How Kenya became an enterprise with distinct owners

A view of Muindi Mbingu street in Dec 1964. [File, Standard]

Is Kenya an enterprise whose resources are owned by influential personalities with a controlling shareholding? Is it possible that each of the 52 million Kenyans owns a stake in their motherland?

The question of whether those who do not vote for the winning presidential candidate have a legitimate expectation of government services is being debated. This debate predates Kenya as we know it today.

The foundations of a country founded solely to profit its principal shareholders who had invested millions date back to August 5, 1895, when construction of the railway line that opened up the interior began in Mombasa.

It was in the same month of August when the Exchequer in London got the first request for PS20,000 (Sh3,053,314.54) which was part of what was expected to be the total cost of PS1,755,000 (Sh267,928,351.24).

But like a runaway train the cost dramatically shot to PS3,000,000 (Sh457,906,411.20) within a year. By 1902, this loan had accrued interest of PS319,112.

And as historian Makhete Fall writes in his doctoral thesis: Early Political Discord in Kenya, the astronomical costs laid the basis of "colonial conquest, justified on the basis of practicality and profitability."

But from the onset, not every person who was found within the borders of the protectorate which was later turned into a colony was to be an equal shareholder. When Winston Churchill visited Kenya at a time he was working in the colonial office, he observed that "Every white man in Nairobi is a politician, and most of them are leaders of parties. One would scarcely believe it possible, that a centre so new should be able to develop so many divergent and conflicting interests."

To him, the settlers were political animals and troublemakers who were difficult to please.

Churchill also detected symptoms of racial and political discord which would breed acrimonious debate pitting the white man versus the black; the Indian versus both as well as against the planter.

Initially, there were proposals to get peasants from India to settle in the country which some of the pioneer administrators thought was not good enough for Europeans, but this later changed when Charles Eliot came to Kenya and started enticing aristocrats with sweet land deals.

When the whites finally migrated from other parts of the world they created a society where whites demanded services from the government and were unwilling to pay for any services.

The whites wanted to form a white man's country devoid of people of other colours, which left Churchill wondering how 2,500 whites wanted to dominate more than four million Africans.