Why our politics have never been ethnic, it is ideological!

 Voters line to cast their votes at Moi Avenue Primary school during the March 2013 General Election

The common narrative that our politics is ethnic centred is a fallacy. Of course we have ethnic tensions and traditionally discourse spinning around ethnic power configurations, but this does not make our politics tribal.

True, we vote based on ethnic lines but that does not mean our political culture is structurally ethnic. Closer scrutiny shows that Kenya’s politics has an appearance of ethnicity, but it is actually ideological — it is only packaged in ethnic colours.

While some voters are often mobilised through ethnic identities to the extent of voting for one with whom they identify ethnically, the people we end up electing usually embody certain ideological positions.

Since independence, the veneer of ethnicity has blinded us to the soul of Kenya’s politics, which has very sharp ideological fault lines. Without realising it, we have often voted, enjoyed, suffered and sometimes killed each other over ideologies, all the while internalising as truths, that our conflicts are tribal. This lie must now be dispelled.

While the histories of these ideological positions are traced to a few years before independence, it was in 1966 that they became obvious — when Jaramogi Oginga bolted out of government to form the socialist leaning Kenya People’s Union (KPU), marking the formalisation of Kenya’s left wing politics. His book, Not yet Uhuru, written while under house arrest, crystallises the ideological position that stood in opposition to the right wing, conservative politics of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) under founding president Jomo Kenyatta. The substance of their differences was that Jaramogi favoured a preoccupation with reform and social justice, while the president preferred a capitalist, centralised state premised on ‘forgetting the past.’

For both, ethnicity was merely used to mask the extremes of these ideological positions since leftist politics threatened economic progress, while right wing politics increased social inequality. Even today, ethnicity is used to amass followers, divert attention from actual issues and protect privilege.

Ethnicity is the cover that the political elite run to when their interests are threatened. The sad thing is that we, as voters, intellectuals, media, professionals and ordinary citizens lend the ethnic discourse quasi-legitimate status by following and actualising the meta-narrative carved by the political class.

Indeed, ethnicity is merely an instrument, but the stakes are ideological. Over five decades after Kenya got her independence, the sons of the two founding fathers stand on opposite ends of the competing ideologies that still continue to define our politics.

In the last two decades, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga has emerged at the apex of left wing politics in Kenya, a mantle taken directly from his late father, but which now includes a huge section of civil society groups, some academics and professionals. Under his tenure, Kenya’s left still essentialises social justice and reforms, and is often perceived as combative, marginalised, liberal, but politically unlucky.

On the other side, the Jubilee elite, led by President Uhuru Kenyatta, embody the perceived characteristics of latter day Kenya’s right wing politics; ambivalent to both social justice and reform, politically lucky, amiable, privileged and keen on promoting capital. Thus, I agree with those who suggest that Kenya’s political history is reducible to a protracted quarrel between the Kenyatta and Odinga families. But more than this, these quarrels have deep ideological differences that continue to shape our politics.

The implication of the competing ideologies in Kenya’s politics might actually help us understand our heated political debates. The coalition experiment proved that these two ideologies are incompatible. Indeed, the tone and nature of ongoing quarrels over issues such as Eurobond, the Constitution and even the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) are largely reflective of deep suspicions located more in these ideological differences than on actual substance of facts. More important, perceptions that Kenya’s ideological right is presiding over a Constitution which many leftist leaning Kenyans consider the prize of their hard-won victory against a stubborn conservative right, adds to the mutual suspicion.

The cords that bind Kenya’s right wing political class are capital and the maintenance of status quo. From pre-independence time, through to the post-colonial state, Kenya’s political right has held on to power, both by popular mandate and sheer brute.

The left have never truly ruled Kenya. Not even in the coalition arrangement. Often, they have had themselves to blame. The left is considered and perceived as violent, Marxist and a threat to capital. There is often apprehension and anxiety because of the uncertainty of what Kenya’s left would do if they captured power.

As such, the propertied and landed classes, who happen to be the owners of capital and the equivalent of the conservative wing of Kenya’s politics, routinely consolidate their immense influence to prevent any chance of Kenya’s left capturing power. Usually, ethnicity and narratives of fear are deployed on both sides to mask claims to power.

Dr Omanga is currently a Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge and lectures on Media Studies at Moi University.

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