Why Kenya needs a major development coalition urgently

I have been thinking about why Kenya, unlike other countries that escaped the poverty trap, did not spawn and maintain a stable developmental coalition over the decades. By “developmental coalition” I mean a shared understanding and consensus among the public, civil society, politicians and businesspeople of our national development objectives and how to achieve them.

Such a consensus would come with two important advantages. First, it would ensure the country stays the course on its development journey despite changing administrations. For example, in our case we would have retained the focus on Vision 2030 across multiple administrations (admittedly, emphases would vary depending on prevailing politics).

Second, it would create the moral economy superstructure needed to enforce the sacrifices needed for rapid development. Both Kenya capital and workers would understand that we are in this together, and therefore agree to make necessary sacrifices for the greater good of future generations. At present our elites perennially exhibit a complete disregard for the national development outcomes. Their consumption habits, investment habits, erratic policymaking, tax-dodging, among other forms of bad behaviour are impediments to our development. Period.

So why do we not have a stable developmental coalition and what would it take to build one? First, we do not have a stable developmental coalition because of an initial dissensus about how to develop the country, which was reinforced over the decades via path dependence. At independence, KANU’s majority should have turned it into a platform for developmental coalition building.

However, divisions within KANU over how to handle the land question as it pertains to agriculture (smallholder vs large plantations) and the role of the state (state capitalism vs state socialism) meant there was no consensus on how to develop the country. Notice that this dissensus was ideological, and not ethnic. Unfortunately, the management of the dissensus quickly took an ethnic turn. Thus in 1966 the government did everything to ensure the Kenya People’s Union emerged not as a national leftist party, but Nyanza-based party.

From a developmentalist perspective, KANU never recovered from 1966. Politically, the party lost power to the executive’s provincial administration machinery. This reduced the party merely to a forum for organising the country’s ethnic kingpins and distributing the spoils of power. This feature of KANU defined our party politics even after the party lost power. As a country, we are yet to appreciate the power of inter-generational political and economic organisations.

The musical chairs in our politics leaves little room for organised thinking about how to build consensus and support coalition for our development. The brief glimmer of hope that came with the organised Hustler Movement quickly fizzled out once the Kenya Kwanza administration took power. The Hustler got thrown under the bus to make way for deals-based distribution of the spoils of power. Can we get out of this hole? Perhaps. However, it will take time. We need time to develop ideas and political culture needed to maintain a politics genuinely focused on development. The silver lining here is that the challenge we face is primarily an elite-level challenge, which means change can happen quickly.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University