.
These principles of complementary knowledge and non-hierarchical structures also guide the school visits. The goal is to provide students with more opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical thinking. Learners are asked to criticize the workshops as a whole and thus contribute to the process. ���I���m not a teacher, I���m just a facilitator. Even by your experiences, I can also learn,��� explains Bakulu to the pupils. Such an announcement is unusual in an educational context, where the teacher is perceived as an authority that can hardly be questioned.
To secure access to the schools, the Goma Slam Session uses a scientific rather than activist approach, emphasizing improvement of language, performance, and practice. In March 2020, after recurrent visits to 14 schools, the activities were discontinued because of COVID-19. The Espace Slam also remained empty because of the ban on gatherings of more than 20 people. With the first relaxation of measures in July, however, while the schools were still closed, the Academie Slam was launched.
The texts that were presented after this four-week training in the Espace Slam plead for social justice and dignity for arrested persons, refugees, or the victims of the massacres in Beni. Due to the complex recent history of war and political oppression in Goma���s North-Kivu province���the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO) reported an increasing number of violations of human rights and democratic freedoms, both by state actors and armed groups in 2020���it is not surprising that the denunciation of these circumstances is a central theme.
Image credit Guerchom Ndebo.Although civil society movements, such as Lucha or Filimbi, have long spoken out against the DRC government, this kind of critique does not suit everyone, as Benedicte Luendo says: ���To be honest, I’m scared of being an activist. But with slam I can express myself freely without taking to the streets.��� She fears the repression of the security forces, which can intervene harshly in case of demonstrations���for example, in July this year, when Congolese demonstrated in numerous cities for a reform of the national election commission and several people were arrested, injured, and even killed.
Like art in general, slam targets the attention of the public. Although DRC���s media landscape certainly allows critical voices, Bakulu doubts the independence of many traditional media houses. Either they are under the control of those in power, or they are afraid of a temporary forced closure, as was for example the case with the channels RFI and Canal Future during the last elections. In addition to political repression, the precarious financial situation of local media houses seems to play a role: Since many journalists are not paid for their published articles, they follow invitations to press conferences or events by politicians or entrepreneurs to write in their interests in exchange for a small subsidy.
In a context where many lack the means to engage with print media, slam has potential as a means of critique. In their piece ���Coup de b��ton���, for example, the duo Ghislain Kalwira and Jacinthe Maarifa uses the stylistic device of the stick stroke���used as a punishment in education and upbringing���directed upwards against the authorities, the media, and the international community.
���Many people understand slam up to now as a new, foreign form of art, although we have an oral tradition,��� says Kalwira. To bring their art closer to the people, they perform on the street and away from places such as the Institut Francais, the cultural institution which has hosted the collective many times. They mix Swahili into their performances, as free school education for all remains a promise rather than reality, and thus speaking good French remains a status symbol.
As the number of women who bring their own critical voices to the public is still limited, the Goma Slam Session launched Slam au Feminim in September, bringing the program to the school, because due to household responsibilities many girls do not have the same opportunities to take part in extracurricular activities such as the Academie Slam.
As long as the education system fails to provide the young generation with the critical thinking skills and other tools to analyze and address social and political problems, the Goma Slam Session will continue with its subtle subversion. ���Perhaps we are going to present a threat against the lamentable mediocrity of the political system and those who govern us in the future,��� Bakulu says, ���but so far the schools have welcomed us.���
November 9, 2020
Passing as a refugee
Faces of Dadaab. Image credit Riyaad Minty via Flickr CC.
Names and details have been changed to protect anonymity. Mahad���s story is a composite of interviews by the author with more than one person. This post is part of our series, “Histories of Refuge,” made up of essays from participants in the Rethinking Refuge Workshop. It is edited by historian Madina Thiam.
Mahad was born in Kenya���a fact that neither his passport, nor carefully scripted biography suggests. For decades, Kenyan Somalis (citizens of Kenya who also identify as Somali) have faced discrimination in accessing legal documents, including national identity cards, passports, and birth certificates. To even be considered for a national ID, most have to undergo an intimidating, invasive vetting process to assess the authenticity of their claims to citizenship. This process alone excludes many legitimate citizens from obtaining this crucial document.��Without an ID in Kenya, one cannot enjoy many basic political and economic rights. These include opening a bank account, registering a SIM card, gaining formal employment, entering into government and corporate offices, and even moving about freely.
Like many Kenyan Somalis, Mahad ran afoul of registration agents when he tried to register for a national ID. He faced particular difficulty because his family structure defied easy ethnic categorization. Stuck in an impossible position, he turned to one of the few avenues available to him: passing as a refugee.
For decades, government officials and NGO workers have struggled to distinguish between refugees fleeing from Somalia and local Somalis with Kenyan citizenship. In recent years, states and international bodies have turned to techno-political solutions to this elusive problem. In 2007, the UNHCR introduced fingerprint and later iris scans to Kenya���s refugee camps. The UNHCR has also worked closely with the Kenyan government to identify cases of ���double registration��� (people who possess a Kenyan ID card or are on record as having applied for one). Through capacity building programs, they have strengthened the Kenyan state���s ability to carry out refugee registration. The National Registration Bureau of Kenya is now able to run the fingerprints of any person who applies for a national ID through the government���s refugee database, ensnaring people engaged in such doubling acts in legal limbo.
A biometric trail also follows African asylum seekers and migrants who make their way to Europe. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has implemented systems for capturing fingerprints and facial images at border points across 16 African countries. Such measures outsource border security, bringing technology deep into African states and along migration routes and strengthening the ability of Western nation-states ���to prevent would-be asylum seekers from reaching their territories where their claims would be heard.��� Migrants who manage to reach European shores are likely to have their fingerprints captured on the EU���s European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database (EURODAC), which identifies countries of first asylum. Had Mahad been born a few years later, his life trajectory would have likely looked very different. However, he was lucky to have come of age before the 9/11 securitization of borders, before the fever for biometrics had captured the imaginations of governments, intergovernmental bodies, and humanitarian organizations.
Mahad���s story begins with his enterprising and eccentric maternal grandmother, Khadija. As a young divorc��e, Khadija moved from Italian Somaliland to Kenya in the late 1940s, during the waning years of British colonial rule. She settled in Narok, a predominately Maasai area in the south of the country, where she started a successful retail business and became known around town for her wit, business acumen, and occasional lapses into unreality. She soon caught the eye of a wealthy elder Maasai woman who claimed her as a long-lost daughter, adopting Khadija though she was already well into adulthood. When she died, Khadija inherited a portion of her property. This is how she came to stay in Narok, where she raised several children, including Mahad���s mother.
Mahad was born in the 1970s, one of only a few Kenyan-Somali children in this largely Maasai area. When he was little more than a toddler, his father decided to relocate the family to Wajir in northern Kenya, where they could live amongst his extended family. Moving from Narok to his father���s birthplace created unanticipated problems for Mahad���problems that only revealed themselves when he reached 18, the age when Kenyans pass through a standard rite of passage: acquiring a national ID.
For Mahad, obtaining this routine yet crucial document proved impossible. Registration agents in northern Kenya refused to process his application, redirecting him to the birthplace listed on his birth certificate. Yet, to officials in Narok he was an outsider. The kinship ties laid down by his grandmother had been lost to the stream of time. No local chief was able to pen a letter on Mahad���s behalf verifying his parentage, even though his mother had been born in the area. As a Somali, one���s citizenship status in Kenya is often called into question. As a stranger and minority in the region, Mahad was doubly suspect. Shuffled back and forth between Narok and Wajir, he found himself hedged into that ostracized category: the stateless.
Echoes of empire reverberated throughout this experience. Under British rule, Kenyans were governed according to their designated tribe. After introducing fingerprint-based ID cards in the early 20th century, the British colonial regime had insisted that Africans register in their native reserves, their putative ethnic homelands. This ethno-territorial logic���the idea of affixing people to paper to territory���had left an enduring mark on Kenya���s post-independence ID system.
After two tiresome years of trying, unsuccessfully, to acquire a national ID in both his birthplace and hometown, Mahad took a different route. Across the border in Somalia, he could easily obtain a passport. The Republic of Somalia had long championed a pan-ethnic project that embraced all Somalis as members of its imagined nation, regardless of whether they were born in a neighboring country. Somaliness may be no less contested a category than Kenyaness, but Mahad fit the part. Somalia was perhaps the only country that would accept him without question.
After Mahad acquired a Somali passport, the family paid an NGO official to smuggle him aboard a humanitarian flight to Europe, where he claimed asylum. Today, he is a Swedish citizen. When Mahad reentered to Kenya for the first time to visit family, he did so as a foreigner. It was a homecoming on a tourist visa.
According to the letter of the law (international humanitarian law, to be exact), Mahad was not a refugee: a person forced to flee their country because of persecution, war, or violence with a well-founded fear of returning home. Yet, passing as one���gaining refuge under an adopted nationality���was one of the few ways out of a life teetering upon statelessness. The slow violence of bureaucratic indifference had denied him access to his natal citizenship. Adopting an assumed nationality offered him a way out. This is the type of strategy, the kind of creative corruption, employed by those pushed to the margins of political systems.
Biometric identifiers have offered the enticing promise of tying legal status directly to the body, closing the distance between the copy and the original, eliminating the possibility of mimicry and fraud. Indeed, digital biometrics can curb certain kinds of fraud, bribery, and forgery (even as it makes corruption a more expensive, high-tech endeavor). Integrating and centralizing national and refugee databases may make it easier for authorities to detect people like Mahad, who do not so much fall through the cracks as operate within them.
Notwithstanding, it is worth asking what (and who) gets lost when countries and international bodies turn to such automated biometric solutions. Data gaps, administrative failures, and clunky analog systems have caused myriad challenges for those at the mercy of dispassionate bureaucracies. They have also provided people forced to assume false identities���especially those who blur the line between citizen and refugee���room to maneuver complex, transnational lives.
In many cases, ���fraud��� can allow for the smuggling of truths into administrative lies.
Looking disenchantment in the face
Still from "In the Last Days of the City"
There is something about disenchantment that makes it particularly African. Dwelling in a longue dur��e as old as human life itself means that Africans have seen their hopes and dreams endlessly performed and then crushed, tested, and dismissed. Disenchantment becomes a permanent state of being in the world that Africans know well and can look straight in the face.
Every time a genuine project of social change falls apart, this state of disenchantment becomes palpable. After African independence movements and the Arab Spring, the euphoria of being once again free and dreaming of the infinite possibilities that the future holds eventually morphed slowly and steadily into a bleak reality of corruption, misery, and death. Yet, the memory of those euphoric experiences remains so intense that a powerful sense of yearning continues to reverberate across the continent like a utopian pulse.
This Janus-like trope of disenchantment and hope still defines and shapes African art. Almost 50 years apart, Tamer el-Said���s film, In the Last Days of the City (2016) and Ayi Kwei Armah���s novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) offer almost-identical dramatizations of this African condition���actively de-linking African modernity from the debilitating discourse of Afropessimism.
In the Last Days of the City features the male protagonist, Khaled (the actor Khalid Abdalla), who is disillusioned with the desolate spectacle of a decaying Cairo on the brink of total collapse. Initially shot in 2009, el-Said���s debut feature interweaves fiction and nonfiction elements to deliver in retrospect a bleak view of the last days of Hosni Mubarak���s authoritarian regime, ousted by the 2011 revolution. It calls attention to the worsening situation under the current brutal rule of Mubarak���s successor Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the time of the film���s release in 2016.
The Last Days follows Khaled���s daily life and his search for a new apartment in downtown Cairo; his frequent visits to his dying mother; his separation from his love interest, Laila; his inability to decide on the artistic direction of his documentary project; and his distant friendship with other Arab filmmakers from Beirut, Baghdad, and Berlin. He finds himself deeply alienated from himself, his people, and his city. Cairo is now a monstrous city that feeds on its dwellers: failure, sickness, and death become the aesthetics around which the lives of Khaled and everyone around him are framed.
Almost 50 years earlier, Ayi Kwei Armah���s disenchantment with Kwame Nkrumah���s Ghana made The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born a perfect example of what Joe E. Obi Jr. called the disillusionment novel. Published in 1968, two years after the coup d�����tat that overthrew Nkrumah���s government and 11 years after Ghana became the first sub-Saharan country to be independent, Armah���s debut novel depicts in retrospect the disenchanting reality of Nkrumah���s authoritarianism and its terrible impact on Accra and its people.
Set during the last days of Nkrumah���s rule, The Beautyful Ones depicts the unbearable daily life of the man, the nameless protagonist, who refuses to participate in the system of rampant bribery and violence. He is alienated from his meaningless job, his filthy surroundings, and even from his family when he declines at first to be involved in a corrupt transaction of purchasing a fishing boat that would benefit his wife, Oyo, his mother-in-law, and Koomsoon, an old friend turned corrupt minister in Nkrumah���s government. The man is a pale narrator-protagonist who is consumed by a debilitating awareness of the aimlessness of searching for beauty, morality, and truth in such dystopian conditions.
Both The Last Days and The Beautyful Ones center on passive protagonists who cannot reconcile themselves with the decaying society they dwell in, and the impossibility to enact change in their personal lives and the corrupt world around them. Both Khaled and the nameless protagonist are ambivalent about their desires and expectations, incessantly overwhelmed by their incapacity, and eventually unable to form a coherent vision of what emancipation might look like. Both Khaled and the man drift through their cities in a disinterested half-sleep and aimless journey. A deep sense of estrangement and frustration challenges the possibility of even qualifying their wandering as fl��nerie.
Their inability to connect with the world around them is contrasted with the overload of impressions, feelings, and soundscapes that are put under narrative control through the recurring metaphor of the penetrating eye. As they wander in their cities, every sight captures the protagonists��� interest in looking at what has become unfamiliar to them in a hopeless attempt to grasp what happened to their countries and people.
Disenchantment for el-Said and Armah carries an obsession with looking at the scandalous and the abject through slow, querying gaze. The Last Days presents Cairo as a negative space of decay and loss through long shots of destitute, toothless beggars, and multiple scenes where the emphasis is on decomposing houses and dilapidated buildings. The Beautyful Ones is filled with vivid descriptions of bodily waste and scatology. The nameless protagonist moves from the depiction of overflow of excrement; to ���all around decaying things push inward and mix all the body���s juices with the taste of rot;��� to finally the desired death of Koomson whose ���mouth had the rich stench of rotten menstrual blood.���
These obsessions with abject ways of looking at disenchantment have expectedly attracted vehement criticism. The Last Days was banned in Egypt upon its release, but went on to be featured in more than 120 film festivals worldwide and to receive more than 12 international awards. This is partly because el-Said���s film feeds into the Western gaze that sees Africa as a wasteland: the desert yellow and sepia-toned aesthetics through which Cairo is portrayed and the spectacle of urban destruction may be seen as ruin porn, which reinforces the perennial image of Egypt, and Africa in general, as a bleak space of decay and death. Similar concerns can be applied to Armah���s novel: Chinua Achebe famously called Armah ���an alienated writer complete with all the symptoms��� and went further to qualify The Beautyful Ones as ���a sick book��� that ���imposes so much foreign metaphor on the sickness of Ghana that it ceases to be true.���
The imposition of foreign metaphor runs deeper in both works. The central interplay between fiction and fact in The Last Days and The Beautyful Ones becomes counterproductive and fails to convince its audience on its merits. In el-Said���s film, the meta-aesthetics of the director���s on-screen intervention in the editing and pacing of the 250 hours of footage leaves different narrative arcs and the characters��� development pointlessly incomplete. Armah���s novel also abruptly slips into essay mode to incorporate lengthy and direct ideological and political statements. Both works repeatedly break out of their fictional narrative to attempt explicit, and at times irritating, authorial control.
What Derek Wright has called ���a monolithic vision��� in his analysis of Armah���s novel applies to both works: the conflating position of the author, the narrator, and the protagonist as one and the same subsumes the different perspectives at play in the artworks to the unifying negative political vision of the male writers. This leads to a failure to imagine an alternative and generative vision of the African future.
But the most problematic dimension in The Last Days and The Beautyful Ones is the passive role of women. As John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, ���men act and women appear.��� Laila and Oyo are there to be looked at. They barely talk and remain one dimensional. Contrary to the men, they are never acknowledged as actively taking things into their own hands, even though Laila is leaving Egypt to search for a better future, and Oyo seeks to finalize Koomsoon���s deal as the ultimate chance to improve their living conditions.
Instead, both women are confined to the role of helping the male protagonists reconcile with themselves. Laila���s visit to Khaled���s apartment and their revived love through a last kiss saves the male protagonist from himself and from falling into despair. In the last scene of The Last Days, we are left with the strong impression that Khaled thought of attempting suicide by standing close to the window but resisted this death drive because of his renewed hope. In The Beautyful Ones, after a sexless marriage and a repulsion towards Oyo���s scar from her C-section, the man falls in love again with his wife only because of her newfound respect for his moral honesty after he refuses to escape with Koomsoon, which leads the male protagonist to start envisioning a better future. These two events eventually enable a closure in both works, but frame women���s contributions as essentially that of easing men���s anxiety.
Yet, disenchantment differs from despair, and even more from apathy. In almost every frame in The Last Days, there is a reminder of the revolutionary forces that would later topple Mubarak���s dictatorship. Now in retrospect, we know that those forces were defeated, and a new brutal regime is in place, but those energies will rise again and transform into another revolution because Cairenes have lasting memories of better, revolutionary days. Armah���s novel expresses a similar persistence of hope for freedom from neocolonial oppression when, at the end of the novel the new government is announced, the man contemplates an enchanting artwork: ���The green paint was brightened with an inscription carefully lettered to form an oval shape: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In the center of the oval was a single flower, solitary, unexplainable and very beautiful.���
In these instances, and others, disenchantment incarnates the ahistorical and non-place impulse of a utopian everyday in Africa. Disenchantment is not the end of dreams; it is the fire next time.
November 8, 2020
The corporatization of food in South Africa
Photo by Anaya Katlego on Unsplash
This post is part of our series “Climate Politics.”
When our priority is growing food for profit, people will go hungry. It is simply more profitable to grow food for retail and export than it is to feed people living in poverty. In South Africa, 10.4 million people had inadequate access to food in 2017. This is why the marginalized need to have more control over food production.
As defined by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems. People need to have control over what they eat and how that food is produced.
You might have heard over and again that South Africa ���produces enough food for everyone to eat and the problem is rather that of distribution.��� This kind of thinking has led to food security initiatives that distribute food parcels, vouchers, and various other forms of food aid at great cost. Despite this, we still face alarming levels of hunger. For example, one in four South African children go to bed hungry.
We need to admit that the problem of hunger in South Africa is linked to the structure of production itself. Ultimately, if we cede control over food production to corporations, they will make decisions that maximize their profit over decisions that address hunger.��Corporate control over food production in South Africa manifests in many ways. For example, agriculture production favors the production of crops for export. Agricultural export earned South African food corporations a record US$10.6 billion in 2018.
Corporate production of food also leads to waste. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) about 10 million tons of food is wasted in South Africa on an annual basis. Much of this waste takes place during the production process with the losses amounting to one-third of total food production.
Furthermore, the corporate sector controls South Africa���s seed supply chain. A study of seed access in South Africa found that four companies have near monopoly control of the country���s seed market for crucial crops such as maize, sunflower, and wheat. That means the interests of these corporations determine what happens with these crops, which are staples for South African diets.
Moreover, food processing is firmly in the hands of a few corporate entities. A study by Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) found that four companies had a 95% market share in the processing of breakfast foods and starch products in South Africa. Large companies control entire aspects of the supply chain from when seeds are planted in the ground to when they are transported to retailers. Decisions by corporations will inevitably create conditions of hunger because food will be exported or wasted, and small-scale farmers struggle to access seeds due to the monopoly of a few companies.
Even more worrying is that policies by the South African government help to entrench the corporatization of food. For example, the government subsidizes Genetically Modified (GM) maize, halving its price in the process. The increasing importance of GM maize has been linked to declining food sovereignty in Africa.
However, things don���t need to be this way.
In Chitungwiza, a dormitory town situated 30 kilometers south east of Zimbabwe���s capital, Harare, the Kuchengetana Relief Kitchen provides breakfast porridge and a hot meal supper every day. They produce culturally relevant food at a lower cost than food parcels, maximizing financial donations, while also being sustainable for future food needs.
The Wits Food Sovereignty Centre grows food using a method called agroecology, a sustainable farming practice that works with local ecosystems and available natural resources instead of using chemicals and battling nature. A United Nations report found that agroecology controls pests, raises food yield, reduces rural poverty, and is resilient to climate change.
So, a call for food gardens, fruit trees, and organic markets is very much a revolutionary idea, which redistributes power from the corporate capitalist sector to the people. I was part of a group that launched a food campaign at the University of the Free State in 2018 to encourage the institution to grow food���instead of buying it from corporations. We have come a long way. There is now a small food garden, approval for fruit trees and a push for the establishment of community kitchens and an organic market.
Similar movements are growing across the country through the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and the Climate Justice Charter, an ambitious plan to move South Africa away from corporate control of water and food to end hunger, thirst, pollution, and climate harm. More than 220 organizations have endorsed this charter, which was launched this year on World Food Day, October 16.
The South African government recently announced a plan to distribute nearly 900 farms totaling 700,000 hectares of land. Already, smallholder farmers and their communities are growing food, but struggle for food sovereignty in South Africa wages on toward ending corporate control of the food system and specifically diverting government support from corporations to ensure that food sovereignty thrives.
November 6, 2020
Hustler mentality
Image credit Berk Ozkan for OCHA via Flickr CC.
Though Kenyan elections, including for president, are only in 2022, campaigns are in full swing in Kenya, with the current deputy president, William Ruto, mobilizing against the government he helped bring into power. To establish his independence, the “chicken seller” who became vice president positions himself as a “hustler” against “dynasties.” This account is accompanied by a “wheelbarrownomics”���the donation of motorbikes, wheelbarrows and other equipment to unemployed youth. But, there is a more sinister story behind the hustler narrative. This series is curated by editorial board member, Wangui Kimari. This post, from our partnership with The Elephant, is part of a series curated by Wangui Kimari.
Deputy President William Samoei Ruto has hit the campaign trail hard. He has provocatively billed the next presidential election the ���hustlers versus dynasties��� duel, which broadcast journalist Joe Ageyo thinks is new to Kenya���s politics.
In a Citizen TV talk show, Ageyo suggested that Ruto might be doing politics differently, mobilizing and organizing his political base along the dominant social-economic cleavages, and not the usual ethnic-regional conundrum���often presented as transient ethnic kingpin coalitions during general elections.
Certainly, Ruto���s invocation of an existing socioeconomic cleavage between those in power and unemployed youth lends Kenya���s notoriously ethicized politics a class overtone. Has William Ruto, a wealthy, self-styled born-again Christian politician, whose long political journey that began earnestly as the organizing secretary of the surreptitious Youth for Kanu 92 (YK���92), undergone a Road-to-Damascus-like political conversion? Or is this vintage Ruto, grabbing any opportunity he can find to ruthlessly pursue his interests to achieve his lifelong dream of becoming president?
Hustler nation
Speaking in Nyamira County recently, Ruto said, ���Some people are telling us sons of hustlers cannot be president. That your father must be known. That he must be rich for you to become the president. We are telling them that even a child of a boda boda or a kiosk operator or��mtoto wa anayevuta mkokoteni��(child of a cart pusher) can lead this country.��� In a country that is tottering on the brink of economic meltdown, a youth budge, and political despair, this is music to the ears of a desperate youthful population.
The deputy president���s chief critics remind him that surnames have hardly ever handicapped one���s presidential ambitions. Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Arap Moi, and Mwai Kibaki���s became president, and their fathers��� names were totally unknown to Kenyans. Only Uhuru Kenyatta, who Ruto ably assisted to win the presidency in the last two presidential elections, has a father who is known to Kenyans because he was the country���s first president.
Ruto, the self-styled spokesman of ���the hustler nation,��� also stated, ���On dealing with hustlers, Raila should leave that to me. He does not understand the plight of hustlers. He is the son of a vice president and he was born being driven around.���
So why does Ruto proudly claim to be the ���hustler-in-chief���? Hustler means different things to different people, but for many Kenyan youth, it signifies humble beginnings or means of eking out a living���respectable or otherwise. Being a hustler means one has found a way to stay afloat, particularly in hard economic times. The ambivalent feelings this word evokes match the legal and moral ambiguities that Ruto has built around his political career.
The deputy president has the gall to identify with the very youth whose present and future the Jubilee government has committed to misery by mismanaging the economy. He is appealing to youthful voters who will comprise the majority of first-time voters in 2022.
Wheelbarrownomics
But more than assuming their identity, what the deputy president has ably done is to locate the youths��� anxiety: their discontentment and deep frustration with the government. Frederick Kariuki, 29, a qualified accountant and a budding entrepreneur in Nairobi, is the latest convert to the political movement that is seemingly sweeping the country: The Hustlers. He told us that Ruto���s ���wheelbarrownomics��� (a word coined by Kenyan economist David Ndii) has struck the right note with the youth who believe Ruto could be their savior.
���Those talking ill of the wheelbarrow gifts are pretenders to middle class, pedantic mandarins associated with President Uhuru���s wing of the Jubilee Party that is fighting Ruto. After lying to youth during the 2017 presidential campaigns, afraid and embarrassed by the swelling hordes of youth without work who are threatening to explode, the government belatedly came up with��kazi��mtaani��(casual wage labor). What is the difference between��kazi mtaani, where college graduates are being supplied with slashers for cutting grass and paid 400 shillings (which is still stolen from them) and Ruto���s dishing of wheelbarrows and push carts?��� posed Kariuki.
���Ruto has correctly seized the moment to sell his hustler narrative, which has caught on like bush fire, even if it means bringing down a government he helped install in power. And why not? He has outwitted his nemesis through his tactical political maneuvers and that���s what realpolitik is all about.
���A wheelbarrow costs 4,000 shillings and a pushcart 20,000 shillings. A cursory visit to Nairobi markets���Gikomba, Githurai and Marigiti���will show you what difference a wheelbarrow can make to a fruits��� hawker. The wheelbarrow is what many youth are using to hawk their wares. Many a youth in the ghetto, hoping to enter into the business of selling water, cannot because they simply can���t raise 20,000 shillings. Ruto then comes along and gives you a push cart. Between��kazi mtaani��and wage labor of unguaranteed 400 shillings, which would you rather have? What has President Uhuru���s government and those politicians criticizing Ruto offered the youth? Nothing. They should keep quiet. I���ll be voting Ruto very early in the morning and pushing his agenda between now and 2022.���
Muigai, a friend from Fly Over, which is 50 kilometers from Nairobi and on the Nairobi-Nakuru highway, returned to the country just after the 2017 double presidential elections. Despite being armed with a college degree from a prestigious university, he has yet to find work. He was full of expectations; at 24 years of age, he believed the world was his oyster. But every single day, he sees his word crumbling before him.
His relatives encouraged him to come back home because they believed that Uhuru Kenyatta would create jobs for the youth, especially Kikuyu youth. ���Since returning home, I���ve seen my family���s increasing disenchantment with President Uhuru Kenyatta,��� said Muigai.
���At Soko Mjinga Market, the wheelbarrow is king, and they dare criticize Ruto? What has Uhuru himself offered other than destroying our businesses?��� asked Muigai���s angry maternal uncle. ���The Building the Bridges Initiative? They may say all they want about Ruto, that���s the person we���ll be voting for and we cannot wait to do it. The Kenyatta family will know we���re no longer their slaves.���
The underdog narrative
When Ruto teamed up with Uhuru in 2013 to form the Jubilee coalition, he wore shirts emblazoned with the president���s name. In April 2011, Mama Ngina Kenyatta, at Gatundu Grounds at the Kenyatta family���s ancestral home in Kiambu County, lay hands on her son Uhuru and his International Criminal Court (ICC) co-accused William Ruto after stating: ���I���m sure Uhuru and Ruto will go to The Hague and come back so that we can proceed with nation building.���
Ruto had already set his eyes on the prize: the presidency. He was supposedly the smarter one of Jubilee���s so-called ���dynamic duo��� who reeled off ���facts and figures��� at political rallies as he rode on Uhuru���s back, family name, and deep-state connections to the State House. For a man who was tried at the ICC for crimes against humanity, allegedly for his role in the 2007/8 post-election violence against the Gikuyu��walala hoi��of Rift Valley region, he has successfully circumvented the established Gikuyu elite gatekeepers since 2013, and won the hearts and minds of a significant cross-section of the Gikuyu rank and file.
���I���m from Ishaweri, in Gatundu and I can tell you, there���s nothing to report home about the president coming from our midst,��� said Peterson Njuguna. ���The Gatundu youth spend their time drinking illicit liquor, loitering and engaging in petty crime. In Gatundu, poverty glares you in the face. Why? The president cares less about them. He doesn���t know who they are, he���s least bothered whether they drink themselves to death or not, and here he and his minions are criticizing Ruto who dares to give the youth some equipment.
���The Kenyatta family is so mean, they never mix with anyone, leave alone offering any kind of help or hope. But they will be quick to rubbish anyone who seemingly steps in to do something. So what if Ruto is doing it for politics? What has Uhuru himself done for politics? I���ve heard some Kenyans ask: how many wheelbarrows can you give people? Here is a government that promised the youth jobs and more jobs under their watch. Instead what happened? They have systematically presided over the destruction of the economy, so that they can offer slashers to graduates and President Uhuru loyalists have the temerity to talk about Ruto���s symbolism. Uhuru should just go home and leave us alone. We can���t wait for him to bring along the BBI, that���s the day he���ll know the fury of an awakened lot.���
Ruto���s love for his hustler tag dovetails with his ���chicken-seller-who-became-president��� fib. With every media appearance featuring a jua kali artisan, a wheelbarrow, or an evangelical clergyman, his public image is that of a God-chosen wretched of the earth���s presidential candidate in 2022.
An evangelical group of Christians in Nairobi who have already aligned themselves with Ruto���s campaign told us that the deputy president is indeed ���a fearful man of God and God is prepping him to take over the reins of power after Uhuru Kenyatta. His wife (Rachel) is a prayerful woman and they have even erected an altar of the Lord in their house, so they wake up at night to fervently pray and commune with God.���
The group reminded us that Ruto has been very helpful to churches, contributing to their expansion and growth. The group did not seem to be bothered by the source of the money: ���It is not for us to judge, the temple of the Lord is for all of us���the righteous and the wicked. At the end of the day, it���s God to judge. There are people who talk a lot, yet we���ve never seen what they have done for the house of God.���
The deputy president casts himself as the rich and powerful politician who rose from selling chicken to the dizzy heights of the presidency. His grass-to-grace underdog narrative, his ���humble��� birth vis-��-vis his rivals��� ���privilege���, and his difficult childhood encapsulate the identity, dreams and aspirations of millions of unemployed youth. Like Donald Trump in 2016, he is using the rhetoric of the ���outsider��� who has come to save an underclass trampled on by the undeserving upper class.
Ruto has set the political tone of the 2022 presidential election; the rest are merely reacting to it. Ruto���s presidential campaign has seized on something that resonates with many, especially the have-nots in difficult economic times. The ���hustler���s narrative��� serves Ruto���s campaign as a moral allegory for anyone who loves a good underdog story.
The narrative has also cast Ruto as the would-be savior of the Kenyan have-nots, someone who feels and knows their suffering. He is the God-fearing, battle-ready general, leading the war against the Raila Odinga-aided Kenyatta family political gimmicks. It sets the hungry underclass against the Uhuru-Raila attempts to monopolize Kenya���s state power and economy through the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).
No one exemplifies the success of this hustler narrative than the Ngara Market traders, who specialize in second-hand (mitumba) clothes in downtown Nairobi. When we paid them a visit on one sunny Saturday afternoon, we found them in the middle of a heated argument about Ruto���s brand of politics.
���My wife was teacher in a private school until a few weeks ago,��� said one trader. ���Then one morning, the school proprietor sent her an email telling her he had converted the school premises into exhibition stalls. That was it. My wife was reduced to a hawker, peddling avocados on a wheelbarrow.
���We cannot wait for Uhuru and Baba (Raila Odinga) to bring on the BBI referendum. They���ve been telling us Ruto is the government thief. Is he the one who stole COVID-19 money?��� asked one of the traders. ���If Ruto is a thief, it is because they have been stealing together with Uhuru.���
Said Kipkemei Bunei, ���Ruto is a thief who has been giving back (to the society). What have the other thieves been doing?���
Ruto���s campaign infantilizes the 2022 presidential debate by deflecting adult conversations that would scrutinize his long political career since he burst into the national limelight in 1990s. He tells the rags-to-riches chicken seller-hustler story to stoke the youth���s anger against the very government he is still a part of, but which is now being propped up by Raila Odinga and his ODM party. The narrative flattens the complex histories of political families and individuals���an erasure ably aided by Raila���s support of the incompetent Jubilee government.��The hustlers��� rallying call rattles his competitors and rouses his supporters. He only needs to mention the word ���dynasty��� to communicate who his political enemies are.
���Ruto has won the war of narratives,��� said Gakuo Munene, who has openly stated he will support the deputy president in his presidential bid for 2022.
The electoral strategy is clear: set the majority without known surnames against the minority who have widely recognized surnames because their fathers were cabinet ministers, vice presidents, or even president. And the ���hustlers��� are spoilt for choice.
Ruto might have belatedly discovered the great socio-economic divide between the��walala-hoi��and the��walala-hai��in Kenya.��However, to merely acknowledge that such a deep rift exists, to crudely name it as ���hustler versus dynasties���, and to constantly remind the��walala-hoi��of their suffering is not to wage a class struggle. As Thandika Mkandawire, citing Karl Marx, observed, ���The existence of class may portend class struggles, but it does not automatically trigger them. It is not enough that classes exist in themselves, they must also be for themselves.���
Ruto���s political campaign is not a class struggle; it is a struggle for power���for himself. He is organizing and mobilizing his political base the same way the political sons of the late Daniel arap Moi organized their politics���through transactional methods that exploited human need, greed, and ambitions for power. Despite its class warfare undertones, Ruto���s acerbic political rhetoric is not a rallying call to the wretched of the earth to take on their oppressors or to organize for such a war.
Baronial politics
Like Francis Atwoli, the bejeweled trade unionist-turned-political kingmaker, who has taken to summoning the rich and powerful to his Kitengela home, Ruto also summons a few hand-picked hoi polloi to his palatial homes in Karen and Sugoi. Both Ruto and Atwoli perform acts that clearly show what power asymmetry is all about, who is the host and who is the guest, who pays the piper and who calls the tune, even though they have divergent political projects.
So, the jua kali artisans or the delegation of Christian clergy troop to Ruto���s official residence in Karen or Sugoi not as the deputy president���s equals, but as carefully selected guests with a prescribed role to play in Ruto���s political script. It has the hallmarks of what former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga calls ���baronial politics.��� Ruto has yet to discover progressive democratic politics. His ���hustlers��� are guests, not equals, who are summoned for PR stunts. Their images are exploited for whatever legitimacy a paid-for and stage-managed association with a jua kali artisan or a Christian pastor can lend his presidential bid.
True to script, the guests or delegates are paraded for the cameras next to wheelbarrows or beauty salon equipment as any lucky winner of a sports betting lottery would be. It sends a message to the��walala-hoi��to keep betting on Ruto���s leadership because that holds a lottery ticket that might just win big in the next grand draw if they elect him.
Ruto seeks to distinguish himself from his nemeses by performing and publicizing such acts. As the Elgeyo Marakwet Senator, Kipchumba Murkomen���s tweets suggest, such events show that Ruto, unlike Raila and Uhuru, is both rich and generous, a politician who gives motorcycles and car-washing machines to unemployed youth. However, his tweets say little about why thousands of hard working youth who desire to own small or medium-sized businesses cannot afford the start-up capital needed for such items, or why so many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have shut down since the Jubilee Party took control of the government.
Ruto���s hustler narrative may tug at the heartstrings of the millions who are poor and unemployed, but it���s simply a pithy campaign phrase that is ideologically as empty as the Building Bridges Initiative���a promise of a qualitative change in living conditions that will not materialize because there is no qualitative change in the political leadership.
Ruto may now be viewed as being against the Kenyatta family���s political and financial interests, but he���s not yet a pro-democracy and pro-suffering citizens��� politician. He may successfully stoke and channel the anger of hungry citizens against the political elites, but there is no evidence yet that he���s organizing along existing class cleavages, awakening the consciousness of the exploited about the nature and identity of their exploiters, or forming alliances with autonomous organizations of exploited classes.
For the first time in decades, Kenya���s middle class progressives���the numerically small and tenacious civil society groups, which have always punched above their weight���seem to have been totally eclipsed by Ruto���s middle class rabble-rousers. Kenya���s progressive middle class may still have a credible story to tell on democracy, constitutionalism, and the strengthening of devolution, but it seemingly has no candidate to stand with in the 2022 presidential election.
November 5, 2020
A cycle of diminishing expectations
In June 2019, Judge Raymond Zondo, who currently leads a public commission into state corruption in South Africa, swears in Deputy President David Mabuza, himself suspected of corruption, as the country���s acting president. Image via GCIS on Flickr CC.
South Africa is finally cracking down on corrupt politicians after years of inertia amid weekly revelations about the depravity and scale of corruption through the Zondo Commission (led by the country���s current deputy chief judge) into ���state capture��� during former President Jacob Zuma���s tenure (2009-2018). ���State capture��� refers to the handing over of the levers of the economy and policymaking to private interests, in this case the Guptas, a powerful Indian business clan.
Fighting enemies in his own party, President Cyril Ramaphosa is trying to portray recent arrests of political figures, alleged to have profited from state capture, as a win for his stuttering government. But arrests alone do not offer a way forward for South Africa, given the scale of the economic and political crisis the country is facing. The South African government is set on implementing and selling in the name of anticorruption a plan of harsh austerity that will escalate an already brewing social crisis. The country urgently needs more than arrests if the problem of corruption is going to be seriously addressed.
Accountability at last
The Zondo Commission was launched in August of 2018; two years and R700 million later it finally is leading to arrests. The grumblings over the slow pace of justice���despite promises from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), a variant of the FBI, and the government���had been increasing before the first arrests for state capture were announced at the end of September. The commission has revealed a staggering network of corruption that extended far beyond the Guptas.
New arrests of corrupt officials seem to occur on a weekly basis as prosecutors close in on some of the country���s leading politicians, including African National Congress (ANC) secretary-general Ace Magashule, widely seen as the leader of the pro-Zuma faction within the party. Zuma himself has been feeling the heat and using all means at his disposal to portray himself as the victim and avoid appearing before the commission. His most prominent failson, Duduzane���a key Gupta aide���has also been conducting an aggressive PR campaign, calling himself an ���accomplished businessman,��� and doing interviews talking about his and his father���s good deeds.
The corruption extends to other spheres, including the religious. Evangelical Christianity is widely practiced in South Africa and now its crooked pastors are no longer safe. Self-proclaimed ���Prophet��� Shepard Bushiri, for example, was arrested along with his wife and charged with fraud and money laundering. Also known as ���Papa��� and ���Major One,��� Bushiri is a politically connected, smooth-talking hustler, who is arguably the country���s most popular snake oil salesmen���claiming to cure HIV and to be able to walk on air. His arrest comes despite Bushiri prophesizing that 2020 would be a great year.
While the wheels of justice are finally turning in South Africa, the Guptas are on to bigger and better things after making off with a substantial proportion of South Africa���s GDP. They are currently invested in building gigantic model cities for hundreds of millions of dollars in Uzbekistan.
Economic catastrophe
Like almost everywhere else in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has exponentially worsened every existing problem, from unemployment to the power of organized crime. Seven months after the country locked down, the impact on South Africa���s economy was described as unprecedented: ���We only see these sorts of changes and economic shocks as a result of civil war.��� The country���s GDP contracted by 16.4 percent over the second quarter of 2020. South Africa was in terrible shape before the pandemic hit, recording recessions in 2018 and 2019, and three consecutive quarters of declining GDP. Unemployment was already endemic, and the latest figures suggest South Africa permanently lost 2.8 million jobs by June 2020; the expanded unemployment rate is now close to 50 percent and youth unemployment could be more than 70 percent.
Simply put, the South African government implemented one of the harshest lockdowns in response to COVID-19, but failed to provide adequate social provision and economic support. It promised stimulus but never really delivered. It launched a monthly R350 (about USD 20) emergency grant, reaching around 4.4 million South Africans, but this is woefully inadequate as food prices are soaring. The grant has been extended until the end of the year, albeit with some resistance from the Treasury. The government has also promised a massive public works program to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The government���s original stimulus plan of R500 billion ($30 billion) seemed promising, but turned out to be more PR spin than reality. R200 billion of the earmarked funds was set aside as loan guarantees to banks which elected not to lend, and by the end of August the banks had only lent out R14.5 billion. Furthermore, of the Treasury���s claimed R122.4 billion allocation toward the government���s COVID-19 response, R109-billion was financed through budget cuts.
Despite the necessity of a massive stimulus plan, the Treasury along with Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, when not posting apocalyptic pictures of his attempts at cooking on social media, is trying to implement a harsh austerity agenda in the name of reducing rapidly increasing debt.
While there is a bailout of R10.5 billion for the failed national carrier South African Airways in Mboweni���s medium term budget policy statement delivered on October 28, there is harsh austerity for everyone else: higher education has been slashed by R1.13 billion, transport by R681 million and the health budget by R694 million. One would have thought that addressing the escalating social crisis in this country would be the priority of government, but instead there are extreme cuts amounting to more than R300 billion over the next three years.
Mboweni and the Treasury are facing substantial resistance from other members of the government and such harsh austerity flies in the face of the President���s rhetoric about the need for a social pact. The ANC���s internal policy for more than a decade has been pushing for such a pact, in which all forces in South Africa join together and make sacrifices for the good of the nation. However, given the current economic catastrophe and the declining power of organized labor, a real social pact seems almost utopian. Despite pleas for unity to fight the pandemic and given the level of open fratricidal strife within the ANC, it is hard to take these proposals seriously. And the country as a whole is only slightly less divided than the party.
The moralization of everything
Given that the government seems to lack the capacity to deliver for the poor, despite all the rhetoric about historic transformations, and has so far failed in its economic and social response to the pandemic, all that is on offer is the thrill of seeing some of the bad guys go down for the mess that South Africa finds itself in. I will celebrate it as much as the next person, but a few arrests do not translate into real change.
Popular analysis of South Africa is plagued by endemic moralism; everything is cast into great stories of redemption and return to the heroic legacy of the liberation struggle and the popular movements of the 1980s that are betrayed by the current crop of leaders. This obsessive moralism not only makes it harder to actually understand what is going on in the country, but also reflects an increasingly desperate climate in which people conjure some mythological savior, rather than actual political mobilization, to deliver real change.
South African political writing is also hamstrung by its constant need to self-consciously reproduce a national mythology through endless open letters from elders and increasingly desperate calls for leadership as the panacea to the nation���s woes. Unable to offer solutions to the country���s problems, what is left of the intelligentsia resorts to sentimental calls to reclaim the spirit of past struggle. On the left there is a misguided tendency to reduce corruption to simply a normal function of capitalism���one that requires neither specific political or policy response, nor acknowledgment that corruption has been tied to state formation since British imperialist robber barons lusted over the gold reserves of the Witwatersrand. There are even those that argue that Zuma and the Guptas, along with allied black capitalists, were targeted by white monopoly capital, repeating the spin that Zuma and company were victimized because they were fighting for radical economic transformation for the black majority. Currently there appears to be no political force, either in the trade unions or among opposition parties and social movements, capable of enacting political costs on the ANC that will really hold it to account. In some parts of the country���such as the Eastern Cape province, where people suffer the worst impacts of misgovernance���the ANC faces little to no opposition.
Meanwhile the daily news is full of reports related to the friends and family of leading ANC politicians getting rich off the current public health crisis. Two-thirds of all COVID-19-related contracts for protective equipment and other vital goods (totaling R15.6 billion) are being probed by the Special Investigative Unit. Already, 658 dodgy contracts worth some R5.08 billion have been identified. This feeding frenzy has taken place while the country���s economy is collapsing and nearly 20,000 people have died.
In this depressing climate, any glimmer of hope rests with unelected officials of the judiciary ruling in the right way. The South African judiciary has played a generally positive role in the post-apartheid era, but too often the courts become the first course of action, and political battles are outsourced to lawyers. Legal victories, while not an obstacle to movement-building, cannot replace the difficult task of building power.
Systemic corruption
Clearly systemic corruption requires more than platitudes about leadership and getting rid of the bad apples. It is easy enough to wax lyrical about ethics, but it is a challenge to formulate effective political responses. As we have seen in Brazil and elsewhere, reducing the question of anticorruption merely to prosecuting the corrupt, as cathartic as it is, can have unintended consequences and in some cases make things worse. Corruption cannot simply be solved through technical fixes and increasing ���accountability��� by locking up the villains.
In South Africa, corruption is intimately tied to declining state capacity, due to levels of incompetence and broken systems. The state cannot deliver basic services in this environment and, so, the incentive to channel resources for personal benefit increases. As political scientist Ryan Brunette points out, the effects of corruption in South Africa mean that�� ���Life-giving services of water, sanitation, and healthcare, economy-driving provision of electricity, transportation, and education��� are in many places collapsed or on the brink���. Yet, the effects of systemic corruption extend beyond declining state capacity and transactional politics as Brunette argues: ���The central fact of contemporary South African politics is the emergence within it of a nationwide and mass-based patronage system,��� which is mobilized through claims to the common interest.
Systemic corruption creates a cycle of diminishing expectations and the moral outrage to stories of venality declines the more people grow accustomed to it. The less people expect from the state, the easier it is to steal from it and the incentive to actually deliver basic services declines. While in some cases corruption is based on an illicit social compact in which services are delivered with the expectation that some of the amount budgeted for them will be stolen, this is not what we are seeing in South Africa. Billions have been spent on ambitious infrastructure projects that have come to nothing. Thus, it has become increasingly difficult to argue for this type of intervention given that a significant proportion of allocated funding is likely to channeled into the pockets of corrupt officials, their friends and family.
The lack of state capacity and the declining levels of trust in the ability of government to deliver, means anticorruption is increasingly associated with cracking down on wasteful spending and implementing austerity. If the money is going to be stolen what is the point of making the case for state intervention?�� Yet, South Africa and its people simply cannot afford anything less than massive state intervention to hold off social collapse. Arresting villains alone will not put food on the table of the millions currently going hungry. Furthermore, graft and patronage mechanisms are so widespread that people are willing to kill to gain access to even the lowest rung of the ANC and the rewards that come with it. With devastating levels of unemployment, the fight over these positions will likely only intensify as jobs become a matter of life and death.
Credible anticorruption must be accompanied by programs of antipatronage and redistribution, along with radical reforms of public administration. This can only come about through mass political mobilization and struggle. Though there have been positive signs in recent trade union mobilizations���calling for effective public administration and prosecutions, along with universal basic income, a universal health care system, and land reform���the country remains the hostage of weak and compromised political opposition and factional offshoots of the ANC.
The Jacinda Ardern model
Image credit the Commonwealth Secretariat on Flickr CC.
Ever since first coming to power in 2017, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been lauded around the world as a refreshingly empathetic and competent contrast to the increasingly right-wing and often inept leadership seen in countries including the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and India. The African continent has been no exception to ���Jacindamania,��� with people in Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and more expressing their admiration for Ardern and their desire for a similar leader.
When she won a second term in mid-October on the back of a landslide victory for her center-left Labor Party, for example, Zimbabwean opposition leader Nelson Chamisa tweeted congratulations. Chamisa also used the opportunity to unfavorably contrast Zimbabwe���s election infrastructure (���humbling and refreshing to see others holding clean, free, and fair elections���), though some wished to remind him that he was no Ardern: ���at least they lead from the forefront and are very strategic, not just on Twitter writing bible verses!��� Elsewhere on social media, some South Africans compared her gender and youthfulness to their revolving door of old, underwhelming leaders. Their Nigerian counterparts, in the midst of a national strike against police brutality, concurred: ���Nigeria needs a President like Jacinda Ardern. Young, passionate, hardworking consistent and a listener…��� (It helped when one of her party���s candidates, Terisa Ngobi, partly of Samoan descent and married to a Ugandan immigrant, defeated a white South African running in ��taki, near the capital Wellington, for the far-right New Conservative party. Martin Flauenstein, who finished fifth out of eight candidates, claimed to be an ���apartheid survivor,��� only to push for ���reduced��� immigration and to criminalize abortion. For this, he was thoroughly mocked online by South Africans back home.)
But the international hype around Ardern often obscures what it is she represents, and her actual record to date. While there is no doubt that Ardern is a charismatic and effective leader, she has yet to deliver on her promise to lead a truly transformational government.
Ardern���s first term in office was largely defined by multiple unprecedented crises and she rightly deserves significant praise for her response to them. She has demonstrated calm, compassionate, and effective leadership in steering the country through the white supremacist massacre in Christchurch, the deadly volcanic eruption at Whakaari, and now COVID-19. Her response to the Christchurch massacre and the Whakaari eruption prompted journalist Toby Manhire to describe Ardern as bringing ���an empathy, steel and clarity that in the most appalling circumstances brought New Zealanders together and inspired people the world over.��� Arden has brought the same approach to the COVID-19 response, where her government���s clear communication and swift and decisive action has resulted in one of the most effective responses in the world.
Yet, despite Ardern���s effective leadership and some scattered positive changes���including tightening the country���s gun laws, increasing New Zealand���s refugee quota, investing a record amount in mental health, and decriminalizing abortion���she has largely failed to live up to her own progressive rhetoric and vision for the country. After coming to power in 2017, Ardern promised a ���government of transformation��� that would ���lift up those who have been forgotten or neglected��� and ���build a truly prosperous nation and a fair society.��� Instead, across a range of areas the reality of her government���s action has often been limited and underwhelming.
On climate change, Ardern described it in 2017 as her ���generation���s nuclear-free moment.��� And yet while her government banned new offshore oil and gas exploration permits and passed the Zero Carbon Act setting a target of net zero emissions by 2050, existing exploration permits remain valid and the act lacks enforcement mechanisms. Moreover, there is no systematic approach to overhauling different sectors of society to address emissions, particularly in transport and agriculture, and to create a green economy. On voting rights, Ardern���s government partially undid the previous National Party government���s ban on prisoner voting. But in only restoring voting rights for prisoners with sentences of three years or less, the government ensured that most prisoners remain disenfranchised. On welfare, the government made some improvements, including introducing a small increase to benefits���but well below the amount recommended by a working group the government had convened, and ignoring, thus far, the majority of the working group���s other recommendations. On tax reform, despite proposing a modest change to the top tax rate, Ardern has repeatedly ruled out a capital gains tax (to tax the sale of assets) and more recently ruled out a wealth tax proposed by the left-wing Greens. On drug reform, while the government made changes to improve access to medical marijuana, the legalization of recreational use was put to a referendum. Ardern then refused to use her political capital to advocate for legalization or say how she would vote in the referendum, only revealing she voted in favor of legalization after results were announced and the public had narrowly voted against it.
If people across the African continent want nice, competent, centrism then Ardern is certainly a leader to emulate. But if they want truly progressive change then it remains to be seen whether she will provide a compelling example to follow. While Ardern tinkers, the climate crisis worsens, inequality increases, housing becomes ever more unaffordable, and poverty and homelessness persist at alarming levels.
Following the recent election, Labor���s former coalition partner and center-right populists New Zealand First (generally regarded as a handbrake on progress during Ardern���s first term) are now gone from government and parliament and Ardern arguably has more political capital than ever. The resounding victory for the left in New Zealand, with the Labor Party and the Greens combined winning over 70 seats in the 120-seat parliament, means there are now no excuses for Ardern not to enact a coherent transformational progressive agenda.
The next three years will ultimately show whether Ardern has the political will and imagination to do so, but so far she has given little indication that her second term will be significantly different from her first. All we are left with then is centrist tinkering and the seemingly endless accumulation of political capital without ever using it.
November 4, 2020
The multiple meanings of #EndSARS
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
How should we read the mounting disenchantment that produced the conditions that made #EndSARS an agonizing reality? One possible answer is to read the multiple signs left in the wake of the protests, and try to decipher the semiotic codes invested in them���but not before moving beyond the fact that the police apparatus is the most brutal expression of the violence of the Nigerian postcolonial state. As I have argued elsewhere, the Nigerian police exist as a self-contradictory institution that misreads the pragmatics of the friendliness it aspires to.
Although hashtags are generally performative and rhetorical, three levels of significations may be discerned in the #EndSARS protests. These include meanings in visual, rhetorical, and symbolic domains. These cohere around the idea of #EndSARS as a movement consolidating the prior activist labors of civil society in Nigeria, that is if we are to eschew any��ahistorical zeal that misrecognizes past struggles.
The visual field emerges, for example, in a banner that reads: ���to be modern is not a crime.��� Together with those of many other posters and banners, this message welcomes the gaze both on smartphone screens and at actual protest locations���from Lekki to many other places in Nigeria and around the world. The banner aptly summarizes the generating impulses of the #EndSARS protest, namely the layers of discursive contestations around the meanings and contradictions of both the digitally modern subject and the digital media objects that mark their global subjectivities.
At the heart of the protests, therefore, are the social and political signs that become entangled with the uses and perceived abuses of digital technologies. Media anthropologists, such as Richard Vokes and Katrien Pype, have reminded us that the social meanings as well as the many usages of media objects are dialectically related to experiences of daily routine. Everyday life enacts social spaces and relations in which media objects accrue meanings. In this understanding, objects, such as the Internet and the smartphone, play important roles in the constructions of persons, and the understanding of personal and collective histories. In the case of Nigeria,��the fact that media objects are implicated in the resistance politics of #EndSARS is indicative of how technologies, such as the Internet and laptops, have some telling resonances in relation to the Nigerian youth.
The specific vernaculars of these digital technologies are most legible in the essentialist image of the Nigerian Prince; himself, a media construction in the global cultural imagination. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), recently disbanded, comes into the framework of this social circulation of technologies, as Internet fraudsters or ���Yahoo boys��� use ill-gotten money to buy cars, laptops, and other signifiers of materialism. As SARS targeted anyone who appeared to be richer than they should be, or who carried a laptop or iPhone, the resistance to its activities was inevitable.
#EndSARS may then be read in this context as a resistance to the political constructions of global media objects whose possession is twistedly encountered by the materialist as a precondition for modernity. To resist SARS is to push back against state forces that make being modern a crime. That said, even as several banners read ���#iPhone, Laptops, styled Hair and Living Fresh isn’t a Crime,��� we know that #EndSARS transcends the ideological misreading of this tiny section of the dissident youth who equate laptops and iPhones with modernity.
But there also exists a rhetorical dimension to the meanings of #EndSARS, which is most visible in the Yoru��ba�� expression S��r�� s��k��. #S��r�� s��k�� is the imperative to speak loudly, but that translation doesn’t capture the loaded cultural meanings of its deployments in the context of #EndSARS, where it manifests as the linguistic urging to speak up against the brutality and coercive expressions of state power that police and policing in Nigeria symbolizes. When a protester avows that ���I can dress the way I want,��� they not only speak up against the impositions of police brutality, but also express disaffection with the larger hegemonic structures of culture that constrain their agency and power of self-determination. #S��r�� s��k�� becomes understood as the performative displacement of uncritical silence, as a gerontocratic political elite that expects subservience from the young is subjected to the explosive voices of a demographic that potentially wields enormous political power, but lies in perilous proximity to irrelevance. Until now, perhaps.
As you may have already guessed, these last connotations already gesture at the symbolic implications of #EndSARS, as the movement rightly becomes synonymous with the resistance against bad governance and the established corrupt order in a country whose wealth remains an unchanging potential, and whose citizens bear the brunt of a thieving political class that normalizes institutional brigandage.
Perhaps, the most striking image of #EndSARS is the morbid theater of protesters singing the Nigerian national anthem in the pitch darkness���allegedly orchestrated by state agents after a power cut and the removal of CCTV cameras. Naturally, to sing the anthem should have evoked national pride and signaled how nations are produced through such performances of mythologies. Yet, to do so while being shot at and killed by the Nigerian military establishment meant for those who are now missing and/or dead because of the Lekki event, the anthem was a ritual elegy of self-immolation. They sang a nation-state that denied their rights of protest and existence, that extinguished their rights to have rights at all.
The three signifying fields collide in their indictment of the Nigerian state. Visually, the darkness of Lekki reminds us of the blackness many will still have to confront both infrastructurally and culturally, while the needless contestations around whether what happened at the toll gate was a ���massacre,��� ���killings,��� or ���genocide��� rhetorically perform the uncertainties of life in a country in which human lives are sometimes precariously unnumbered, uncountable and unvalued. The tragedy of it all is that both are reiterations of the overall symbolism of #EndSARS���the Nigerian human is a tree that falls in a forest and nothing makes a sound. Again, until now.
Beyond the Nobel Peace Prize
Wangari Maathai mural in San Francisco. Image credit Phil Dokas via Flickr CC.
In 2004, when Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her ���contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace,��� I was in my final year of primary school. Until then, I had largely grown up ignorant about her work. Our history books only mentioned the heroes of pre-independent Kenya, and even then, the contribution of women went largely unrecorded. However, when Maathai won the prize, the magnitude of her life began to filter into my education: here was the first African woman to win a Nobel.
But Maathai was more than an environmental activist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She was also a human being who encountered immense struggles in her personal and professional life, an intellectual who developed a rich scholarship on leadership, citizenship, and women���s empowerment. Two new publications invite readers to consider Maathai���s life beyond the Nobel Peace Prize and the environmental activism for which she is best known: Tabitha Kanogo���s Wangari Maathai and Besi Brillian Muhonja���s Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai.
Kanogo���s Wangari Maathai is a short biography that focuses on different facets of Maathai���s personal and professional life. Kanogo reminds us of Maathai���s beginnings, from her early educational years in Ihithe Primary School, to the corridors of Mount St. Scholastica College, where she earned her first degree. The biography highlights the early achievements that decorated Maathai���s life. The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD. The first female professor and head of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi. She was a woman of many firsts, a fact that Kanogo sums up by noting that Maathai ���was peerless, so she had to set standards for herself.���
Kanogo also writes about the struggles that Maathai faced in her life, particularly the attacks on her womanhood and her activism. Maathai underwent a bitter divorce trial and faced harassment from the Kenyan government. One of her most well-known run-ins with the government was during a 1989 protest against the government���s plan to erect a 60-storey building in Uhuru Park, one of the only green spaces in the city. She sought both international and local support to stall the project, efforts that led to her castigation by political leaders. She was even vilified by the premier women���s organization of the time, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake, which censured her to ���respect men and be quiet.���
While Kanogo provides a concise history of Maathai���s struggles and triumphs, Muhonja pulls back the veil on Maathai the scholar. She challenges the reader to look beyond the environmental activism and to acknowledge Maathai the ���scholar and a critical thinker.��� Muhonja sums up Maathai���s ideas and ideals using the concept of radical utu���a philosophy and practice in which individuals and communities exercise ���equity and honor for the humanity of others and for their environments.��� Muhonja writes that Maathai���s scholarship pushed for the adoption of radical utu, a consciousness that she personally embodied in her approaches to environmental activism, women���s rights, citizenship, and leadership.
Muhonja writes that ���Maathai suggested that human beings should be in a constant quest for knowledge about their environments in order to manage it justly and sustainably and also so that they can fully access their own humanness.��� On women���s empowerment, radical utu is manifested through seeing women as humans first before focusing on their womanhood. Radical utu also gives room for the simultaneous use of the female body and female identities in political struggle. On citizenship and leadership, Muhonja notes how Maathai���s scholarship calls for active citizenship and innovative, consultative, service-based leadership. This model subsequently leads to an utu-centered democratic space characterized by peace, security, equitable distribution of resources, and acceptance of ethnic and national identities.
Maathai did not just advance radical utu; she modeled it, for example, by leading communities in ecological renewal through the planting of millions of trees, and fighting alongside mothers in Kenya whose children were detained by the government. Throughout her life, Maathai embodied a conscientious humanity that looked out ���for the general good of the world.���
Seeing Maathai beyond the Nobel Peace Prize is seeing the radical utu of Maathai���s life. Read together, these two books urge one to move beyond a passive admiration of Maathai���s life into an active engagement with the principles that moved her to fight for environmental protection, women���s empowerment, and democracy. The call of Maathai���s radical utu is the call on all of us to become ���agents of change toward democratic spaces and sustainable development.���
In the face of today���s struggles, from the precarity of democracy and police brutality to the debasement of Black life, Maathai���s radical utu provides impetus for a relentless activism that considers the humanity of others and that exercises respect and honor for their environments.
November 3, 2020
Nigeria���s movement against brutality and poverty
Protesters at the #endSARS protest in Lagos, Nigeria. Image credit Kaizenify via Wikimedia Commons.
The #EndSARS protest represents an unprecedented point in the history of popular struggles in Nigeria. I am happy to be alive to witness this period. I had thought Nigeria was incapable of producing such inspiring, massive resistance. We have never seen anything like this before in the history of Nigeria. No other struggle brought out tens of thousands of people in several cities across all the geo-political regions of the country, defying the guns, risking their freedom and life, declaring they are ready to die for freedom and for future generations.
Young people had been written off as preoccupied with the primitive accumulation of wealth. Yet, with the outbreak of the #EndSARS movement, divisions along ethnicity and religion have largely disappeared. The protests have taken a national character, involving employed youths as well as the large army of the unemployed, in virtually all states of the federation. The movement has fulfilled the long-held understanding that the outbreak of social movements and revolts cannot be mathematically calculated. If anyone had predicted that Nigeria would move at such a scale 10 years ago, such a person would have been ignored as indulging in illusory thinking.
What started as a protest against police brutality evolved quickly into protests to end all forms of impunity and deprivation. Placards held by the protesters included #end unemployment, #end commercialization of education, #end hunger, #end lack of free medical care, #end bad roads, #end hunger, #end fuel price increase, #end increase in electricity tariff, and so on. Above all, the movement began to acquire a political character as the battle cry of the protesters included #Buhari (the head of the central government) must go!
In the past, anti-military dictatorship struggles involved mass protests, but in terms of the number of people mobilized on the streets, those struggles now pale into insignificance. The struggles against military dictatorship tested the will and conviction of relatively few protesters. Aided by the influence of social media, the spread and numbers of protesters involved in the #EndSARS movement have announced a new and glorious phase in mass struggles in Nigeria.
The nature of the struggle is perhaps responsible for the determination of both the federal and state governments to crush it. Initial measures employed by the state included infiltrating the protesters via��agent provocateurs,��who joined the protesters in demonstrations only to attack those on the street with dangerous weapons, burning the vehicles being used for the campaigns and inflicting fatal injuries on protesters. Vehicles belonging to security agencies were sighted in video clips, either dropping off heavily armed thugs or picking them up after protesters had been attacked.
The peak of the vicious attacks on the protesters was the Lekki Massacre of October 20 when soldiers, under the cover of darkness, opened fire on the peaceful protesters. Protesters had been gathering at Lekki Toll gate on a daily basis without a break since early in the month. The numbers of people killed and injured is still undetermined, but media reports have it that not less than 12 peaceful protesters were killed in cold blood.
What has now become known as the ���Lekki Massacre��� enraged the public. Virtually anything that represents the authority of government has been targeted. Shops, banks, houses, and buildings representing the business face of leaders of the ruling party, the All Progressive Congress (APC) and the head of the Lagos State government, were equally attacked and set on fire. Prisoners were set free in many prisons across the country. Party headquarters of the ruling party were attacked. Traditional rulers known to be close to the Lagos State government were not spared by the protesters.
In a palace of a traditional ruler of Lagos, demonstrators raided the palace and left with bags of rice, which were allegedly meant for distribution to ordinary people as part of the COVID-19 palliatives (a term used in Nigeria to describe the relief and support provided by the state). The poverty across Nigeria also saw soldiers who had been sent to restore order allegedly also helping themselves to bags of rice from the palace of the traditional ruler. Poverty thus united the soldiers, the unemployed, and the poor. However, prior to the Lekki Massacre, the protestors rejected food and water sent to them by a notorious political figure in Lagos who is perceived to be an agent of the state government. The rage of the people following the Lekki Massacre was such that the protesters in some states of the federation defied the curfew declared by authorities. The protests continued unabated.
The Lekki Massacre, as well as the killings of protesters in other states, highlights the question whether ordinary people who were protesting are slaves without rights or citizens who have the right to protest. The anger of poor people has been fueled by the refusal of President Buhari to address the nation on the killings. When he made a presidential speech on October 22, he expressed no regret for the Lekki Massacre and the killings in other states. The speech was widely perceived as insensitive. It added to the fury among the masses. Despite social media and video footage on the attack in Lekki, the official position of government is that there were no killings.
The federal government has explanations to make. Under Section 217 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the military has no role to play in the civil disobedience that was being carried out by peaceful protesters. The only role of the military is to defend the territorial integrity of Nigeria against external aggressors. Peaceful protesters are not external aggressors. The sacredness of life guaranteed under section 33 of the Constitution has also been violated. Currently, it is estimated that about 60 people were killed during almost three weeks of peaceful protests while many more have suffered fatal injuries. In one city in Oyo State, in Ogbomoso, Southwestern Nigeria, four peaceful protesters were killed by security agents on�� October 11���it is important to name them, Jimoh Isiaq (20), Ganiyu Moshood (22), Taiwo Adeoye (25), and Pelumi Olatunji (15).
Despite the largescale killings, the #EndSARS movement has not been defeated. It may have suffered a setback. It may resurrect in the same name or under other names or demands. Poverty is pervasive in the country and the masses will be forced to fight, again and again. The unity of the oppressed, in the north and south of Nigeria, lies in the development of such movements. We know that failure of these movements may herald social conflagration along ethnic and religious lines, which would promote untold hardship, bloodshed, and ultimately a breakup of the country. The challenge is to prevent such a future by building mass movements to unite the masses in collective struggles from below to change society in their own interest.
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