Third liberation should be about breaking the chains of poverty

President William Ruto. [Kelly Ayodi, Standard]

When Roger Swynnerton imagined a new Kenya in 1954, his Kenya was one where a few of us had land, received education, loans and access to markets. These newly educated and empowered land owners were to be the new middle class (for in his imagination no African would ever been upper class). The middle class, he imagined, would in turn hire the lower landless class to be their servants, a fact for which he thought the poor would be grateful. His Kenya was therefore a white upper class, a few African middle class and many, very many, African lower class. Thus the seeds of structural inequalities in Kenya were sown.

The interesting thing about the Swynnerton Plan is that it worked, and exports grew. The pre-independence economy boomed. Yet despite this, the Mau Mau rebelled, the country was ill at ease and there was no quelling the hunger for freedom. From Kisumu to Mombasa, from Wajir to Maralal and from Moyale to Narok, we all wanted freedom. That freedom was multi-pronged. We wanted political emancipation, economic emancipation and spiritual (dignity) emancipation. The poor African didn't want to remain poor and the middle class Kenyan wanted to be upper class.