Democracy under siege as region's ruling class defend dictatorship unity

East Africa’s emerging diplomatic compact risks mistaking repression of dissent for order and State capacity. At any rate, this is the impression, following President William Ruto’s State visit to Tanzania in the ended week, and President Yoweri Museveni’s visit to Nairobi a few days earlier.

Legitimate regional cooperation is morphing into sanctioned anti-democratic convergence between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, with combustible potential.

President Samia Suluhu disclosed that she “told” President Ruto that they should “clobber Gen-Z activists who carry activism across national borders. The Tanzanian has no time for what she calls “offshore democracy.” We have our own democracy, and “foreigners should know that they will not teach us democracy.” 

Amidst diplomatic awkwardness occasioned by Kenya’s boorish goofs and gaffes, Suluhu nonetheless brought home the message.

East Africa’s ruling class believes that its youthful citizens are its biggest existential threat. Opposition parties only seem to come a distant second, behind Gen-Zs and millennials.

Accordingly, Suluhu said, “When they come this way, I will clobber them, and when they go to Kenya, Ruto will clobber them.”

 This consensus comes at a time when Suluhu is also concerned about Kenya’s overreach in other respects. She has stated publicly that she is shocked that Ruto is talking about building an oil refinery in Tanga, when she knows nothing of the kind. 

Coming in the wake of a closed-door session by the two leaders, Suluhu’s pronouncements on Tanga and on Gen-Zs are revealing.

First, Kenya is being very unmethodical. Ruto is failing in diplomatic etiquette. Tanzania is naturally disturbed. Second, despite Kenya’s boorishness, the need to contain dissent in East Africa overrides all other concerns. 

Yet, the question of diplomatic correctness remains. The message on Ruto’s faux pas on Tanga remains portentous, as does the need for Kenya to re-evaluate its diplomatic deportment generally.

The diplomatic landscape is subtle and delicate. It often requires personnel who are trained in protocol and in the norms of common decency.

Felicity of diction is as important as is celerity of mind, and measured application of wit. You are free to think what you will, but you are not equally free to state what you think the way you think it.

Most significantly, you must understand diplo-speak and attendant codes. You operate strictly within restrained coordinates.   

National foreign relations offices will usually induct all high-level leaders before sending them out. Regular refresher courses are also of the essence to keep pace with emerging issues and changing global political and economic realities.

In recent times, Kenya has not performed well. If there has been training, have the contents and import possibly been forgotten as soon as they have been learned?  

In any event, it is not clear that Kenya’s present topmost political diplomats have enjoyed this training. From day one, a tweet was sent out, even before Ruto returned home from his inauguration, controversially recognising the Saharawi Republic.

Saharawi has been in a self-determination and legitimacy war with Morocco for close to six decades. Morocco was livid, and the tweet was pulled down. There have been other goofs and gaffes that have made regional leaders uncomfortable with Kenya. 

Ruto’s recent remarks that Kenya has more tarmac road mileage than the rest of the East African Community countries rolled into one made his peers uncomfortable. Tanzania’s Minister for Works, Abdallah Ulega, dismissed the remarks as “false, misleading, and demeaning.”  

President Ruto was trying to explain why petrol costs more at the pump in Kenya than in neighbouring countries. He also remarked that Kenya was a middle-level developed nation, while the rest were underdeveloped countries.

On this, Tanzania clarified that its status was that of a “lower middle-income country.” Ruto was accused of “trying to create a false impression of development superiority.”

Peers do not usually take kindly to such offhand remarks. Nor did Africa receive well Ruto’s posture to present himself as the continental spokesperson early in his tenure.

The Kenyan President spoke bluntly to the World Bank and to the UN Security Council on Africa’s exclusion and mistreatment, veritably wearing an aura of a “continental ambassador plenipotentiary.”  

This, together with Kenya’s misrepresentation of other African governments as having supported the late Raila Odinga’s bid for the African Union Commission Chair, is believed to have cost Raila the African Union Commission victory in February last year.  

In recent times, President Ruto has made disconcerting remarks about what are presumed to be Nigerian mannerisms. They parallel earlier remarks that were made about DR Congo in matters of dress and speech, as well as their agricultural economy. Then there was, early in the year, overreaching and wrong-signalling in the ongoing Israeli and American war in Iran.

Kenya has often presented an uppish and even meddlesome diplomatic profile that has usually left would-be friends' mouths agape. 

Separately, the world will be watching closely this week’s Nairobi Africa-Forward Summit, co-hosted by Kenya and France.

The organisers of the event expect upwards of 30 African heads of State to attend. This is an astute moment for Kenya to spruce up her diplomatic image by avoiding the kind of faux pas that have characterised her performance in that space these past four years.

Be that as it may, East Africa’s leadership’s political instincts remain trained on a growing regional compact, founded on the containment of dissent.

The leaders are especially focused on what they call “disciplining the youth.” At the core, however, is preserving elite political control. It is instructive, for instance, that while President Suluhu arrived in power as a breath of fresh air, after the passing on of the iron-fisted John Pombe Magufuli, her current rhetoric speaks to a harsh high-handed leadership style.  

In this, Suluhu finds easy and ready convergence with both Presidents Museveni and Ruto. At face value, the pursuit looks noble. The leaders are choosing development and cross-border economic cooperation.

President Museveni was in Nairobi on a mission that could be described as “business diplomacy.” And Ruto’s offhand remarks on Tanga also speak to business diplomacy in the very critical energy sector. 

Yet, is East Africa integrating economically if it is at the cost of civil liberties? Is elite might and dominance the consent East Africans must give, if they expect development? If East Africans accept being silenced, will the three presidents take them to Singapore, as Ruto was only until recently saying? Conversely, can what these leaders call “stability” implode, or even explode, on account of excess accumulation of pressure among citizens? 

Historically, systems such as Ruto, Museveni and Suluhu have destroyed the mechanisms through which society releases pressure. They have tended to clamp down on free expression, protest, media freedom, judicial processes, and opposition competition.

Yes, they make leaders look orderly and firmly in control. Yet, when you disable dissent-release mechanisms, you tend to irreversibly incubate explosive futures.  

In the short term, East Africa’s leaders may clobber Gen-Zs, keep opposition leaders behind bars, and exile others. In effect, however, they are generating a pressure cooker problem. When citizens cannot vote credibly, litigate fairly, or criticise safely, leadership ought to recognize that it sits on a time bomb. 

For a start, such leaders only receive filtered information from those below them. This is where Ruto, Museveni and Suluhu are going, if they are not yet there. Their charges and assignees give them only the kind of information they know that they want to hear; for “bad news” is dangerous. Hence, they will only hear praise, compliance, and selective optimism. 

Ruto will only know about sieved social reality, for example. He will cut across the country on self-congratulatory missions, believing everything that his subordinates tell him about his popularity.

But the truth remains that he is in a terrible place. When those who have been close to him begin abandoning him, one after the other, he believes that they are isolated cases and that they were “all along unreliable individuals.” 

 Together with his subordinates, Ruto may begin looking for scapegoats. It may be the media or a section of the media. It may be civil society. Or it could be a retired president, “jealous and unhappy that Ruto has achieved in three years what four presidents, put together, could not achieve in 60years.”  And he believes them.  

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have written a telling book which Ruto, Suluhu and Museveni need to read. Titled Why Nations Fail, the two writers talk of inclusive institutions, on the one hand, and extractive institutions on the other. Inclusive institutions have the rule of law and accountable government. They don’t clobber Gen Zs for protesting against bad finance Bills. They provide equal opportunity and are genuinely people-focused. They lead to success and prosperity. 

Extractive institutions portend failure. They concentrate power and freedom in the hands of a few. They exploit the majority for elite benefit. They limit economic opportunity and lack accountability. These countries remain poor, or sink into poverty, even if they were previously promising. Even when leaders know better, or should know better at any rate, they refuse to reform. For why would they want to reform when they are benefiting from extractive systems? Is this where East Africa is headed? 

If you ask Museveni, Ruto and Suluhu, they will tell you that they are headed for Singapore. If you ask discerning students and teachers of political economy, they will say East Africa’s Singapore is a wrong fantasy. East Africa’s leaders invoke Singapore because of Lee Kuan Yew’s heavy hand that they wish to borrow. Yet, they lack his anti-corruption discipline and institutional credibility. 

Ruto, Suluhu and Museveni may adopt Lee’s securitisation of Singapore in their time, centralised authority, and impatience with dissent. Yet, you do not become Singapore by suppressing dissent while preserving patronage. East Africa’s future looks less like an Asian Tiger governance and economic miracle. We look more like a hybrid of Latin American democratic fatigue and South East Asian authoritarianism, and its failures. 

East Africa looks more like a region groping for the route to Cambodia, Venezuela, Haiti, and Colombia, than a passage to Singapore, or even to India. Clearly, Museveni, Suluhu and Ruto may not be identical as leaders. Yet, do they appear increasingly aligned around similar governing instincts? Do they agree on “order” over dissent? 

They are each suspicious, even afraid, of youth-led politics. In the coming days, East Africans are likely to see more cross-border “diplomatic sorties”, despite underlying traditional suspicions, goofs and gaffes. The region’s youth represent a more formidable concern than the petty jealousies that gauche diplomatic blunders and sundry tactlessness evoke.

The region is youthful, indeed very young. And young people are impatient. They are tired of deferred promises and gerontocratic authority. They are breaking into these landscapes through social media. They are weakening legacy information monopolies while creating centres for alternative conversations and agenda-setting. They constantly compare themselves with youth in other parts of the world, and they are not happy to see manure in the food they are served. 

But equally significant, these are youth without borders. A protest in Nairobi travels psychologically to Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala in real time. To stop them, you may need to clobber them in cyberspace. Rather than encourage each other to shoot the youth in the legs, East Africa’s leaders may need to look the problem in the face. Youth unemployment, inequality, cost of living, hopelessness; these are the underlying problems. And they sit on a pedestal of grand corruption. Billions are reported stolen or lost every day.   

On top of this, the East African State wants to narrow civic space. East African youth are operating on accumulated frustrations and intense political awareness. If the governments must default to narrowing of civic space while material frustration rises, they must know that they are meddling with combustible chemistry. 

Dr. Barrack Muluka is a strategic communications advisor