Resurgent ethnic nationalism a threat to democracy

William Ruto takes the oath of office as the fifth President of Kenya on September 13, 2022.[PSCU, Standard]

The national elections of 2022 were widely regarded as a coming-of-age moment for Kenya’s democracy. Issue-driven politics appeared to matter more than the parochial ethnic loyalties of the past.

The sovereign will of voters triumphed in the ejection of an administration widely judged to have presided over a dismal economic record.

There are, however, troubling signs of a retreat from that progress. Atavistic fealties, which place ethnicity above competing political and economic considerations, have returned with renewed force.

Sections of the country now appear to be coalescing, not around shared economic interests or a common national project, but around an older and more divisive form of ethnic nationalism; precisely the politics many had hoped the 2010 Constitution would consign to the past.

The danger is not merely that Kenya is reverting to familiar political habits. It is that the gains of 2022 may prove less durable than they first appeared.

No doubt, many Kenyans recoil from the prospect of a return to ethnically charged politics. Having lived through the horrors of the post-election violence of 2007-08, few would willingly revisit the fractious, and often bloody, politics of that period. It is precisely why the entry of Gen Z into politics initially won such broad approval: It appeared to represent a genuinely tribeless movement, cutting across the country’s familiar ethnic fault lines.

Yet there are signs of an insidious effort, driven by sections of the political elite, to unwind those gains. The campaign began soon after the Kenya Kwanza administration took office, when some of its supporters started describing the government in the language of ethnic “shareholding,” as though political victory conferred on particular communities a proprietary claim over the State and its resources.

The rhetoric was soon accompanied by the more tangible attempts to reinforce the narrative. A purported “rolodex” showing the distribution of public appointments was circulated, ostensibly demonstrating that the administration had failed to meet the Constitution’s requirements for regional exclusivity.

The document was subsequently discredited as fabricated, but the episode was revealing nonetheless. It showed how readily the old politics of ethnic arithmetic could be revived, even after a generation of Kenyans had begun to reject it.

But it is the rhetoric of an opposition politician that has now crossed the line. He has repeatedly sought to attribute the perceived failings of the KK administration to the President’s ethnicity, turning political criticism into an exercise in ethnic insinuation.

 The pattern was evident again recently after several policemen, apparently acting outside the law, were implicated in the murder of a prominent psychologist.

The politician went to considerable lengths to emphasise that the rogue officers came from the President’s home region. What he conspicuously failed to mention was that two of the four suspects hailed from his own political and ethnic backyard.

Such disingenuous arguments deserve to be repudiated. Crime and incompetence are not the preserve of any ethnic community, nor should the misconduct of individuals be weaponised to indict an entire group.

To suggest otherwise is not merely intellectually dishonest; it is politically corrosive. It feeds the very ethnic nationalism that has too often narrowed boundaries of national debate, while serving the interests of politicians who prosper by turning communal identity into a political instrument.  

Mr Khafafa is a public policy analyst