Intellectuals are free to take sides in politics

Dr David Ndii

Dr David Ndii, one of Kenya’s foremost economists, recently made clear his support for the opposition. This revelation was followed by a significant amount of complaints, many of them aimed at Ndii’s alleged betrayal of analytical integrity by taking political sides. The argument behind much of the complaining was the fact that objective analysis of economic facts ought to be done from an apolitical perspective and that Ndii had ceded his credibility by picking political sides.

This analysis is, of course, off the mark. The idea that academics and professionals of Ndii’s caliber ought to be apolitical is based on the erroneous assumption that facts are apolitical. They are not. By definition, facts tell us what the world is truly like. They inform how we view the world, which in turn informs how we engage in political action.

For example, imagine a situation in which academics conducted a study of our healthcare system and, based on empirical evidence, determined that in order to improve health outcomes (as measured by say morbidity rates) the government ought to invest in training more healthcare workers and not in expensive medical equipment. How would we treat this new information?

Would we pretend that this was an “objective” apolitical piece of information and ignore its real political implications? How would government policymakers who benefit from the purchase of expensive medical equipment react? And how would the researchers react to government policy that insist on buying ever more expensive medical equipment instead of training more health workers?

Good academics would certainly write op-eds, and try to the best of their abilities to persuade the public that they shouldn’t be enticed by shiny equipment but should focus on health outcomes, and that the latter would be improved by investments in training of health workers. That is what Dr Ndii is doing. He is following his theory of how Kenya’s political economy works to its logical conclusions.

The reaction to Ndii’s very public political stance was also inspired by the fallacy that theory should be separate from practice. That scholars like Ndii should pontificate on theory from their ivory tower, never contribute to actual praxis.

This is a myth that continues to doom us to action without thought and planning. The day we marry theory with practice is the day we will stop wasting billions of shillings on projects and systems more suited for Norway than our own social and physical contexts.

Here, too, Dr Ndii has done the right thing. He is a thinker who does not shy from praxis. More Kenyans ought to emulate his example.

Does this mean Dr Ndii has all the “objective” facts about our political economy right? Absolutely not.

The challenge for those who do not agree with him is that they should provide equally coherent analyses and make cogent arguments for why they think that the Jubilee administration remains Kenya’s best hope moving forward. They must seek to play on the same plane as Dr Ndii does, and contribute to elevation of political discourse in Kenya. This will allow us to develop a political culture that respects academic thought and rigour. As our economy gets bigger, we cannot afford to continue playing in the small leagues as far as policy debates are concerned. We must rise higher.

Moving forward, the challenge for Dr Ndii and other thinkers of his stature (on both sides of the political divide) is to discipline their respective political blocs. They should not allow their intellectual pedigree to be merely used as a rubber stamp for platforms that are otherwise empty on actual policy.

They must work to ensure the discussions ahead of August centre not only on elections as an ethnic census, but also as a mechanism of determining between alternative futures for Kenya. Their task is to articulate these alternatives in the most parsimonious and accessible way possible.