The Invisible Clan

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete

Recently the matter of Kenya’s national indebtedness has gained wide coverage in the media, not least in a presidential roundtable with the press on December 28th, 2018. In my opinion, our nation is grossly indebted, and in fact we are in a de facto state of emergency as far as our nation’s finances are concerned. I hope to demonstrate this fact below, and to suggest what options we have for dealing with our indebtedness.

Several indicators for measuring national indebtedness exist, such as Debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (Debt:GDP), debt per capita, etc. Probably the most widely-used indicator is the Debt:GDP ratio. This particular metric is so obfuscatory and misleading that it is not inconceivable that it was actually developed to mask the truth about national indebtedness the world over.

When we as individuals want to borrow salary-backed loans from banks, the banks attempt to assess our ability to pay off these loans by reviewing our payslips, sometimes going back 3 to 6 months. This effort is calculated to answer just one question: what is our take-home pay? In doing this, the banks are assessing our credit-worthiness, which helps to reduce the risk of default. At the national level, however, this abundance of caution is thrown to the wind. The use of the Debt:GDP ratio to measure national indebtedness means that a country’s ability to take on more debt is assessed on the basis of its GDP. At an individual level, such an assessment would approximate assessing our ability to pay off salary-backed loans based on our gross pay. In fact, it is much worse: it is more like assessing an individual’s ability to pay off a loan based on how much revenue he generates for his employer. Even if such a company is just breaking even, the revenue an employee earns his employer must necessarily exceed his salary, or else that organisation would be unable to meet its operational costs, such as rent, electricity and other office expenses. Put another way, the revenue an employee generates pays a lot more than his salary). Since GDP attempts (poorly) to measure the total value generated by all the economic activity in a nation, to use it as a basis for measuring whether a country has room to borrow is patently unwise simply because not all the value created in a nation’s economy is available to pay a nation’s debt.

The revenue employees generate and the value an economy generates (GDP) are analogous in that both are measures of value created. However, whereas the revenue produced by employees accrues directly to their employers’ GDP, it does not so directly accrue to a nation. For example, after a loaf of bread has been produced in a country, that loaf is not submitted to the government, yet its production adds to the nation’s GDP. For this reason, even a revenue-based definition of employees’ income does not properly approximate the absurdity of using GDP as a measure of national income on which to assess indebtedness because not all of GDP accrues to the nation as income.

What is the net effect of all this? The more broadly a lender can define a borrower’s income, the larger the proportion of that borrower’s true income that will flow out as loan repayments, and the more the borrower’s assets stand at risk of repossession as collateral. This is what has happened to us as a nation. When we consider further stratagems like rebasing our GDP, which had the effect of increasing our GDP by 25% at a stroke, it can be seen that by nominally increasing our GDP the illusion was given that our nation was able to take on even more borrowing than before, opening the gates to yet more lending.

By masking true indebtedness, therefore, the Debt:GDP ratio encourages wanton borrowing. This works in favour both of fiscally irresponsible (or worse, corrupt) governments and of predatory lenders, both private and multilateral (the line between private and multilateral lenders is far thinner than is generally believed). We do not pay debt out of GDP. We pay debt out of our national revenues. The more revealing and honest measure would be debt-to-national revenue. For the same reasons of honesty and clarity, it is prudent to narrow the definition of national revenue down further to tax revenue, thereby eliminating grants, donations, monies realised from the sale of public assets, and other incidentals from the discussion.

The problem – from the viewpoint of irresponsible governments and predatory lenders, of course – is that once we do so, the scales will fall off our eyes and it becomes apparent just how much of our nation’s money is going towards servicing our debt. According to the national Treasury, our national debt, which stood at Sh1.894 trillion in the financial year (FY) 2013, had grown to Sh5.047 trillion by the end of FY 2018, a growth of 269 per cent.

Our GDP in 2013, according to the same report, was Sh4.496 trillion, meaning our Debt:GDP ratio was 42.1 per cent in 2013. In 2018, our GDP was Sh8.845 trillion. (This suggests that our GDP has been growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 14.49 per cent, which would be news to most Kenyans; the effect of rebasing our GDP can now more clearly be seen.) These figures imply our Debt:GDP ratio in FY 2018 was 57 per cent.

In 2013, however, the government collected a total of Sh754.2 billion in taxes. The implication is that our Debt:Tax ratio stood at a whopping 251 per cent in that year. By 2018, although revenue collections had grown to Sh1.47 trillion, our debt had grown much faster, so much so that our Debt:Tax ratio in the FY 2018 stood at 343 per cent. In other words, if the Government did nothing else but pay off our national debt – if it did not pay teachers, doctors, nurses, the army, and the police; if it did not provide medical supplies; if it bought no textbooks; if it did not construct one metre of road or railway; if it did not construct one hospital room or classroom or police post – it would take us about three and a half years to pay off the national debt.

Table 1: Kenya’s Debt:GDP vs Debt:Tax ratio, FYs 2013 – 2018

This situation is untenable. National Treasury data indicates that in FY 2018 we spent Sh459.4 billion servicing our debt. By that measure, debt repayment was the single largest item in our nation’s expenditure, exceeding our expenditure on transport infrastructure (Sh225 billion), health (Sh65.5 billion) or education (Sh415.3 billion). In other words, we are spending more paying off our debt than we are spending providing good transport for our people and good treatment for our sick – combined.

A day of reckoning is soon coming for our beloved country, on which day we shall realise that indeed, as per the Holy Writ, “…the borrower is slave to the lender”, and that debt (even if the money is used well, let alone if it is actively misused as we have done) is the tool of the neo- colonialist. It will become starkly apparent that by a system of multilateral and international debt, there is a sense in which foreign powers have been able to be perhaps as extractive of our nation’s wealth as they were when they were in power as our colonial masters. There is in fact a very real sense in which the colonial powers never really left. The only major change is that China is now on the list of our foreign masters. We have already seen multilateral lenders like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) force our government to impose VAT on fuel. This is not the first time this happened. In 2013, when our debt was less than half what it is now, the IMF backed changes in our VAT law that would have imposed VAT on milk and medicines, claiming that “…the changes in the law [would] put Kenya in line with other modern VAT regimes in the world by simplifying the way it operates while reducing the number of exempt items.” Although the Cabinet did not impose VAT on milk and medicines, other items, such as textbooks, periodicals and magazines, did not escape the taxman’s levy. The press reported that our national port in Mombasa was used as a security for the loan that was used to construct the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). These are not isolated bellwethers of the dire situation our country finds herself in: the Daily Nation recently reported that we will require Sh1.04 trillion to service our debt in FY 2020. Where will it come from?

We must now examine possible solutions to what is clearly a monumental problem. The truth is this: debt can be dealt with either by paying it, or by not paying it. National debt can be repaid through austerity programmes and/or by the realisation of collateral. A nation may avoid repayment by pursuing debt forgiveness; defaulting on our sovereign debt; and/or overseeing a managed default on our sovereign debt.

Options for paying our national debt

Austerity programmes

Since the national debt can only be paid out of taxes, an escalation of the national debt can only result in an austerity programme. Austerity is a term that follows a very well-worn path of giving nasty, anti-common man policies honourable names (this is what is called “Economese”). Simply put, austerity necessitates the redirection of large portions of tax receipts away from normal government expenditure (including mission-critical social expenditure like health and education, and away from development expenditure) in an effort to pay off the debt. The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes austerity as “enforced or extreme economy”.

The fact that Kenya is – whether it has publicly announced it or not – well up the austerity road is evidenced by the earlier observation that debt repayment is the single largest item in our nation’s budget. By the time our lenders and leaders decide to announce that we are in an austerity programme, we will have been in one for years.

To examine where this road leads, we must turn to Greece. That nation has been locked in austerity’s deathly embrace for the better part of a decade. An Al Jazeera article notes that the austerity programme in Greece was occasioned by over-borrowing (sound familiar?) in the years leading up to the global financial crisis, which was exacerbated by a rise in rates occasioned by that crisis. In order to keep paying government salaries and finance public services, Greece had to accept an initial loan of EUR110 billion from its Eurozone partners and the IMF. To pay off this loan, the country was compelled to institute radical austerity measures. How did that go?

In August 2018, the Guardian summarized Greece’s experience thus:

The European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund loaned Greece a total of €289bn ($330bn) in three programmes, in 2010, 2012 and 2015.

The economic reforms the creditors demanded in return brought the country to its knees with a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP) evaporating over eight years and unemployment soaring to more than 27%.

The fundamental contradictions between the envisaged outcomes of austerity and its outcomes in reality are also the reason we find multilateral lenders talking out of both sides of their mouths, first imposing these programmes, and then sheepishly admitting that they have not worked. The IMF, for example, actually produced a report stating that it made notable failures on its first rescue package to Greece.

Greece teaches us, if we will listen, that the time is likely to come when Kenya will be unable to pay government workers’ salaries and will not be able to fund essential public services, such as security. At this point, the Government of Kenya will be forced to take on yet more borrowing to prevent a mass uprising. These “rescue packages” will be offered on grossly usurious terms, terms that the government will have no choice but to accept. Then, in a strange twist of irony, the very people upon whom the initial injustices were visited will do the lenders’ marketing for them by way of a civil uprising. From then on, our nation’s expenditure will be “supervised” by these lenders, not to help the Kenyan people, but to ensure that these lenders are paid. These are doomsday scenarios, and I find it difficult to even write them. Yet it can get worse – and has, elsewhere in the world.

Realisation of collateral

Realisation of collateral is a method of debt payment that is as old and as basic as Shylocks. It is difficult to recall a time when national debt was collateralised to the extent that has happened in the recent past. It appears that the realisation of collateral appears to be the favoured method of China for collecting debt. For our case study on this, we must turn to the nation of Sri Lanka, as the New York Times reported:

Every time Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, turned to his Chinese allies for loans and assistance with an ambitious port project, the answer was yes.

Yes, though feasibility studies said the port wouldn’t work. Yes, though other frequent lenders like India had refused. Yes, though Sri Lanka’s debt was ballooning rapidly under Mr. Rajapaksa.

…Mr. Rajapaksa was voted out of office in 2015, but Sri Lanka’s new government struggled to make payments on the debt he had taken on. Under heavy pressure and after months of negotiations with the Chinese, the government handed over the port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years in December [2017].

There are examples closer to home. In December 2018, the US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, sensationally claimed that China was about to take over the Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation (ZESCO), which is Zambia’s version of Kenya Power & Lighting Company, before KenGen and Ketraco were hived off. Although this rumour was strongly refuted by Zambia’s presidential spokesman, Mr Amos Chanda, Mr Chanda did admit that Zambia owes China US$3.1 billion in debt. In Africa that kind of statement from that kind of person often means the figure is much higher; indeed, some sources have placed the figure at US$6.4 billion.

In 2017, Zambia’s police force had to scrap plans to hire eight Chinese nationals following a public outcry. Zambians were concerned about having to salute a Chinese national in their own country. It is also true that in November 2018 police arrested over 100 residents in Kitwe (the country’s second-largest city) who were protesting the alleged sale of the Zambia Forestry and Forest Industries Corporation (ZAFFICO). There is a possible sub-plot here: Mr Bolton’s claim may mean that the IMF and Western allies are worried that they are losing their grip on the Zambian nation to China. Options for not paying our national debt

In advocating for the non-payment of national debt I am not advocating injustice or dishonesty for this reason: “The government” is not a nebulous entity separate from the people. The government is the people. When the government borrows, it is the people who are borrowing; when the government pays, it is the people who must pay; indeed, it is their taxes that are used to pay.

As can be seen from the foregoing, over-borrowing, poor governance and/or the mismanagement of public funds can lead to adverse effects, not on “the government”, not on the lenders – even private lenders – but on the people. The stark truth is that austerity rarely, if ever, aids recovery – unless by recovery we mean the recovery of lenders’ money. Austerity is a creditor-oriented policy, not a people-oriented policy, and it fails because cuts in government spending result in reduced consumption, unemployment and lower tax receipts. Yet tax receipts are what are needed in order to pay off the debt. The realisation of collateral (the other solution) is nothing but the seizure of a people’s land

There exists, therefore, a moral case for non-payment, which is this: that the betrayal of a people by its ruling class through the accumulation of a debt whose benefits the people never realised should not be visited upon the class of the ruled, who pay the debt. On this point, therefore, I am advocating for justice, not injustice; and for honesty, not dishonesty.

Debt forgiveness

Debt forgiveness is not a new concept; it is in fact a biblical concept. The concept of Jubilee meant that every 50 years, during the eponymously-named Jubilee year, all debts were written off, all enslavement ended, and everyone was allowed to return to whatever ancestral lands that they might have had to give up because of an inability to pay back debt. A thorough examination of the wisdom and justice of this law would take up a solid chapter in a good book; suffice it to say that it acted like a legislated revolution, resetting the kind of gross national inequalities that US Senator Bernie Sanders is grappling with – for the price of a trumpet blast.

Our gross national indebtedness means – or rather, dictates – that we pursue debt forgiveness, because we simply cannot pay back everything we have borrowed. The problem is that we are not considered a poor country any more – not even a low-income country. We are now a middle income nation, and precedent shows that debt forgiveness is the preserve of highly indebted poor countries. Our pleas for debt forgiveness, therefore, are quite likely to fall on deaf ears. Further, a significant portion of our national debt is owed to China and China, Sri Lanka might whisper, is not a nation one asks for forgiveness.

A note of caution must here be sounded: only 15 or so years ago, Zambia had its debts wiped clean under the IMF’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries scheme. The same country then took “less than a decade” to run up fresh debt of 59 per cent of GDP, buying million-dollar fire engines and constructing roads twice as expensive as those of her neighbours.

A strategy of debt forgiveness is, therefore, useless in the absence of enforced legislation to ensure that future over-indebtedness and/or wastage is prevented. A law preventing the government from tying up more than 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the average tax collected in the previous five years on debt servicing would be a very good place to start. The laws preventing wastage and theft of what we actually do borrow do exist, but require radical enforcement.

Default on sovereign debt

There exist exceptional circumstances in which nations default on their national debt. These times are usually presaged by significant external shocks or political ones, such as when Fidel Castro took over in Cuba in 1959, and simply defaulted on outstanding Cuban debt. The bonds on which he defaulted are in default to date.

Reference is often made to the Argentinian default (and one must be specific) of 2001. In 1998, Argentina’s economy entered a deep recession. The IMF’s by now predictable solution, of course, was austerity. Over the course of the following two years, it became increasingly clear that the toxic mix of an artificially fixed exchange rate, a steadily worsening balance of payments deficit (imports exceeding exports) and mounting debt, among other factors, meant that Argentina would never be able to pay off its debt.

Then the people began to protest, with increasing vociferousness, against austerity. When in December 2001 the IMF realised that default could not be avoided, it held back previously promised “support” so that the government was left without any external funding. Bank runs and riots followed: at one point the country had five presidents in ten days. Finally, on December 24, the country defaulted on a US$ 100 billion debt. This led to a social crisis of epic proportions, characterised not least by rampant unemployment.

Sovereign defaults of this nature tend to be devastating and ought to be avoided. The social cost ends up being far too high, even if one is a Castro leading a non-conformist Cuba. Firstly, in order to teach other would-be defaulters a lesson, lenders make an example out of one. Secondly, the world has become too interconnected for us to make ourselves a pariah state for any length of time: globalisation is a source of many ills, but it can help us as well, for we have a surplus of labour that we can offer the world (among other competitive advantages).

Managed default on sovereign debt

The way we might want to do it is the way Ecuador did it between 2007 and 2009. The then President Rafael Correa stopped payments on bonds that the country had taken out, and established a “debt audit commission” to conduct an audit on the country’s debt, which at the time was using up 38 per cent of the government’s budget. The purpose of this audit was to establish the “legitimacy” of the debt.

This was a brilliant first step. Firstly, it brought to the forefront the moral injustice of a people’s having to pay loans from which they never benefitted. Secondly, the reason given for the initial default was a moral one, as opposed to a financial one (even though the financial reasons lurk menacingly in the background). The genius behind the debt audit was that it was for establishing the morality (and not merely the affordability) of the public debt. Such a debt audit commission in Kenya – objective, apolitical (in a local sense), staffed with technically qualified, patriotic individuals and with an ability to trace the flows of borrowed funds – would likely produce spectacular results.

Ecuador’s debt audit commission found that the debt was illegitimate based on the manner in which negotiations were conducted. (The reasons for which debt can be illegitimate are myriad: here in Kenya, the factors would range from non-existence of the assets ostensibly purchased with the debt, overpricing of assets that do exist, payment of bribes and kickbacks, and lack of public participation and parliamentary approval, etc.) Arising from the stopped payments, and from the public establishment of the illegitimacy of the debt, the value of the bonds on the open market plunged. The Government of Ecuador then tendered to repurchase the bonds at 30 cents on the dollar. On the basis of the auction results, the government then offered to buy back the bonds at 35 cents on the dollar, expecting to retire at least 75 per cent of the bonds. Ninety-one per cent of the bonds were so retired in June 2009, that the government paid off its public debt for about a third of what it was worth and, according to President Correa, saved US$ 300M (Sh30 billion) per year in interest payments.

The Ecuadorian solution has an elegance that only simplicity gives. However, its success needs to be assessed against the backdrop of an important contextual factor: the retirement of the country’s debt happened at a time when markets were in the throes of the global financial crisis. Investors, therefore, were under pressure to liquidate their assets. Further, how successful this method would be as regards Chinese debt is anyone’s guess: simple and easy are vastly different things.

That said, the process presents a blueprint for any government that is ready and willing to ease the burden of over-indebtedness and is an option and a strategy this country should pursue – before it’s too late.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete

Rafael Marques de Morais has something that defines his whole life: the Civil Courage Prize, which recognises his “steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk”. Rafael is a journalist and political activist from Angola, fighting government corruption through his online watchdog Maka Angola and the Makaleaks whistleblower platform.

To understand the world of corruption in which Marques lives, he tells us about his last investigation: “A former provincial governor diverted the funds to build schools and a hospital in a rather depressed community, and instead built his own private luxury lodge to welcome foreign hunters to hunt lions and elephants”.

Between 1999 and 2002, Marques de Morais wrote a serie of articles about the diamond trade which gave birth to the book “Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola”. According to the Wikipedia, the articles “described the killing and terrorizing of villagers by private security companies and Angolan military officials in the name of protecting mining operations”. In November 2011 the journalist issued a criminal complaint accusing nine Angolan generals of crimes against humanity in connection with diamond mining. This is Marques style. His fight is against fear: “For there to be press freedom, people must speak freely, without fear. So, I have had to fight to help free the Angolan people from the shackles of fear as well. Otherwise, journalism is like building a sand castle near a high tide”.

“On my first trial, in 2000, the two female assistant judges came to whisper to my ear that they were praying for me”

This means becoming an activist: “I have forged my skills under a dictatorship, and there was no way I could just do journalism. I have had to defend and fight for the very space to fulfill my duties as a professional and as a citizen”. Now, he says, we see even in the United States that “many media outlets and journalists are getting bolder, and being activists, as President Trump accuses them of being the “enemies of the people”.

Marques de Morais is proud to have never fought alone: “On my first trial, in 2000, the two female assistant judges came to whisper to my ear that they were praying for me, and wished me Godspeed strength”. He had been left with no lawyer, no witness, in a trial held in camera for calling the President Dos Santos corrupt and a dictator. “But I was not alone, I had the two assistant judges giving me strength. It is the first time I share this story”, he states. Author: Barbican C. Alex Brenner

Marques doesn’t remember how many times he’s been in prison: “I lost count. The longest I stayed in prison was for 43 or 44 days, but I have been briefly detained many times”. Once, he was arrested while going to buy tomatoes for a salad: “I saw a Swiss human rights researcher being chased by some militias. I stopped to help her, and then I ended up at the police station with my tomatoes in the car”, he says.

Another time, a friend asked him to accompany him to buy fish, early in the morning. Without them knowing it, the police had destroyed tens of fishermen’s huts and houses and forcibly removed the people and dumped them out of the city: “Needless to say, I was blamed as the agitator by the police and briefly held”, Marques asserts.

In 2013, he went to cover the trial of young protesters. He was interviewing them outside the court when “54 special police forces besieged us with machine guns and all the anti-riot gear, and an armored car. We were taken to the Rapid Intervention Police were some of us were tortured and taunted with death threats”. All the action was filmed by a camerawoman because, according Marques, “the regime’s hatred for me inspired them to film my beating”.

He has “a lot of kasfkaesque stories to write about one day, including ambushes”, but he has never surrendered. In 2009 he launched Maka Angola to publish the material he had in excess for his dissertation at Oxford University on “The Transparency of Looting” in Angola. “I wanted to share all the information I had gathered”, he says, as the great journalist he is.

Qurium has been hosting Maka Angola and Maka Leaks since 2016. Maka Angola had received many cyberattacks since he joined Virtualroad, by a colleague’s recommendation: “Every since I have had a peace of mind, for it has become a great line of defence against cyber attacks and I have not been bothered by a single attack since Virtualroad became Makaangola’s host”, he says.

Does Marques de Morais think the Internet is a good or a bad tool for journalists? “It’s only a tool, it all depends on the strength of the journalists who use it for good journalism, vis-à-vis the armies of trolls at the service of authoritarian regimes, and the mushrooming industry of online disinformation”. We’re sure which side is he on.

In 2018 the International Press Institute awarded Rafael Marques de Morais with the World Press Freedom Hero prize

This article was originally published by Qurium. Read the original article.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete Kenyans walking to work on Nairobi’s Haile Selassie Avenue on the 16th of June 2016 were shocked to find that a pile of well-worn identity cards and driver’s licences had been dumped during the night on the pavement outside the Jesus is Alive Ministries’ church. The identity cards were those that Kenyans mistakenly call the second and third generation IDs – one, dating from 1995, is laminated, and the other, issued after 2011, is printed directly onto plastic. Both types of cards were produced by Thales, a French parastatal, so they are administratively identical. On the front side, they present the card’s serial number, the holder’s identity number, full name, date of birth, sex, district of birth, place of issue, date of issue, signature, thumbprint; on the reverse are the functional categories of colonial indirect rule: district; division; location; sub-location.

None of the cards in the pile were the third-generation or digital IDs that Kenyans have been promised for a decade: the polycarbonate sheet, laser-printed with solid colour images and etched holograms containing, critically, a machine-readable chip and a full set of digital finger and iris biometrics.

In 2007, the main archives of the National Registration Bureau (issuer of ID cards) contained the scanned records of the inked fingerprints of 14 million Kenyans. In an attempt to bolster the identity card system and the integrity of the register that authenticated applications for cards, the KNCHR called for the fast-tracking of a biometric database – the Integrated Population Registration System (IPRS). In 2009, the development of that system was awarded, apparently without controversy, to a consortium from the Ukraine called EDAPS.

The third generation card was first announced publicly in 2007 in the wake of an investigation by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) into accusations of widespread corruption and discrimination in the issuing of IDs. The commission’s concerns were split evenly between the general complaint about the cash bribes officials demanded to perform basic administrative services and the more specific accusation that Somali-Kenyans were being systematically denied identity cards and their basic rights as citizens. Behind both worries lurked fears about the fragility of the laminated card, and its susceptibility to forgery. The notorious weakness of the cards had much to do with the seven-digit identity number and the vulnerability of the registry that was being used to authenticate claims for citizenship.

The appointment of a contractor for the production of the third generation cards was not so simple. The 2005 Anglo Leasing scandal – where the Mwai Kibaki government was notoriously implicated in the payment of a massively inflated tender to a British shell company for printing passports – loomed in the background of the call for tender for the new identity cards. The processes were fraught and contested, especially as losing bidders could bring show-stopping appeals to the newly established Public Procurement Oversight Authority after 2007.

The call for tender for the new cards was issued in May 2009, specifying a “third generation ID Card” with the establishment of an “elaborate infrastructure supported by appropriate software modules, including installation of live data capture equipment both at the headquarters and in the field offices, personalisation centre and a centralised database production facility, complete with the necessary biometric and facial recognition features”. The government allocated $10 million to the project, and the international biometrics giants all submitted proposals. In September that same year, the whole process came to a sudden halt when NADRA, the Pakistan identification agency (who were making Kenyan passports) raised a successful protest about the decision of the tender board.

Thales continued printing the laminated cards after the tender collapsed, but in July 2011 the cabinet refused to endorse their ongoing production, and the issuing of the indispensable IDs stopped completely, prompting something of a national emergency. The Ministry of Immigration and Registration of Persons issued a second tender in 2011 but that succumbed in the same way when the French ID contractor, Imprimerie Nationale, protested its exclusion on the basis of the tender board’s sloppy paperwork. With the 2013 election looming, the ministry had little choice but to restore Thales’ contract to print the backlog of two million – rising quickly to four million – of the new plastic (not laminated but also not third generation) cards.

That was the situation, at least as far as the ID cards were concerned, when Mwende Gatabaki arrived to join the Office of the President from her job at the African Development Bank in Tunis in February 2014. Gatabaki was chosen as the architect of the new plan for identification and information-sharing – the National Digital Registry System (NDRS) – as she had extensive experience working on the networking requirements of the cumbersome Kenyan parastatals and the large donor organisations in East Africa.

Clean, complete, correct

The plan to register the entire Kenyan population “afresh” was first made public at the ConnectedKenya conference in Mombasa in April 2014. It was presented by Gatabaki, who was tasked with assembling a new government agency that would unify the different functions of birth and death registration, the registration of aliens and refugees, and the issuing of identity cards, which were all spread across the detached Departments of Civil Registration, Immigration, Refugee Affairs and the National Registration Bureau.

The Act establishing the new service had already been passed in 2011. It called for a new co- ordinating agency that would develop a unique identifier for every person, manage all issues related to citizenship and immigration, and maintain a comprehensive and accurate national population register. Gatabaki’s plan drew on the heightened public concern around national security in the wake of the September 2013 attacks on the Westgate shopping mall. It lay out a potentially revolutionary reorganisation of the entire Kenyan state around a “single source of truth”. The new database would link together existing and new registries of population, land holdings, companies and moveable assets. Gatabaki argued that the new database and registrations would be significantly cheaper than the cost of upgrading existing but separate projects of registration and identification underway in the separate departments. To do all of this required a break from the existing forms of paper registration and a new set of purely digital biometrics for every person in the country.

This initial presentation made no mention of a new digital ID card, but the following day the CEO of the state ICT Authority explained that the government was preparing to spend nearly $100 million on the new database and that the new ID cards would have a chip or magnetic strip that would allow police officers on patrol to confirm authenticity.

Gatabaki’s emphasis on a compulsory national round of digital registrations was controversial, to put it mildly, because many Kenyans – especially those supporting the CORD coalition that was kept from power – were still furious about the biometric debacle staged during the previous year’s national elections when the biometric voter identification kits supplied by the South African firm, Face Technologies, failed. The official enquiry into this debacle, accusations of corruption and other ongoing controversies over the enormous cost and licensing of the biometric kit dominated public debate until the end of 2015. In Kenya, biometric registration is the main arena of a bitter struggle over state power, and it was hardly surprising that the opposition leaders immediately responded to the move to register all afresh by claiming that it was a scheme to rig the next elections.

Political mistrust was not the only serious problem, however; over the previous decade, the procurement processes for the long-promised identity card had repeatedly collapsed into a mess of conflicting corruption allegations.

Indigenising capital

Gatabaki’s project aimed, chiefly, at replacing the unreliable and limited paper-based population register with a digital biometric database. The new biometric system would have established a single official identity for all adults in Kenya for the first time and it would have allowed real-time, remote biometric authentication. But it was also motivated by an effort to create a new kind of property by registering collateral in moveable assets, such as vehicles, farm animals and companies.

Meanwhile, the EDAPS consortium had been busy working to build the IPRS, linking together the main repositories of identification and citizenship status. EDAPS first built the IPRS connections between the National Registration Bureau’s ID card database and the Ministry for Immigration and Registration of Persons (MIRP) passport and aliens registries. In 2010 they began to incorporate new data from the birth and death registries managed by the Department of Civil Registration. The following year, 2011, they built automated two-way links between the IPRS and the databases maintained by the two newly established credit reference bureaus (CRBs).

This relationship allowed the CRBs to do real time confirmation of the identity of the new applicants for credit (using automated queries against the linked civil registration and ID card records). Much more importantly for the broader political economy in Kenya, and the fate of the NDRS, it also pushed blacklisting data into the IPRS itself. The listing of defaults inside the state’s IPRS – what the Credit Information Sharing Association of Kenya (CISKenya) described as negative information – provided a simple, effective and real time sorting and coercive tool for the new mobile credit providers looking for instant decision-making systems. This simple link had the effect of separating Safaricom, with its troves of data on millions of users’ spending behaviour, from the broader alliance of formal lenders who were looking to build database profiles that would differentiate customers based on sharing positive (payments) and negative (defaults) information.

Safaricom – the monopolistic telecommunications firm that has created the globally distinctive system of mobile money known as M-Pesa – was able to develop simple forms of virtual reputational collateral using its own automated assessment systems and its own identification and authentication processes. The state’s existing population register was sufficient for its needs, where the banks’ credit information sharing (CIS) processes – with their demanding templates of data and very high errors of identification – faced continuous failures and material resistance.

The failure of the new digital identification scheme was the result of a conflict between the formal banks and Safaricom. It was also a struggle between different types of credit markets. On the one hand, the banks wanted to build credit reporting systems and new government registration arrangements that would allow individuals and firms to formalise non-fixed assets, such as vehicles and livestock, which would then act as new forms of collateral for further borrowing. The advocates of these assets registers and of the banks’ universal credit reporting systems were opposed by Safaricom (in practice more than in public) and eventually by the leaders of the Kenyan state, who championed a simple and effective system for delivering unsecured, high-interest micro-loans that did not require collateral registers.

The advocates of the biometric plan justified it by appealing to the need for certain and secure identification, for stronger national security (and policing) and better tax coverage and recovery, but what distinguished it from the already existing plans for population registration was the effort to build a new kind of asset register – a database describing real, not informational, collateral assets. The National Digital Registry System plan proposed a joined-up architecture of state databases that brought the management of private collateral into the core of the state’s business. Aimed at the interests that the established banks had in the development of reliable, accurate and complete credit histories, it was also a radical effort to address the informational void that surrounds property on the African continent.

As Safaricom’s monopoly status became painfully obvious after 2010, the banks’ advocates increasingly argued – and with good reason – that the most serious weakness in the Kenyan economy lay in the difficulties that small businesses faced in securing credit. Policy makers argued that thousands of these small firms possessed moveable assets – buildings, vehicles, equipment, products, animals – that could provide secure collateral for formal credit when provided with the right administrative and information processing tools. This was the idea behind the NDRS – a centralised data exchange that would make information from the discrete registries (for example, of companies and vehicles) available to lenders. At the same time, this kind of centralised data hub would offer non-bank lenders a quid pro quo for sharing information about their customers’ servicing of existing loans. This idea – that the NDRS would, finally, make it easy for financial institutions to appraise borrowers – was at the heart of the Gatabaki proposal. “A central repository of personal and corporate information will facilitate banks in their credit appraisal,” as the Central Bank governor explained in endorsing the project in October 2014, “This should not only ease access to credit but also reduce costs of credit, given the lower search costs.”

In fact, of course, that integration never happened. Instead, the Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), in alliance with Safaricom, developed its own separate scoring mechanism that drew on data from Safaricom’s transaction database specifically to identify borrowers who did not meet the initial basic criteria that were derived from Safaricom airtime purchases. The resulting scorecard worked only too well and – combined with the basic identification and simple blacklisting supported by the IPRS – it meant that CBA and Safaricom could issue M-Shwari loans without any need to look up or report data to the credit bureaus; the credit information templates of credit sharing were too cumbersome and too slow and would have ruined the rapid decision-making that is one of the attractions of Safaricom’s mobile lending.

From the outset, the CBA, like many of the other non-bank credit providers in Kenya, used credit information sharing only as a last resort in the effort to recover outstanding loans. After 120 days of non-payment, the bank reported delinquent M-Shwari debtors to the credit bureaus. These records, almost all of them negative reports, rapidly inflated the population covered by the CRBs from 1 million people in 2014 to 4 million the following year. This expansion was the exact opposite of the reputational collateral that the bankers had long used to justify credit sharing; it measured, instead, the dramatically augmented pool of those denied formal credit at any cost.

By the time that Gatabaki announced the NDRS project in April 2014, the effort to create a technological platform to foster reputational collateral for ordinary Kenyans had effectively failed. Over the following year, the balance of informational power shifted decisively towards Safaricom and CBA. Few people made the argument publicly, but the telecom giant had clearly come to exercise monopoly control over the heights of the Kenyan economy. Their interest in micro-loans – while profitable and useful to borrowers – did little to make formal credit available to individuals or companies. The CIS system was working only as a blacklist available to Safaricom on the IPRS platform and, far from working as a solution to the problem of asymmetrical information for other lenders, it simply encouraged local banks to deny ordinary Kenyans credit.

The Safaricom monopoly

Gatabaki’s scheme faced resistance from within the state, not least because the World Bank’s Kenya Transparency Communications Infrastructure Project (KTCIP) had been pouring money into the renewal of the old IPRS. As the NDRS was being debated, the Bank was busy upgrading the IPRS, supporting digitisation of the existing land and company registries, strengthening the administration of the fifty newly devolved county centres of government, and connecting all of the divisions of the state to an accounting database. The KTCIP overhaul reduced some of the pressure for repair of the existing state information systems, but it does not account for the collapse of Gatabaki’s scheme, which would in fact have been bolstered by the same processes. The real reason lay in the ascendancy of the highly simplified information systems controlled by Safaricom, the explosive growth of M-Shwari mobile loans offered by the CBA and the decline of the political influence of the other established banks. During the year that the NDRS was being debated, Safaricom converted its M-Pesa monopoly over pre-paid customers and financial transactions into the wildly successful M-Shwari microcredit product. In the process, it transformed the Commercial Bank of Africa – substantially owned by the Kenyatta family – from a bespoke bank providing services to the elite to one of the most profitable banks in the world…

Two financial relationships were key to this influence. The first was the joint ownership of Safaricom between the British telecorp Vodafone and the Kenyan state, which gave the state a double-dipping interest in the company’s enormous profits: first as shareholder and second as tax collector. By 2017 the state was earning Sh60 billion in tax and licence fees, and an additional Sh12 billion in dividends – a total that meant a tenth of the revenues raised by the state came from a single firm.

During the year that the NDRS was being debated, Safaricom converted its M-Pesa monopoly over pre-paid customers and financial transactions into the wildly successful M-Shwari microcredit product. In the process, it transformed the Commercial Bank of Africa – substantially owned by the Kenyatta family – from a bespoke bank providing services to the elite to one of the most profitable banks in the world, offering credit and banking facilities to the majority of adult Kenyans – most of whom were very poor. During 2016, 35 million Kenyans used mobile banking to conduct 1.5 billion transactions for a combined value of Sh3.5 trillion. The number of wretchedly but newly employed field agents servicing this finance industry rose by 10 per cent to 165,000 individuals in the same year. And Safaricom exercises a textbook monopoly over the field, controlling 65 per cent of the SIM card subscriptions and 84 per cent of the mobile banking transactions.

By the end of 2016, M-Shwari was an even purer monopoly of the mobile credit market than its M- Pesa parent. It was being used by 16 million customers to take out 64 million small loans with a total value of $1.4 billion. One in five Kenyans were borrowing from M-Swari in a normal month. A highly simplified, stripped-down informational architecture that exploited the very limited capabilities of the Simcard Toolkit and the IPRS (the opposite of the integrated, interoperable and real-time biometric system proposed for the NDRS) was key to the explosive successs of the Safaricom-CBA product.

In contrast with the NDRS, the M-Shwari loans imposed no new identification process on borrowers. For loans of less than sh2500, M-Shwari relied only on the original M-Pesa paperwork – sight of the national ID and a completed application form – that each customer is supposed to have submitted to load the M-Pesa menu and the IPRS blacklist. This frictionless simplicity – turning ignorance and convenience into effective instruments of profit – is now internationally called the “tier-based Know- Your-Customer” procedure. It is intrinsically the opposite of the “clean, complete, correct and secure” registration process that Gatabaki envisaged for the NDRS. It is important to note that it is an instrument of monopoly power because Safaricom can control its risk exposure by relying on the data it owns about users’ purchases of airtime and their relationships with other users. That information – and possible histories of impersonation and PIN-swopping – is not available to the firms’ competitors. It is only in the final decision of blacklisting borrowers that Safaricom reports unpaid M-Shwari debts to the CRBs, effectively blocking those borrowers from future credit and their competitors’ access to future customers. In the short, in the three-year life of M-Shwari, the number of Kenyans – most without any prior connection with the formal banking system – added to the blacklist shared between the CIS and the IPRS has reached three million people (a tenth of the adult population). And nearly 400,000 of those blacklisted have been denied access to future credit for failing to settle debts of less than sh200.

In the years since the demise of the NDRS, Safaricom’s relationship with the Kenyan state has only grown more intimate. The company was an immediate beneficiary of the 14 per cent cap on interest which the Kenyan Central Bank imposed on formal lenders in September 2016 – not least because CBA successfully defended the argument that the 7.5 per cent monthly fee on M-Shwari was an administrative charge and not interest. (The effective interest rate offered on M-Shwari loans approaches 140 per cent over a year of borrowing, but this rate – ten times the legal limit imposed on the formal banks – was still much lower than the returns demanded by informal money lenders.) Safaricom has taken on many of the trophy projects pursued by the Kenyan state since, including a national CCTV surveillance network in 2016, and an e-citizenship project that takes up many of the goals of online convenience that motivated the NDRS.

That the Kenyan state has been strengthened by the rise of Safaricom is probably most evident in the doubling of the population of formal taxpayers in this same period. Yet, it is also clear that this relationship has defeated the NDRS’s goals for addressing the weaknesses of formal credit provision for ordinary Kenyans, especially for firms and for individuals looking to invest relatively large amounts in productive investments. In place of the revolutionary, panoptic over-reach of Gatabaki’s National Digital Registry System, Kenyans have the simplicity and efficiency of M-Shwari. In comparison with the goals of full credit reporting and asset registries, this looks very much like the old pattern of skeletal registration and brutal administration that Africans have long had to endure.

Keith Breckenridge was also published in The Journal of African Studies on the same: “Breckenridge. K. (2019), The failure of the ‘single source of truth about Kenyans’: The NDRS, collateral mysteries and the Safaricom monopoly: Journal of African Studies, Vol. 78 Issue 1, pp 91-111”. It can be accessed here

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete

To some observers, it was a victory that recalls the Biblical David versus Goliath encounter, which will be told long after the “stone” that fell the giant Orange Democratic Party’s political machinery and its candidate in the 5 April Ugenya by-election has been buried deep in the fecund soils of Ugenya. For others, it was the epic duel, which Senator James Orengo – a living legend in Kenya and in Ugenya’s opposition politics – like Hamlet without the Prince, lost spectacularly to David Ochieng, a political neophyte.

In the 5 April Ugenya constituency by-election, a parliamentary candidate called David Ochieng’ of the little-known Movement for Democracy and Growth (MDG) took on a giant, the Orange Democratic Party (ODM), and floored its candidate, Chris Karan. This was not a first in the colorful history of Ugenya, a constituency whose politics has partly been defined by the political rivalries between in-laws James Orengo and his brother-in-law, Stephen Ondiek, who between them, represented Ugenya constituency for 33 years between 1980 to 2013.

Although there is no love lost between Orengo and Ochieng, Ochieng’s victory recalls James Orengo’s Nyatieng’s’ (the grinding-stone) victory in the 1980 Ugenya constituency by-election against Mathews Ogutu, a pro-establishment and a Jomo Kenyatta era minister for local government. Just like Orengo’s victory in 1980 as a Jaramogi Odinga colyte was a slap in the face of pro- establishment politics of acquiescence in the face of betrayals of independence ideals and KANU’s suffocating post-independence one-party state, Ochieng’s, too, is a rejection of Raila Odinga’s pro- status quo politics, which in the face of suffocating party politics demands acquiescence with politics of incompetence or ineptitude at the local level.

The victory was too sweet to be savoured only by Ochieng’ and his constituents. By saying that the by-election was a Raila versus Ruto contest and casting it as a proxy battle for Kenya’s soul…the ODM party barons had invited the dissident United Republican Party (URP) wing of the ruling Jubilee Party to the Ugenya party. Or so, it seems.

Ochieng’s was a sweet victory, a crowning of a successful and drawn out election petition against the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)’s declaration of Chris Karan as the victor of the 2017 Ugenya parliamentary election, in which he handed ODM, especially his Ugenya nemesis, Senator James Orengo, a humiliating defeat.

The victory was too sweet to be savoured only by Ochieng’ and his constituents. By saying that the by-election was a Raila versus Ruto contest and casting it as a proxy battle for Kenya’s soul – where a vote cast for Chris Karan is a vote for Raila Odinga, and a vote cast for David is a vote for William Ruto – the ODM party barons had invited the dissident United Republican Party (URP) wing of the ruling Jubilee Party to the Ugenya party. Or so, it seems.

As if on cue, the “hustler’s” nation, for whom everything ni kujipanga without compunction, showed up for the party, honouring ODM’s ill-thought, and perhaps proxy invitation, to a propaganda-fest. William Ruto, Kenya’s Deputy President, who craves an earthly kingdom, took a celestial leap for it, and tweeted, “Jameni wacheni MUNGU aitwe MUNGU. The hustler nation has spoken, the people have decided”, thereby quickly claiming David’s victory for the “hustler” Christian nation and milking it for its propaganda value: Odinga’s loss is a Ruto’s or self-declared hustler-in-chief’s gain.

Ostensibly, Ochieng’s victory now symbolised the miraculous ways of God, foretelling the coming victory of the kingdom of the hustler-in-chief over his nemesis Raila Odinga, the longed-for Godless earthly kingdom of Kenyans who seldom give a damn about justice or ethics in pursuit of power or wealth.

Ochieng’s MGD victory was a godsend. Irresistible. And they grabbed it, perhaps with the ease with which billions of shillings in dollar denominations is nowadays spirited out of Kenya’s public coffers to a few individual’s secret accounts abroad or safe boxes in local banks under the Jubilee government’s watch.

Senator Susan Kihika, a Ruto disciple, took a less optimistic but a more earthly view of Ochieng’s victory. She tweeted, “Is ODM’s loss in Ugenya & Embakasi South an indication of changing times? Ugenya being ODM stronghold begs the question, is the electorate finally ready to defy dictatorship vote & independently? Perhaps. Interesting times ahead. Kitaeleweka sooner than later!”

“Not a big deal,” Raila Odinga said repeatedly, and rather strenuously, for the “just a drop in the ocean” loss of two parliamentary seats in a week when the twin ODM loss, especially the Ugenya by- election, was trending in the major call-ins in Dholuo breakfast and late night radio broadcasts.

For some of the diehard ODM supporters, the twin parliamentary electoral loss is symptomatic of ODM’s diseased body politic. “It’s suffering a T.B. Not the dreadful respiratory disease, tuberculosis, but the equally devastating “Tugni gi Bagni,” or “conflict and confusion,” for a party that has had a relative clear political vision,” said a disillusioned ODM supporter in a call-in breakfast radio show.

Still, others opined, the victory of these candidates raises several questions that the party ought to answer: why do sitting ODM MPs, who ably discharge their parliamentary responsibilities or good candidates seeking an ODM ticket lose to those said to be the party-anointed but lacklustre performers? Is it the region’s six-piece voting pattern or how the six-pieces of the ODM leaders is put together? Is it because, as some callers opined, “party ni gi wegi” (the party has its owners)? And therefore, have the party nominations, not just the ODM’s, but also other Raila Odinga-led parties’ nominations, been a charade? Does the party respect the wishes and interests of the majority? “Certificate e omo malo.” (Has the party been imposing candidates on the voters?) Is it because we’ve been electing charlatans who claim “wadhi konyo Jakom goyo lweny?” (Is it those who claim they are going to help Raila Odinga fight a war?)

Beyond the biblical analogies, evangelical Christian rhetoric, and the denials of ODM party barons, what does Ochieng’s victory mean? What does it tell us about Luo politics? What hopes does it hold, especially for those from the counties of Siaya, Homa Bay, Migori and Kisumu, who are disgruntled with ODM, especially the party nominations, and increasingly see Raila Odinga’s dominance in Luo politics as a stranglehold on regional democracy? What about those who yearn either for a change or a revolution in the ODM strongholds?

Unlike ODM power barons’ denials, the candid and passionate debates on Ochieng’s victory and ODM’s poor performance in the two by-elections throws up more than Ochieng’s winning formula or ODM’s ways of losing an election, which, for some rank and file members of the party, shouldn’t be waved aside.

Many ODM supporters who called various Dholuo radio stations last week blamed Senator James Orengo for the loss of the Ugenya seat to the MDG party. They put it down to the rivalry between Orengo and Opiyo Wandayi, said to be driven by competing ambitions for the Siaya County’s 2022 gubernatorial election. ODM had wrongly pitched the contest as a national issue, with little local touch, and favoured big roadshow events – which entertain the youth, but which scarcely educate the electorate – and counterproductive threats by Siaya governor, Amoth Rasanga, to punish his Ugenya constituents if they voted for Ochieng’. Yet Ochieng’ has a better development record in Ugenya than the Siaya County government, and carried out a more effective door-to-door campaign attuned to the hopes of Ugenya voters, especially women.

Ochieng is a young and ambitious politician who first came to parliament as an ODM Member of Parliament. His victory points to a deeper crisis gnawing at the heart of the Orange Democratic Movement. ODM not only failed to live up to its name and to its political ideals, but is suffered from a crisis of vision, as some callers pointed out. It also stalled intra-party, inter-generational succession, which is now simmering and might come to the boil before or by 2022.

However, listening to ODM supporters who are still smarting from the party’s loss of Ugenya constituency does suggest that Ochieng’s victory is significant but that it is no more significant than the past victories of “independents” in the current Luo politics. Ochieng joins the league of politicians, such as Olago Aluoch, the MP for Kisumu West on a Ford Kenya ticket, Shakeel Shabbir of Kisumu Town East, who ran as independent in the 2017 general election, and even of the disgraced Okoth Obado, now an ODM governor, who was elected on a PDP ticket in 2013.

Ochieng’s victory, like that of the other “independents”, suggests that ODM or Raila Odinga are not invincible. However, winning an election is still an uphill task. You’ve got to factor Raila Odinga into your winning formula or circumvent it in your campaigns. Strategically, you must be an ally or be seen to be an ally of Raila Odinga’s cause. And as some callers said, those who have successfully run against the ODM wave, such as Olago Aluoch of Kisumu Town West or Shakeel Shabbir, have simultaneously avoided casting their quest for elective office as contests between them and Raila Odinga. They ran on a Raila-zone friendly party or no political party, and thoroughly localised the parliamentary contest while pledging loyalty to Raila’s cause or claiming him as their undisputed leader or leader of the Luo community.

Shakeel Shabbir, popularly known as “Onyango woun Mogo” (Onyango, the owner of maize flour), like Ochieng, bolted out of the ODM in 2017, but ran successfully as an independent. Upon winning, he said, “I still share ODM ideals and want to assure my people that I will stand with the party and leader Raila Odinga.”

Similarly, speaking to the Star after winning, Ochieng’ said, “I avoided the media like the plague since they were going to hype it as a war between me and Raila,” and added, “I have no issue with Raila. In fact, we kept talking when I was in court. There is no bad blood between him and myself. I respect him. I support the handshake, which is the best thing ever to happen to this country.”

Salim Odeny, a suave and eloquent ODM ideologue with a priestly mastery of the Bible, an ecumenical mastery of many Christian denominational hymns, liturgy, and rituals, and a mastery of dead-pan Dholuo put-downs or sexist insults, said that the ODM bigwigs in charge of the Chris Karan campaigns didn’t set the Raila trap well. He says that ODM lost the Ugenya seat, not only because the infighting within the Senator James Orengo-led campaign team, but also because they didn’t frame the contest in terms that resonates with the Ugenya electorate. “They should have asked, who does Uhuru Kenyatta deal with when he wants to deal with a Luo leader, a party leader called Raila Odinga of ODM or a party leader called David Ochieng’ of MDG?” said Odeny. The contest should have been framed as the battle between Raila and Ochieng’ for the leadership of the Luos – who of the two embodies the community’s fears and hopes? – not as a Raila versus Ruto contest.

Ochieng’ saw the trap and lifted the safety hatch. He simply asked his constituents, “Ka udhi ma ok uneno Raila e debe, gone David Ochieng’,” (If you go to the polling booth, and you don’t find Raila’s name on the ballot, then vote for David Ochieng), some callers pointed out. Raila’s absences, literary and figuratively, also worked in Ochieng’s favour.

Citing African Union engagements, Raila made only a single appearance at a funeral in Ugenya during the campaign period. Since the handshake, what he embodies or stands for, the larger-than- life cause cryptically referred to as “lweny” (the war), and the political cause that he has embodied in Luo politics (which gives him a free hand to choose who’s a loyal lieutenant and who’s not) has become foggy at best.

What’s more, “the handshake” has blunted the sharp edge of the “mole” label, the traitor charge, which can cut down one’s political career short, especially for Luo politicians who work with the establishment, either in times of opposition or outside the Raila Odinga umbrella, in times of co- optation.

In 2017, David Ochieng’, who had been dubbed a mole, bore this burden. In 2019, after the handshake, the sharp opposition-establishment distinction is blurred, and the burden has lifted off a little bit. Moreover, unlike James Orengo, who was once a cabinet minister (a minister for lands), Ochieng’ seems to have leveraged his first term pro-establishment connections and delivered collective material goods to his Ugenya constituents better than both James Orengo and the County of Government of Siaya: a medical training centre, a teachers’ training college, a technical institute, subsidised fertilizer to farmers, and a forestry school in the making.

Tactically, by framing the by-election as a local contest and conducting a door-to-door campaign, Ochieng’ outflanked the ODM bigwigs who mounted colourful roadshows and pitched the battle as a national contest between Raila Odinga and William Ruto. Backed by Ugenya professionals, he turned his first term development record as an ODM MP into an asset and bait: “I have built a TTC, and a MTC here, but the MTC College could collapse, because it offers only one course. Give me a chance to complete this project,” Ochieng, reportedly pitched.

But David Ochieng’, the ambitious rebel politician who says he eschews “politics of lies, personality cult, where you identify a figure of hate”, derides and is disdainful of Orengo’s brand of politics – what he dismissively calls “university type of politics, which no longer works for the masses” – as the kind of politics that has long reached its sell-by date and is a product the fallout that followed the ODM’s post-2013 generational succession politics in Luo politics.

Ochieng told the Star that he left ODM because “the party machinery was not taking my views. There is a lot of suspicion about me and how I work. At some point, I felt I didn’t want to go to parliament.” Moreover, “My party did not like people who can innovate or those giving views. I thought I did not want to go through that, hence, the birth of MDG,” Ochieng’ added, without mentioning the source of this suspicion.

That suspicion was borne out a the Sega Declaration in 2014. David Ochieng’, together with some youthful and freshly elected first-term members of parliament, such as Jared K’Opiyo, Silvanus Osele, Agostino Neto, Junet Mohamed, Millie Odhiambo, Ken Obura, and John Mbadi, sought to reform and re-energise the party after the loss of the 2013 presidential election and to change its leadership. But the doyens of opposition politics, such as Raila Odinga, Anyang’ Nyong’o, and Otieno Ka’jwang,’ read mischief in this move. The ODM MPs, who were party to the Sega Declaration, were viewed with suspicion as fifth columnists.

ODM power barons scattered this group, but didn’t adequately address the discontent, the injustice of the party nomination process, and the feeling of being left out of both the national party power structures and in the ODM county governments, which many youthful members of the party, including the rank and file, feel to date. Dubbed “moles,” the unrepentant signatories to the Sega Declaration faced a stiff challenge for the ODM ticket or opted for alternative political parties. Some, like John Mbadi and Junet Mohamed, beat a retreat and were rewarded with high party positions. Others, like Ken Obura and Silvanus Osele, fell by the wayside. A few, like David Ochieng, and Millie Odhiambo, retreated to their constituencies and worked hard to fortify their hold on them.

Labeled a Jubilee mole, David Ochieng’ felt it doubly, in 2017 and 2019. “There were days we could spend up to shillings 1 million in a day,” Ochieng’ told the Star, without disclosing either what he spent the money on or the total amount of money he spent to secure the seat. Clearly, one million shillings a day, even for a few days of campaigning in a rural constituency, is a little over the top, particularly, for a candidate who says his popularity rests solidly on his unmatched development record.

Ochieng’s triumph over the ODM was sweet, hard-won, and crowning, but still an expensive victory. It reeks of a BUY-election. Although Ochieng says that his solid development record as an ODM member of parliament put him in good stead, he spent heavily to secure the seat, even when he avoided a “big entourage” and occasionally rode a bicycle while looking for votes.

Ochieng’s victory reminds the ODM party, and Raila Odinga, in particular, that that until ODM embraces internal party democracy, addresses the generational succession question, and Raila unequivocally states what the party stands for, the independents (who voters say are good leaders, but often fall out of favour with the ODM party barons) will always eat Baba’s lunch in a free and fair election – especially when the voters can’t tell what Raila Odinga stands for or what the political vision of ODM is since he signed a truce with the Jubilee government.

Questions arise: Is Raila still hunting, holding the leopard by the tail or has he domesticated the beast? Or is he stroking its fur, cleaning its bloodstained paws and its incisors while his core constituency, clawed or killed by the beast in the last electoral encounters, cries for justice? Does ODM fight for democracy and good government only at the national level? What about the ODM-led constituencies and the counties?

Ochieng’s victory too, is just an exception that proves the rule: the common sense that binds Raila Odinga and his die-hard political base still holds a contested sway, However, the yawning democratic deficits of the ODM party, which the ODM rank and file complain about on radio, and the ineptitudes of Raila’s lieutenants in local politics and in organising a smooth ODM generational succession, coupled with the incompetence, corruption, and nepotism of county governments, especially in Siaya, Homa Bay, and Migori counties, will ultimately claim ODM’s dominance in Luo politics.

Ochieng’s victory is good news, especially to those who find Raila’s two-decade long dominance in Luo politics too suffocating and too stifling for democratic aspirations. It reveals a chink in Raila’s amour. However, those yearning for a change or revolution in ODM have a tough task ahead. Electoral defeats, like Ugenya’s, though highly embarrassing, hardly chip at the Odingas’ dominance in Luo politics.

The twin electoral defeats, a recoil from a third, and the Wajir senatorial election reminds ODM that a coalition of widely different political dynasties, united only by a common fear of the prospects of a Ruto presidency, is unlikely to energise the ODM support base. ODM could suffer humiliating defeats in the hands of a wily, tenacious, and daredevil opponent bound by no compunction.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Follow us on Twitter. Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete

Donald Trump’s election victory dismissed many conventional assumptions about the conduct and content of American political discourse. Once in office, the new president began hollowing out the nation’s foreign policy institutions. He threw allies under the bus, embraced dictators, and took every opportunity to undermine the multilateral institutions sustaining the post-World War II order. By jettisoning the framework containing nuclear weapon proliferation and withdrawing from the Paris consensus on global warming, he ratcheted up the risk factors facing the planet. On the domestic front, he bulldozed his party and staff into lining up behind him. The generals tried to limit the damage his maverick foreign policy was wreaking abroad. They failed.

Unlike the tweeting, dissembling, and mocking the norms governing national politics for generations, most of the president’s agenda represented policy positions that can be contested or debated. But when Trump came to the defence of the Charlottesville neo-Nazis, it confirmed many critics’ worse-case scenarios. The number of hate groups in the United States increased by 7 per cent last year and hate crime reports increased by 17 per cent, according to the FBI. In a polity where elected leaders usually gravitate towards the middle to implement their agenda, Donald Trump continues to weaponise the polarising subterranean logic that turned Washington into what General Kelley, the former Chief of Staff, described as “Crazy Town”.

Enter Ilhan Omar

The Democratic Party captured the US House of Representatives in the 2018 by-elections. Eighty- one of the record number of 102 women elected to the House are Democrats. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, expressed the hope of many: “When our new members take the oath, our Congress will be refreshed and our democracy will be strengthened by the optimism, idealism and patriotism of this transformative freshman class.”

Progressives celebrated Ilhan Omar as a victory for inclusion, the Somali nation claimed ownership of their daughter, and The Intercept announced that she was “Trump’s Worst Nightmare.”

The Somalia-born Ilhan Omar arrived in Washington DC with the kind of backstory that synergised the attention focused on the quintet of new minority Congresswomen that included the Palestinian American, Rashida Mtlaib, and the 23-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar walked into the national spotlight with panache and charisma, and took a seat in the high profile Congressional Committee for Foreign Relations. A successful proposal to adjust the ban on head covering saw Omar became the first woman to wear a hijab on the House floor.

Progressives celebrated Ilhan Omar as a victory for inclusion, the Somali nation claimed ownership of their daughter, and The Intercept announced that she was “Trump’s Worst Nightmare.”

Omar has constructed her political career on domestic social issues: affordable housing and healthcare, support for a living wage, student loan debt forgiveness, universal access to higher education, proactive climate change policies, and the protection of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She strongly opposes the immigration policies of the Trump administration and the Muslim travel ban.

The pivot to Foreign Relations encouraged expectations in this part of the world that she would focus fresh attention on African issues and insight into the shifts accompanying renewed interest across the greater Horn of Africa region.

Beto O’Rourke, the presidential hopeful exemplar of the new blood political wave, was recently revealed as a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective. An ex-hacker running for national office would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. A reporter covering the story declared, “There has been no better time to be an American politician rebelling against business as usual.”

Omar proceeded to put the hypothesis to the test by igniting a firestorm that quickly escalated into the resurgent Democratic Party’s first internal crisis. It began when she tweeted lyrics from a rap song, “Its all about the Benjamins.” The reference to the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC)’s financial tentacles was far less derogatory than calling Mogadishu Somalis ‘”skinnies”, or Iraqis “towelheads”. But Omar was vilified for promoting ethnic stereotypes, and then accused of being anti-Semitic after she defended her position.

In a Democratic primary campaign devoid of any religious or ethnic animosity, the Congresswoman defeated the Jewish incumbent of over forty years. But now she was in Trump’s Crazy Town. Instead of mollifying the critics, her attempt to place her opposition to AIPAC in context provoked even more intense condemnation. Some of the strongest reactions to her statement came from within her own party. It did not help that she broke ranks with the Party’s opposition to Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro, the one foreign policy issue enjoying bipartisan consensus. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used AIPAC’s annual conference to attack her, unleashing the formidable clout of the US pro-Israeli media industry.

The impunity that AIPAC has enjoyed within the Washington establishment over the years is a basic fact documented in analyses by many Jewish critics of Israel’s policies. When CNN’s Jake Tapper invoked the “words count” meme, the context implied that the person who utters them counts even more. A Somali news website observed that Ilhan Omar was singled out for three intersecting reasons: she is black; she is Muslim; and she is a woman.

The tweet detonated a firestorm of vindictive rage and self-righteous condemnation. The range of supporters who came to Ms. Omar’s defence, including a delegation of Jewish rabbis, received considerably less coverage. Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hassan speculated that “she, perhaps naively, thought she was highlighting a powerful and reactionary lobby group, no different to the NRA.”

At the time when Ilhan Omar was being placed on the rack, Trump avoided being sucked into the anti-Semitism maelstrom. He was given a pass despite his flagrant stereotyping of ethnic minorities, including a history of insulting Jews. Private citizen Trump is on record for saying only “short guys that wear yarmulkes” should count his money—itself a dig at the black accountants working for his organisation. He used to keep a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table. After he became president, as the author of an article differentiating anti-Zionism from anti- Semitism reported, Trump invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress (who is on record for saying Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus) to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the US embassy in Jerusalem. The “good people” marching with Charlottesville Neo-Nazis he defended were chanting, among other things, anti-Jewish slogans.

In 2016 Trump tweeted a “Crooked Hilary” campaign ad showing Clinton next to a Star of David superimposed against a background of 100 dollar “Benjamins”. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grandmaster of the recent Spike Lee BlacKKKlansman fame, completed the circle by congratulating her: “Ilhan Omar is now the most important member of the House of Representatives”.

Crooked Hillary — Makes History! #ImWithYou #AmericaFirst pic.twitter.com/PKQhYhMmIX

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2016

Instead of interrogating the long tradition of hate resurfacing in the recent series of anti-Semitic violence across the US and Europe, the Ilhan Omar news cycle provided a timely gift for the Trump White House that diverted attention from Jared Kushner’s controversial security clearance, reports of the ballooning 51-billion-dollar trade deficit, and the farcical Kim Jong Un summit in Hanoi.

The House Democrats’ motion to condemn crimes of hate in its diverse forms passed with only four dissenting Republican votes. The March 15 attack by a Trump-inspired white extremist on the mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand provided the counterpoint that placed the debate in its proper perspective.

The dual loyalty contradiction

Ilhan Omar was already a marked woman who has had to fend off attacks from conservative media outlets since she ran for a seat in the Minnesota Legislature. The controversy provided a fresh entry point for recycling the kind of vicious allegations the fake news industry has raised to a commercialised art form. She vented on the hypocrisy of her critics in a robust response delivered at an informal gathering in Washington. This an abridged excerpt of what she said:

“We know what hate looks like. We experience it every single day. We have to deal with death threats. I have colleagues who talk about death threats. I have people driving around my district looking for my home, for my office, causing me harm. I have people every single day on Fox News and everywhere, posting that I am a threat to this country. So I know what fear looks like. The masjid I pray in in Minnesota got bombed by domestic white terrorists. So I know what it feels to be someone who is of faith that is vilified. I know what it means to be someone whose ethnicity is vilified. I know what it feels to be of a race—like I am an immigrant, so I don’t have the historical drama that some of my black sisters and brothers have in this country, but I know what it means for people to just see me as a black person, and to treat me as less than a human. And so, when people say, ‘you are bringing hate’, I know what their intention is. Their intention is to make sure that our lights are dimmed…What people are afraid of is that there are two Muslims in Congress that have their eyes wide open, that have their feet to the ground, that know what they’re talking about, that are fearless, and that understand that they have the same election certificate as everyone else in Congress.”

Instead of setting the record straight, a semantic stumble re-energised the backlash:

“So for me, I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. I want to ask, why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil-fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy.”

The politics of dual loyalty has a long history in the United States, dating back to the role of British royalists during the Revolutionary War. It evolved into an unwritten rule that capped the political mobility of minorities like Jews and Catholics. Joseph Kennedy came to understand that it was a glass ceiling that he would never be able to rise above. He curbed his presidential ambitions and instead devoted his resources and political influence to position his sons to break the myth of American Catholics’ loyalty to the Vatican. John F. Kennedy cleared the way for Catholics and Irish Americans to vie for the highest political office.

The politics of dual loyalty has a long history in the United States, dating back to the role of British royalists during the Revolutionary War. It evolved into an unwritten rule that capped the political mobility of minorities like Jews and Catholics. Joseph Kennedy came to understand that it was a glass ceiling that he would never be able to rise above. Despite the inroads made by African, Muslim, and other ethnic candidates vying for elected offices—including Bernie Sanders’s challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination—the dual loyalty question never went away as a convenient prism for challenging the patriotism of minority communities. For American Muslims, the problem of Western Muslim radicalisation has recast the dual loyalty issue in stark terms. During the Republican primaries, Ben Carson openly stated that a Muslim should never become president of the United States.

According to American intelligence sources, as many as 20,000 foreign fighters joined ISIS’s ranks, about 3,400 of them from Western nations. FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee placed the statistic in perspective. He reported that “upwards of 200 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria to participate in the conflict”. The Nazi’s Bund operated openly in the US during the run-up to World War II without generating a significant backlash against German Americans, even while the U-boats were sinking hundreds of American vessels. Japanese-Americans, in contrast, were interred in camps after Pearl Harbor.

The integration process in the United States has evolved since these events, as Ilhan Omar’s and the election of less prominent ethnic candidates to local offices indicate. But her “foreign allegiance” reference triggered an avalanche of alt-right and pro-Israel reactions focusing on her own political connections to Somalia and Islam.

PJ Media challenged Omar’s automatic security clearance by citing her activism within the Somali community. It focused on a meeting with Somalia’s then presidential candidate, Mohammed Abdullahi “Farmajo”, referring to his subsequent victory as “one of the most fraudulent political events in Somalia’s history”. It alleged that the meeting led to Ilhan Omar’s brother-in-law, Mohamed Keynan, being appointed to a high-level position in the Somali government.

Another website stated that her allegiance to the Qu’ran outweighs any allegiance she may have claimed to make to the US constitution. A petition launched to remove her from office claimed that the “Qur’an appears to legalise hatred of specific people groups.” Anti-Israeli views gathered from ethnic Somalis serving in Minnesota jails backed up their claims while reinforcing the accusations of Omar’s Islamist affiliations repeated in Saudi and Israeli press attacks during her campaign.

In an insightful analysis of citizenship, Stephen Njuguna pointed out that most Africans are dual nationals by birth. He used Kenya’s post-multiparty political violence to illustrate how allegiance to community can undermine a citizen’s obligations to the nation.

For Somalia – now a nation no longer tethered to a contiguous territory or physical boundaries – its diaspora citizenship combines sanctuary from the event horizon of clan politics, while supporting many unique opportunities. For example, a Somali friend of mine is an Australian-Bimaal dual citizen. He ran a business from Kenya, was appointed to serve as liaison to the diaspora by the first transitional federal government in Somalia, and assisted the Australian navy with critical intelligence on the western Indian Ocean piracy epidemic.

The Red Sea region is now an important arena for a new Great Game drawing in a complicated array of great and second-tier powers. The Somali government facilitates American military operations in one of the Forever War’s most turbulent theatres. Djibouti is the base for AFRICOM (US Africa Command) operations across the continent. Both Farmajo and Keynan are American citizens; many other diaspora elites have held high political offices in the succession of post-collapse Somalia governments.

My guess is that Western intelligence mandarins for the most part view such dual nationals as insider assets – a long-term soft power advantage not available to the likes of Xi JinPing and Vladimir Putin – not a dual loyalty threat.

American Jews became the most successful exemplar of minority success in the US by turning the Israel dual loyalty issue into a proxy for national security. On the other hand, Omar’s relationship with Somali leaders reinforces her anti-Islamist credentials.

But at this juncture, there is nothing to be gained and much to lose from her pre-congressional links to the Somalia homeland. As one contributor on a Somali blog stated, “If I was her I would stay out of Somali politics. You don’t want to alienate US Somali voters and people back in Somalia don’t care about her or her endorsement.”

The 2020 reckoning

The upside-down methods and polarising narratives that date back to the culture wars of the Ronald Reagan era now fuel the alt-right’s dumbed-down clash of civilisations algorithm. Their media warriors manipulate the dual loyalty issue to promote America’s own tribal rebellion.

PJ Media is the country’s ninth most conservative website, and the Omar-Farmajo story spawned comments associating Democratic voters in Minnesota with the “enemy”: “The simple-minded Left- wing voters are just as much an enemy as any Jihadi, but they are too stupid to figure out how much damage they are doing to this country.” Another commenter said the problem would persist until the coming civil war sorts things out.

These words function as a thinly-veiled call for action, like the August 2017 bombing of the Dar Al- Farooq Islamic Center in Minneapolis by three members the White Rabbits militia. Donald Trump’s threatening reference to his own simple-minded supporters endorsed these sentiments: “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough – until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

It remains to be seen how the AIPAC furore will influence Omar’s long-term contribution to the “optimism, idealism and patriotism” Nancy Pelosi referred to. The incident underscored some cautionary observations regarding timing and strategy.

Around the same time, the few hundred MAGA-hatted protestors gathered at the March 23 event in Los Angeles where Omar was giving a speech signaled the passing of this particular storm. These kind of warnings nevertheless raise the stakes for the potentially “transformative freshman class” in the much more challenging battles now taking form. Nate Silver and his data-driven 548 crowd estimated that Donald Trump would stand a 50-50 chance of being re-elected if the national elections were to be held now.

Omar’s freshman colleague from Brooklyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, reset the climate change debate by tabling her comprehensive Green Plan that featured policy positions that demanded a sober response. Although a number of Democrats dismissed the document as unfeasible, the Plan moved the discussion forward and expanded the space it occupies.

Ilhan Omar would do well to use a similar comprehensive policy agenda to connect the dots between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s failed war in Yemen and Trump’s callous abandonment of the Kurds (the real warriors who defeated ISIS). She should cultivate bipartisan support for causes, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s condemnation of the Chinese re-education camps in Xinxiang and made-to-order issues like the horrors visited on Africans trafficked through Libya. Above all, she needs to retake control of her narrative.

Israel was not the ideal subject for a maiden foray into foreign policy, however inadvertent. In any case, the country that now ranked fourth among the world’s most unpopular governments has its own long-term security dilemmas, as highlighted by the in-house critique authored by the University of Jerusalem professor, Martin von Creveld.

On the other side of the divide, the emergent Muslim female leadership personified by Omar and Tlaib and many other less recognised advocates elsewhere may over time invert Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations focus on the disruptive impact of the young Muslim male demographic.

There are, however, more immediate concerns at this moment. The two outspoken female representatives are popular in their constituencies but not so much elsewhere. Positive poll ratings at the national level for the articulate Alexandria’s Ocasio-Cortez hover around 25 per cent, disapproval slightly higher, and her Democratic socialist colleagues are probably lower after the recent cat fight. Their rock star status and the aggressive positioning accompanying the new representatives’ high profile entrance has created frictions among the Democratic Party’s rank and file politicians who grind out the results. Their fascinating but too large field of presidential candidates is a potential damper on voter turnout, and Donald Trump is riding the crest of a vibrant economy that has seen real worker income rise for the first time in a decade.

I expect Ilhan Omar will prove to be resilient in the face of challenges like the representation trap, which arises when controversy involving prominent minority individuals encourages more self-policing from within their community.

The shit storm over the Benjamins was a timely warning puncturing the euphoria over the new Democrats. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is already using their agenda as a campaign wedge. Instead of worst nightmare, Ilhan Omar is exactly the kind of prop Trump exploits to mobilise support.

I expect Ilhan Omar will prove to be resilient in the face of challenges like the representation gap, which arises when controversy involving prominent minority individuals encourages more self- policing from within their community. When Rashida Mtlaib uttered her “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker” statement, one blogger backed the American Muslims who criticised her because “when you are a minority, people judge you not as an individual but as the group you belong to”.

She responded to this scenario by declaring: “There is an interest in putting us in the box of constantly defending our identities and I am not interested in being in that box. I am interested in defending my ideas and not my identity.” Ayaan Hersi created a political niche for Muslim women by blowing up the box. Ilhan Omar faces a more difficult escape route. But focusing on what she does well, supporting working class social issues, and turning out the vote, she increased voter participation by 37 per cent in her district – a good place to start. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete

Kenya’s Supreme Court is in the eye of a storm. Four members of the apex court face allegations of bribery and impropriety. The Chief Justice himself faces a petition. The Deputy Chief Justice faces the prospect of criminal charges if an ongoing constitutional case is determined against her. One of the Supreme Court judges has declined to appear before the Judicial Service Commission (JSC), citing constitutional immunity. Lower down the rung, a judge of the High Court who was found unfit has challenged the decision. His appeal has, however, been dismissed by the Supreme Court. Several other High Court judges could face tribunals depending on the findings of the committees set up to investigate the complaints against them. Some of the complaints may turn out to be not worthy of the formation of a tribunal. However, the fact that there are so many complaints against members of the Supreme Court erodes the confidence that should be attached to the apex court, and by extension, to the whole Judiciary.

It is said that when Julius Caeser’s wife, Pompeia, allowed a man dressed as a woman into a Roman religious festival strictly reserved for women, Caeser divorced her. The whole thing had been a prank and Pompeia had no intentions of impropriety. Aware of this, the citizens of Rome enquired why Caeser had divorced his wife. “The wife of Caeser must be above suspicion,” was the Great Emperor’s response. Hence the comparison with the level of integrity expected of a judge.

Perception plays an important role in the discharge of justice. Some 118 years ago, Lord Charles Bowen, while setting aside the ruling of the Lord Chief Justice who had determined an appeal in a case involving his own brother’s architectural firm, said, “Like Caeser’s wife, a judge must be beyond suspicion.”

Now one may ask where Caeser’s wife fits in all this? What does Caeser’s wife have to do with the integrity of a judge?

A transparent, reliable and accountable Judiciary is vital in the furtherance of the rule of law, which is fundamental to constitutionalism and democracy. It cannot be gainsaid that right from the recruitment, functioning, supervision, to the removal of judicial officers, the process must be rigorous, transparent, accountable and free from influence. To properly carry out their mandate, judicial officers must be insulated from victimisation arising from the discharge of their judicial functions. Conversely, they must conduct themselves with the propriety expected from those entrusted with great power.

Justice before 2010

Prior to the enactment of the 2010 constitution, the appointment of the Chief Justice was the sole prerogative of the president. He was also the appointing authority in the appointment of judges, the only rider being that with such appointments, he was to act in accordance with the advice of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC).

An examination of the composition the JSC, however, clearly showed that the president held sway in such appointments. Composed of the Chief Justice, the Attorney General, two judges appointed by the president and the chair of the Public Service Commission, all members of the JSC were direct or indirect appointees of the president and, therefore, beholden to him.

Another contract judge, Patrick O’Connor, was sacked by the Chief Justice when he resisted a transfer to Meru. When O’Connor questioned whether the Chief Justice had the powers to sack him, he was criticised by the political class. Not long after, in 1988, Parliament amended the constitution to remove the security of tenure of judges.

Then there were the “contract judges”, who were mostly British citizens. Their contracts were renewable at the government’s discretion. Some of these judges were so beholden to the Executive that, in one instance, the by then Chief Justice, Alan Robin Hancox, in 1991 went as far as advising members of the bar and bench that their loyalty was to the head of state.

Another contract judge, Norbury Dugdale, found himself in conflict with lawyers and members of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) due to the consistency of his decisions in favour of the Executive. Supporting an earlier call by nine members of the LSK in 1991 to have a tribunal established for the removal of Chief Justice Hancox and Justice Dugdale in September of that year, 107 lawyers signed a memorandum calling for the resignation of the two. (The Weekly Review Sep 6, 1991, page 4.)

Not all of the contract judges acted as gatekeepers for the Executive. Not all of them were malleable to the whims of the head of state. The fierce independence of Justice Derek Schofield, a contract judge, comes to mind. In 1978, a family filed a writ of habeas corpus seeking the production of their family member, Mbaraka Karanja. When Justice Schofield ordered the production of Karanja, the police said that he had been shot while escaping and had been buried. The judge then insisted the body be exhumed. Even after the opening of 19 graves, there was still no body of Karanja. Justice Schofield then threatened the Director of Criminal Investigation with contempt, prompting Chief Justice Cecil Miller to remove the case from the judge and to transfer him to Meru. Justice Schofield chose to resign than put up with this blatant interference. He would later say that the Chief Justice had informed him that his actions had been at the behest of President Moi. (Nairobi Law Monthly 49. Feb/Mar, 1992, and also Nation newspaper, 11 October 2008, interview with Okwemba.)

At the lower tier of the judiciary were the magistrates. Greater in number than the judges, and considered the true face of the Judiciary, they worked in far-flung stations. The JSC exercised complete control over their appointment. The law afforded them nothing in terms of security of tenure and they could be sacked at any time through mechanisms that were not transparent.

They worked alongside police prosecutors. Often considered enforcers for the Executive, their courts acted arbitrarily with little regard for the law or procedure. The extent of their emasculation by the Executive was at its most obvious during the Mwakenya trials. Scores of intellectuals, students, politicians and ordinary wananchi were arrested, tortured and charged with belonging to proscribed groups. The accused persons were “tried” and convicted in the magistrate’s courts, outside court hours, usually in the evenings without the benefit of counsel. (See KNHRC 2009 publication “Surviving after Torture”, pages 41-42.) One of the accusations against the twelfth Chief Justice, Benard Chunga, in 2003 when a tribunal for his removal was constituted, was that during his tenure as the Deputy Public Prosecutor, he had condoned and executed programmes of torture and illegal trials in the magistrate’s courts.

Executive interference was not the only factor that influenced the decisions of judicial officers. Far from it. In many cases, it was corruption that subverted the course of justice. So rooted was this vice that the popular saying, “Why hire a lawyer when you can buy a judge?” was an accurate depiction of the state of corruption in the Judiciary. The corridors of “justice” had become a marketplace where the highest bidder carried the day.

Magistrates who displayed independence were punished. A case in point was in 1994 when Senior Principal Magistrate, Onesmus Githinji; while acquitting six accused persons (famously known as the Ndeiya Six) charged with breaking into a chief’s camp, censured the police and ordered an investigation over allegations of torture. Soon after, he was transferred to a remote court in Kitui, which prompted him to resign.

The impunity with which some judicial officers conducted their affairs was in some instances almost hilarious. In Kisumu, an advocate obtained a photograph of a judge being transported in a vehicle that the same judge had irregularly allowed an auctioneer to attach and sell. When the advocate confronted the judge with this evidence and asked that he disqualify himself from the still ongoing proceedings, he declined. (The same judge would resign rather than face a tribunal during the 2003 “radical surgery” of the Judiciary initiated during the Mwai Kibaki administration.) In Nairobi, a magistrate was found with two sets of written judgments for the same case, one acquitting the accused, the other convicting him. His reason for this embarrassing situation was anyone’s guess.

In remote stations, magistrates were a law unto themselves. Feared by a populace that had long accepted corruption as a way of the courts, they went about their sordid business without a care in the world.

The Radical Surgery

By the time the country was going to the 2002 polls, it was plain to see that it was just a matter of time before some serious intervention was made to try and salvage a Judiciary gone rogue. And come it did in the form of what came to be known as the Radical Surgery.

With the defeat of KANU in the 2002 presidential elections and the ascendance of Mwai Kibaki to power, the stage was set for a radical intervention. An Anti-Corruption Committee chaired by Justice Aron Ringera was promptly constituted to investigate corruption in the Judiciary. Upon completing its work, it tabled a report that chronicled instances ranging from judicial officers receiving money to influence decisions to the seeking of sexual favours to make favourable decisions. It implicated 5 of the 9 Court of Appeal judges, 18 of the 36 High Court judges and 82 of the 254 magistrates country-wide.

This radical crackdown had unmasked powerful men and women, who hitherto, like Caeser’s wife, had been considered above suspicion. Pictures of Court of Appeal judges outside what is now the Supreme Court being helped by family members to load personal belongings into the boots of cars was a reflection of the magnitude of what had transpired. In a brazen, and most would say unfair, move, the names of the implicated judicial officers were published in the national press even before they were informed of the accusations against them. This was followed by a withdrawal of their benefits and privileges. (These were to be reinstated many months later.) A two-week ultimatum to resign or be dismissed was issued to them. Many opted for the former. Some of the judges decided to face the tribunals. Justices Waki, Anganyanya, Nambuye, and Mbogoli were some of the judges who were later cleared and resumed their duties as judges.

Years of corruption and impunity within the Judiciary had eroded public confidence. This now ensured that there was little sympathy for these victims of the purge. It was the reason why there was little protest, despite the process of their removal being unfair and unjust. Even when the President, in an unorthodox move, used his authority to appoint 28 acting judges of the High Court to replace the fired ones, there was hardly any opposition.

The President’s move was irregular. The new acting judges had not been subjected to scrutiny. Many believed their appointment was influenced by political, tribal and other considerations, rather than merit. The process was flawed. Consequently, an opportunity to effectively clean up the Aegean stables that our Judiciary had become was lost.

In 2003, Evan Gicheru replaced Benard Chunga as the thirteenth Chief Justice of independent Kenya. An embattled Chunga had opted to resign rather than face a tribunal made up of men he had on many occasions crossed swords with, and whose opinion of him could only be negative.

Business as usual

The Radical Surgery having gobbled up a sizeable chunk of the old faces in the judiciary. Many naively expected a reduction in instances of executive interference and corruption and consequently a marked improvement in the delivery of justice. This was not to be and for obvious reasons.

Firstly, the manner in which the Radical Surgery had been carried out, with little regard for the internationally accepted standards for the removal of judges, greatly eroded morale in the Judiciary. The appointment of 28 acting judges to replace those removed was also far from transparent. The appointees were beholden to the appointing authority, which was still the President. The constitution still allowed him the sole prerogative in the appointment of the Chief Justice. Little wonder then that in 2007, Chief Justice Evan Gicheru, who owed his appointment solely to President Kibaki, was agreeable to irregularly swearing him in as president at dusk in a private function at State House after a highly contested election. The culmination of this was an eruption of violence that left over a thousand dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.

The other reason why the Judiciary would still be hobbled with the problems of old was that the institutional deficiencies remained in place. While the faces of the judicial officers had to a great extent changed, the structures and working conditions for a long time remained the same. Soon enough it was business as usual.

The greatest opportunity to truly revamp the Kenyan Judiciary came with the promulgation of the new constitution in 2010. For the first time, the appointment of the Chief Justice would not be the sole prerogative of the president. The new constitution provided for an independent Judicial Service Commission (JSC). Save for the Attorney General and a couple of other members, the JSC was to be composed of a representative elected by magistrates, judges of the High Court and the Court of Appeal, and two members elected by the Law Society of Kenya, amongst others; all independent of the Executive. The members of the JSC were to forward their choice for Chief Justice to the President. Their single nominee – subject to the vetting of Parliament – would be appointed to head the Judiciary.

The new constitution also mandated Parliament to provide legislation for the vetting of all judges and magistrates who were in office on the 27th of August 2010. This culminated in the enactment of the Vetting of Judges and Magistrates Act No. 2 of 2011 and consequently the appointment of a vetting board by the President in consultation with the Prime Minister. A seasoned advocate, Sharad Rao, was appointed to chair the board. The decision of the board was not to be the subject of question or review in any court.

The Mutunga Era

In June 2011, Willy Mutunga, a well-known human rights activist, one-time chair of the LSK and a former detainee, was appointed the fourteenth Chief Justice. Everyone agreed that with his appointment, the third arm of government was on the way to great heights. The state of the Judiciary at the time of his appointment was summed up in his speech delivered in October 2011.

“We found an institution so frail in its structures; so thin on resources; so low in confidence; so deficient in integrity; so weak in its public support that to have expected it to deliver justice was to be wildly optimistic. We found a judiciary that was designed to fail.”

The new Chief Justice was alive to the dire state of the Judiciary he had been tasked to head. With only 16 High Court stations and 111 magistrate’s courts around the country, a total of 53 judges and 330 magistrates were expected to cater for a population of over 41 million. Morale amongst the magistrates was low. Considered the backbone of the Judiciary, they handled most of the cases in far-flung courts under appalling conditions, yet their salaries, in comparison with what the judges were paid, was measly. There was a huge case backlog, which was not helped by the constant disappearance of files instigated by litigants and even advocates. Financing was low, with a paltry 0.05 per cent of the national budget set aside for the Judiciary in 2010-2011, compared with the international benchmark of 2.5 per cent. This was the Judiciary that Mutunga inherited from Evan Gicheru.

Upon assuming office, Willy Mutunga realised that there were many reports by civil society and task forces formed by past Chief Justices, the latest being the 2009-2010 report by Justice Ouko that recommended improvements in the functioning of the Judiciary. Using most of this material, his team developed what he called The Judiciary Transformation Framework.

The new Chief Justice was considered an outsider – he had not been a member of the Judiciary nor had he practised much as an advocate. So he was bound to meet opposition to his leadership and any proposed reforms. The advantage was that he would not be bound by the cartels that had for a long time taken root in the Judiciary. The confidence in the new Chief Justice was soon reflected in the substantial increase in funding of the Judiciary. Parliament more than doubled the Judiciary’s budget allocation in 2011-2012. The World Bank, GTZ and UNDP committed funds towards the intended transformation.

Mutunga also sought to give the Judiciary a more human face by doing away with some anachronistic traditions. He allowed for less formal attire and did away with symbols such as wigs. Encouraging interaction between judicial officers and court users, he sought to bridge the distance that had been created under the guise of independence and impartiality. He introduced new innovations, like the Daily Court Returns Template tracking the progress of cases.

Then Petition Number 5 of 2013 happened. It challenged the election of Uhuru Kenyatta as the fourth President of the Republic. On 30th March 2013, in a brief statement delivered in an almost cavalier manner, Chief Justice Mutunga dismissed the presidential election petition. A full judgment followed on 16th April of the same year. Criticised for its lack of depth and failure to confront the evidence, it left a blot in the image of a Judiciary that was still struggling to erase an inglorious past.

The presidential petition aside, more than any other Chief Justice, it was Mutunga who squarely faced the institutional bottlenecks that had long dogged the Judiciary. He undertook structured efforts to solve them. His earlier standing in civil society also helped marshal the finances required to transform the Judiciary. The current robust engagement between court users and the Judiciary, hitherto lacking, can be attributed to Mutunga’s efforts at giving the Judiciary a human face.

Current state of the Judiciary

On the 1st September 2017, the Supreme Court, chaired by Chief Justice David Maraga, nullified the disputed 2017 presidential elections and called for fresh elections within sixty days. While the world wowed, an enraged President called the judges of the Supreme Court “wakora” (crooks). The political class swore to “revisit” the issue. Confidence in the Judiciary soared.

The nullification of a presidential election by the apex court was a clear indicator of how far the Judiciary had moved in terms of independence from the Executive. Such a move would never have been thought of in the times of Hancox or Miller.

Upon realising that the intimidation of judges no longer worked, the Executive now sought to control the appointment process. One clear instance was the Amendments to the Judicial Service Act that sought to have the JSC forward three nominees to the President, instead of one, for position of Chief Justice. The LSK successfully petitioned a constitutional court to declare the amendments to be in breach of the doctrine of separation of powers.

Further pointers of independence from the other arms of government were evident in the fearless abandon with which the High Court continued to strike down legislation sponsored by the Executive as unconstitutional. In 2015, a five-judge bench agreed with the views of Justice Odunga and struck out eight offensive clauses in the controversial Security Law (Amendment) Act No 19 of 2014 as being in violation of fundamental human rights. This prompted much criticism from politicians, with threats against sitting judges.

The Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), George Kegoro, in an opinion piece in the Standard newspaper, pointed out other instances of such interference: In one such move the President revoked the membership of two commissioners of the JSC, namely, Rev Samuel Kobia and Kipngetich Bett, while their term had not expired and in disregard of their security of tenure. Another attempt was the insistence on Parliament vetting Justice Warsame, who had been re-elected by the Court of Appeal to the JSC. It took a judgment of the Court of Appeal to scuttle the intended mischief.

The 2016-2017 State of The Judiciary & Administration of Justice Report shows that the number of judges in 2017 had almost tripled to 158 from just 53 in 2011. The number of magistrates had also risen from 330 in 2011 to 421 in 2017. Judiciary funding had almost doubled to 0.99 per cent in 2017. The maximum salary of a judge of the High Court was now slightly over Sh1 million, while that of a Chief Magistarate was over Sh700,000.

With these marked improvements in the numbers and remuneration of judicial officers, why was it that the Transparency International Bribery Index 2017 still considered the Kenyan Judiciary as the second most corrupt institution in the country after the police? Why was there still a perception amongst Kenyans that corruption was still rife in the Judiciary?

The immunity of members of the judiciary from any action or suit for anything done or omitted in good faith, in the lawful performance of a judicial function, is guaranteed in Article 160(5) of the 2010 constitution. Case law also suggests that no action can lie against a judicial officer for anything done within his or her jurisdiction even if done maliciously and in bad faith. (See Anderson -vs-Gorrie [1895] 1QB, 668. A similar position was held by our courts in Bellevue Dev Co Ltd –vs- Justice Francis Gikonyo & 7 others, [2018] eKLR.) What is suggested is that you can never sue a judicial officer for personal liability over anything he does within his jurisdiction even though it is done with malice. It matters not that his decision is so tainted with malice and militates against the evidence to the extent that it can only be attributable to extraneous factors.

Remedy lies in lodging a complaint with the JSC against such a judicial officer, and that’s just about where it ends. Immunity of judicial officers from personal liability for acts while in office, as provided in Article 160(5), suggests that it survives the officer’s tenure. Not even the President of the Republic is offered such immunity. The immunity accorded to a President under Article 143 of the constitution over acts carried out while in office does not extend past his tenure. It also allows for the period of limitation of time for any anticipated action against the President to stop running during his term in office.

It is common knowledge that the complaint process against judicial officers is slow and can remain undetermined for years. One of the reasons is that commissioners of the JSC hold other demanding jobs and enterprises. These men and women only meet occasionally. Judicial officers facing complaints have been known to brag that such complaints will not see the light of day due to the slow process. Others who have been suspended from office as their cases await determination also complain of the slow pace with which their cases are handled. Perhaps the time is right for the implementation of the Sharad Rao-led Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board recommendations of having a permanent Complaints Tribunal to handle such complaints.

The safeguard of immunity, together with the principles of independence and impartiality, are tailored to assist judicial officers to carry out their onerous task of dispensing justice. This has at times been abused. It is not uncommon for an errant judicial officer to shelter behind the iron veil of independence to escape accountability. There is a need to re-engineer these parameters and strike a functional balance between immunity, independence, impartiality and accountability of members of the bench.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete

Sometime in mid-2017, Deputy President William Ruto led a team of Jubilee Party MPs, senators and some governors deep into the Arror forest in Marakwet West. It was a big team because it was ferried in three helicopters. The Deputy President had taken the team to the forest to show them where one of two anticipated dams – the Arror hydroelectric power station (HEP) – would be located. The other dam that was to be built was Kimwarer-Talaal, which was to be on the Kimwarer River in Keiyo South, Elgeyo Marakwet County.

“We flew over the dense, thick forests of Arror and Kimwarer and from high above, we could see the mighty Arror River roaring down the plains,” said Beatrice Ilachi, then a nominated senator. “But some of us wondered loudly how the dam was ever going to be constructed. The landscape is not only very steep, it would also mean that a huge chunk of the gazetted forest would have to be cleared off.” Many in the group wondered whether the dams would further encroach on the country’s remaining dwindling forest cover.

When the choppers landed on some flat land, Ruto led the team into scaling the steep heights of the Arror forest. “We had not been prepared for the climbing – from our attires to the shoes – least of all, mentally,” said Ilachi. “Half way climbing through the thicket and scrubland, we gave up, many of us by then had even removed our shoes.”

“It was about two months to the elections [in August 2017], and so it was obvious that countrywide campaigns had commenced. On our way to Arror and Kimwarer sites, we had stopped at Tot in Baringo County to presumably check on the state of the county’s food security. After touring the supposedly dams’ sites, we flew to West Pokot for more campaigns.” said the former senator. “We didn’t hear of the dams’ story again until last December, when talk of an Italian company and visits to Italy were made by the DP and his team and now with the explosion of the magnitude of the scandal.”

The two multi-purpose dams were supposed to cost an arm and a leg. The latest sum given of between Sh63 billion ($630 million) and Sh38 billion ($380 million) for Arror and Sh28 billion ($280 million) for Kimwarer have generated so much heat within the ruling Jubilee Party that the Treasury Cabinet Secretary, Henry Rotich, had to be grilled for two days at the Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DCI) offices on Kiambu Road and made to answer some 300 questions relating to the dams’ financing. (Rotich arrived at the DCI at 6am on 5 March, 2019 and was questioned the whole day. The following day, the grilling was so intense that he requested for his favourite liquor drink to be delivered to him in the afternoon to cool his nerves.)

The Deputy President’s front line brigade, led by the cantankerous Kapseret MP Oscar Sudi, have cried foul, accusing the Jubilee wing of President Uhuru Kenyatta of opening a succession war to bar Ruto from succeeding the President come 2022. Seemingly addressing the DCI boss George Kinoti, he recently lambasted and accused him of being used by some “crooked” forces within the government to destroy Ruto by waging a smear campaign against the person of the Deputy President. In his characteristic war-like utterances at a public rally in his constituency, Sudi lunged at President Uhuru and asked him to state categorically whether he was also engaged in a mendacious campaign to mudsling his deputy. “This dams’ saga is not about fighting corruption, but fighting William Ruto,” wailed Sudi. “If you [President Uhuru] don’t want William Ruto, just state it openly instead of engaging in purportedly phantom-like corruption wars all over the county, but in real sense your agenda is to sideline the DP.”

The beginning of a scandal

Ruto first talked of the construction of the dams in May 2016 at St Patrick’s High School in Iten. At the school’s function, he spoke of plans to build three dams: Arror, Embobut and Kimwarer (all located in forests), which he said would generate 125megawatts of power and would cost Sh80 billion. David Kimosop, the Managing Director of the Kerio Valley Development Authority (KVDA), who was present, said that construction of the dams would be completed “before end of year, once Treasury released funds.”

Kimosop even stated that a down payment of Sh4.9 billion (15 per cent of the total cost) had been made for the design of the Arror dam. “Construction work is expected to commence around September or October [2018], after detailed design plan is carried out.” The KVDA boss also stated that 400 hectares of forestland would be acquired from Kenya Forest Service (KFS) in exchange for 570 hectares of private land.

Exactly two years later, in 2018, the chairman of National Land Commission, Mohammad Swazuri, said it had begun acquiring 8,000 acres of land for the construction of Arror and Kimwarer dams. Swazuri would go on to say that Sh63 billion had been set aside to buy land for people’s resettlement and to compensate about 800 families.

However, a month ago, the Kenya Forest Service pulled out of the deal, arguing that the project was ridden with controversy and corruption. “The matter failed to go through after the project was hit by allegations of corruption,” said Benjamin Kanyili, head of Kenya Forest Service North Rift Conservancy.

“One of the biggest lessons that is coming out of these mega scandals perpetrated during the first term of the Uhuruto presidency is the president’s lackadaisical attitude towards his deputy and sole responsibility of taking presidential charge,” said a former women’s representative who was also part of the Deputy President’s campaign trip to the dams’ site and who requested anonymity. “I remember early on in their dual rulership, we Jubilee Party Kikuyu MPs, having a sitting with the president and cautioning him against being too trusting of his deputy. But he brushed aside our concerns, claiming we needed to trust Ruto by giving him space to work and be in charge.”

“The dams’ projects were among the key drivers of the Jubilee government’s economic push and development, as captured in their first manifesto,” said the former women’s rep. “The other major project included the Galana-Kulalu Irrigation Scheme. Both of them were a total flop because there are some people in the government who didn’t see them as economic growth flagships, but as projects to rip off the state.”

The former women’s rep said that President Uhuru was now reaping the bitter fruits of having relegated his core duties to his deputy “who apparently took advantage of the president’s good- naturedness and his laid-back pose. Let us not kid ourselves – Ruto was the president in the first term.” In the initial days his first term, the president okayed the dams’ projects, confident in the knowledge that they were being handled efficiently and professionally by his deputy and the relevant ministries, said the former MP. “The dams’ projects were among the key drivers of the Jubilee government’s economic push and development, as captured in their first manifesto,” said the former women’s rep. “The other major project included the Galana-Kulalu Irrigation Scheme [the one-million-acre agricultural scheme on Tana River that straddles both Tana River and Kilifi counties]. Both of them were a total flop because there are some people in the government who didn’t see them as economic growth flagships, but as projects to rip off the state.”

A former MP from Central Kenya told me he had “very early on raised the red flag about the Galana project and sounded the warning that it looked like some Jubilee functionaries were keen on using the project to siphon billions of shillings”. He said he was ignored by the presidency and in the process created some serious enemies within the Deputy President’s camp. “I became a marked man, and when the time for nominations came, they dealt with me.”

“When the dams’ scandal exploded, the president was very furious with his deputy,” claimed the former women’s rep. “He asked the DP why he had taken advantage of his good-naturedness and trust in him to bungle government projects. Of course, the president, in his fury, said that the state would get to the bottom of the scam and whoever was involved would be punished. But it is not always that easy. Fighting corruption is like walking through on tightrope; you must be very careful how you manage the politics.”

President Uhuru was not only furious and supposedly embarrassed by the magnitude of the corruption engulfing his Jubilee Party government, but he was also shamed internationally. Last month, a British Conservative Party MP contributing to the Brexit motion in Parliament is reported to have cautioned Theresa May on how she managed Britain’s exit from the European Union lest the country found itself having to deal with mega corruption scandals “like the one engulfing Kenya right now”.

The Italian connection

In Italy, La Verita, a conservative-leaning newspaper, picked up the dams’ scandal in Kenya and reported that an Italian company had been fingered in the labyrinthine maze of the dams’ sleaze. “There’s a new investigation coming from Africa,” wrote the paper on March 9, 2019. “This time it relates to an Italian construction giant, CMC of Ravenna, rocked by major scandals in Kenya.” The paper stated that “the investigations affect also four minister of the government of Uhuru Kenyatta. In the middle of this scandal, there are three dams, for a total of value of 800 million Euros. Two of them are built with Itinera (Gavio Group).”

According to www.globalcapital.com, Cooperative Muratoi Cementisti Di Ravenna filed for creditor protection in a court in Ravenna on December 4, 2018. (Around the same time that Ruto visited Rome.) “Distressed CMC Ravenna stokes HY’s Italian Fears,” read the headline story. (HYs stands for high yield.) Coincidentally, the company filed for bankruptcy just when it was about to take another construction job in Uganda – the UGSh500-billion contract work for the construction of the Busega-Mpigi Expressway. In Kenya, by the time CMC was filing for bankruptcy, it had pocked Sh15 billion ($150 million) as down payment and had done just half of the work at Itare Dam in Meru County, which had been valued at Sh38 billion ($380 million).

The “historical” CMC Ravenna, as the La Verita newspaper describes the company started in the beginning of last century, had three jobs in Kenya: Arror, Kimwarer and Itare dams construction, all totaling about Sh150 billion ($1.5 billion). “That’s a whacking lot of money to give to one company,” said a government land economist who was involved in land evaluation for some of the intended dams’ construction. “It means a very influential person was behind the awarding of the contracts to this company. Do you have to be super clever to guess the name of that person other than the president himself?”

The paper listed the chronology of events leading to the contracts. “A contract in Kenya was obtained by CMC in 2014. The other two were signed in 2015 on occasion of a visit to Nairobi by our former Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, who was photographed together with President Uhuru Kenyatta wearing a bullet-proof vest.”

La Verita reported that CMC requested to be admitted to the so-called “arrangement with the creditors” procedure. The paper said the company “is suspected of having paid bribes to win bids related to three dams.”

The work of the company, said La Verita, was meant to be “part of a wider project to redesign the water distribution in Kenya, which was one of the electoral promises of Mr Kenyatta himself.” The paper wrote that a sum of Sh4.9 billion ($49 million) was deposited in a bank in Westlands, “the Nairobi neighbourhood where the [Italian] expats live and international companies have their offices”. The newspaper mentions four cabinet secretaries in connection with the scam: Henry Rotich, the Treasury Cabinet Secretary, Mwangi Kiunjuri, the Agriculture Cabinet Secretary, Najib Balala, the Tourism Cabinet Secretary, and Simon Chelugui the Water Cabinet Secretary.

The newspaper speculated this could be one of the biggest misappropriation of public funds ever experienced in Kenya. In February, reported the newspaper, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Noordin Haji, visited Italy, to, among other things, establish Rotich’s alleged association with Rita Ricciardi, the chairperson of the Italy-Kenya Association. The paper concluded by saying that “in reality, the 2015 negotiation with CMC was managed by the Ministry of Treasury,” clearly placing the onus of the scandal at Rotich’s feet.

Conflict of interest

The Treasury Cabinet Secretary, Henry Rotich, is alleged to be markedly neck deep in the dams’ saga. Sources at the Treasury, who asked that their names not be revealed because they are not authorised to speak to the media, spoke of a person who knew precisely what he was doing in relation to the Arror and Kimwarer dams project.

“Once it was clear that the project had been given the go-ahead, Rotich allegedly bought Elgeyo Sawmills owned by some South Asians through proxies for Sh1 billion,” confided a land economist working at the Treasury. (This is part of the land where KVDA had planned to build the dam.) “In 60 days, Rotich had offloaded the saw mills for Sh6.6 billion. What the CS did was to resell the land to KVDA for a killing.” This is where the real murkiness begins, added the economist. “This is illegal. Rotich technically paid himself in a clear case of conflict of interest, abuse of office and negligence of duty,” said the economist. “The Evaluation Act is very clear: Such a sale of a huge going concern cannot be sold in at least under 90 days. The sale must appreciate for at least six months for it to be resold at 25 per cent of the appreciation.”

Three weeks ago, the former Attorney General, Prof Githu Muigai said at the DCI offices that he had advised Rotich against entering into a deal with CMC Ravenna. Githu said that due diligence had not been done on the Italian company and both Rotich and KVDA ignored his pleas to first conduct a thorough legal/financial status of the company.

The dams’ saga gets murkier when three senior government officials (Susan Koech, Principal Secretary, East African Community and Regional Development, David Kimosop, KVDA MD and Henry Rotich CS Treasury), all coming from the same village in Arror, are alleged to have been involved in the scam. It is alleged that Susan Koech, who was once the North Rift Regional Manager for Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), arranged for payments to be made to the CMC. “By then the dams had been transferred to the EAC ministry for easy follow-up because the scam’s perpetrators’ person was there.”

This is not the first time such shenanigans – of shifting or retaining projects in certain ministries to either follow their minders or stay with them – have taken place. In 1986, Kamau Ngotho, writing in the Sunday Nation, last month said: “So personalised was the Turkwel (Gorge Dam) project, that when the Ministry of Regional Development, under which KVDA fell, was carved out from Mr Biwott’s Ministry of Energy and Regional Development, President Daniel arap Moi issued an executive order that the parastatal be retained in Mr Biwott’s docket.”

Peter Munya, the former Meru governor, who is the current Cabinet Secretary for Industrialisation, served at the East African Community and Regional Development (the ministry in charge of constructing the phantom dams) for six months. “Munya was very uneasy about the goings-on about the dams’ project, which was in his ministry,” said a senior bureaucrat at the ministry. He didn’t want to be suckered up in a mess that was clearly going to blow up sooner than later.”

The bureaucrat told me that there is no love lost between Ruto & Ruto Inc. and Munya. “Munya still smarts from the fact that Ruto organised for his losing of the Meru governor’s seat. He has never forgiven him for that defeat to his political nemesis, Kiraitu Murungi. “So when Rotich allegedly approached Munya and pleaded with him to hush-hush the dams’ murky ongoings, Munya ignored him.” Consider Munya the whistle blower of this particular dams’ sleaze, said the civil servant.

Dams and development

“Dams have long fascinated scientists and politicians alike,” writes Dr Harry Verhoeven. “In the post-independent era of the late 1960s and 1970s, dams become popular in the developing countries seeking to meet the triple challenges of state-building, nation-building and economic development.”

The professor of politics, who has worked in the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa, argues that Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India saw dams as the “modern temples of India, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty through spectacular multiplier effect in industry and irrigated agriculture”.

In Africa, Gamal Abdel Nasser, considered to be the father of Pan-Arabism and the second President of Egypt, viewed the building of the Aswan High Dam – the biggest dam in Africa built in the 1960s – as Egypt’s “second independence”. Aswan has remained Africa’s largest and most important infrastructure project. It is credited with controlling the Nile flood for the first time in history. Aswan Dam is considered to be Egypt’s greatest engineering marvel, possibly only comparable to the construction of the pyramids.

Dr Verhoeven, observes that “dams are believed to magically transform barren wastelands into fertile acreage, elevating the nation and integrating, through irrigation and electrification, the domestic political economy.”

From the 1950s through to the 1970s, the World Bank provided the ideological and financial backing for the construction of hundreds of mega dams across Africa, Asia and Latin America. “But from the 1970s dams as development instruments become contested sites,” reports the don. “They were exposed as huge corruption scandals that contributed to the systemic over-estimation of their benefits. But from 2012, dams seems to be staging a comeback.”

To be continued…

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete Well into its fourth week, the bewildering showdown between Rwanda President Paul Kagame and his Ugandan counterpart, Yoweri Museveni, had predictably produced a heart-rending headline. The news reports said that a woman several months pregnant, an Elizabeth Mukarugwiza, had been chased across the border from Rwanda into Uganda by either the Rwandan army or police.

Eye-witness reports said that Ms. Mukarugwiza, 37, just about beat the Rwandan security to the border. Whatever it was had driven her, and we can only speculate (a prenatal visit to a clinic?), would have been that urgent. Had this episode occurred inside Rwanda itself, what happened next would not have been reported. Were we to hear of it, it would have come as rumor, a thing said of a closed country that without voices or images to back it up, quickly loses steam.

Take the story of three sisters:

As reported in The Observer newspaper, the sisters, daughters of a pastor Deo Nyirigira who lives in Mbarara in Western Uganda, had completed their studies at Ugandan universities and then returned to find work in Kigali. Their father, part of the group extruded from Rwanda in the 1959 upheaval that brought Paul Kagame himself to Uganda, had one time returned to the country after the genocide. After only a handful of years, Mr. Nyirigira realised that he could no longer live in his country. For a second time, he left Rwanda for Uganda. Given his influence as a pastor, the authorities in Kigali grew weary of him and wanted him back. Attempts at kidnapping him are said to have led to the shooting death of one of the suspected Rwandan kidnap squad.

Eyewitness reports said that Ms. Mukarugwiza, 37, just about beat the Rwandan security to the border. Whatever it was that had driven her, we can only speculate that it had been urgent (a prenatal visit to a clinic, perhaps?). Had this episode occurred inside Rwanda itself, what happened next would not have been reported. Were we to hear of it, it would have come as rumour – a thing that quickly loses steam without voices or images to back it up.

Back in Rwanda, and back in the present, with the rise in political tensions now, Mr. Nyirigira’s daughters, because the government could not touch their father, have reportedly been stripped of their jobs. In Rwanda, children may be punished for the infractions of parents; in the worst of times, the unborn were not spared either. One sister was already married with a child. The husband was ordered to divorce her. It was when their father sent them sustenance money that they were apparently taken into custody. But we hear of these events secondhand.

The fate of Ms. Mukarugwiza too would have been rumor were it not for the Ugandan media. But alas, escaping the Rwandan forces counted for naught. No sooner had Ms. Mukarugwiza made it across the border than she collapsed and died, she and her unborn baby.

A moment crackling with significance; there you had the picture, shared across social media, of what appear to be two Red Cross responders, white latex gloved hands, stooped forms, shocked, horrified faces wanting to have a look. The body covered in red, green, then blue and red Maasai blankets. The scene is slopping ground, a wooded glen, heavy jackets giving an idea of altitude and weather. Armed men hounded the expectant mother to death; just like in a gothic, B Movie, the fetus must not be born. It was as if 1994 were reclaiming the soul of Rwanda.

Trying to see it from the perspective of a Rwandan, to not miss-judge the act, however carking, was hard, the central question refusing to go away; in what way does the death of a pregnant woman contribute to the greater good of Rwanda? At 37, Ms. Mukarugwiza would have left behind other children. They will remember, so does that now make them targets to a regime that lives in fear of its victims? (“He who kills Brutus but does not kill the sons of Brutus,” a researcher once quoted the mantra to me). How many times in that country was it justified by saying that the child will be born an enemy? Too rebarbative to contain, and yet human sacrifice, after thousands of years, has still not lost its repugnance. Fascism, the conclusion went, had sunk deep roots into Rwanda, its president, irretrievably fallen to the dark side.

Ugly underbelly

The one link I could use to comprehend what happened to Ms. Mukarugwiza was two decades out of date. The first and last time I was in Rwanda, a few years after the genocide, was March 2003. The first thing I did in Kigali was look up my old classmates who had returned home post-1994. But the once humble, amiable schoolboys of the late 80s and early 90s, I failed to find in the men they had become. In turns brash, and rude, then commanding, suddenly distant, then calm, then uncommunicative, their mercurial, unstable character had caught me off guard in 2003. I took it with whatever fortitude I could muster at that age, rationalizing that few peoples had endured what the Rwandans had gone through.

But for a few years after that, and already disabused of my then, post-genocide, World Bank- sponsored naivety, garnished with western media manufactured facts about post-genocide Rwanda, I paid closer attention. I tried my best not to fall into the binary, this side good, that side bad routine. I read into each report, into each TV segment, the calamitous shift in the character of my old school friends. It was as if once you had seen into peoples’ souls, no mere shift in ideology nor mass media spin, can fool you.

We were not many in the newsroom, so on top of my other beats, I was dispatched to northern Uganda countless times where I spent time with refugees. Covering Rwanda and Congo was one of the most upsetting times of my career as a reporter. The end of the genocide had been heralded as a grand moment, yet in many respects, it signaled the beginning of other horrible events.

And then I paid too much attention. The years starting from 2003 would culminate with my departure from the media in 2006. They were the years of the unravelling of whatever post-Mobutu hiatus might have been in Congo. Congolese refugees were streaming out in all directions. And it seemed back then that the region was on fire. One of the worst massacres in the northern Uganda war came in that span of time. Sudan had just concluded its penultimate, bloody stage of civil war. Garang died in a plane crash. Back then, being a reporter meant that by default, you were a war reporter.

We were not many in the newsroom, so on top of my other beats, I was dispatched to northern Uganda countless times. I spent time with refugees. Of Rwanda and Congo, there began one of the most upsetting times of my career as a reporter. The ending of the genocide had been heralded as the grand moment. In many respects, it had been the beginning of the worst. In testimony after testimony, I heard something else besides what was said of the region. I was cruelly disillusioned about where this region would end up. I met the ugly underbelly of what was a disturbing, ethno- racial war. The silence of guns, if that ever came, would mean this zero-sum war being fought by other means.

We were all in it, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, so that events in any part of Congo would have meaning in all four countries. Those stocking the flames of the northern Uganda war saw it as a continuum for the outcomes in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, etc. How, as a reporter taught to not identify subjects by race or ethnicity do you approach that without also withholding the truth from the public? Calculating that if the combatants and their invidious backers in Kampala, Kigali and who knows which other cities quietly believed in their own ethnic superiority, why should the rest of us watching in confusion not know their full intentions?

Because Rwanda could rely on it, it took Uganda’s friendship for granted. However, by 2017 something had gone amiss. Kigali, it seemed, had overstepped its boundaries by interfering with the power dynamics of Uganda at a sensitive time when Museveni was struggling to assert his power.

It is one thing to fight a war of self-defense. It is another to wage a war of hegemonic ambition. The one is understandable; the other is a crime. I went for it. I reported what was a parallel, darker narrative to the sanitised news routine; the common approach was not courageous enough to tell the truth; rather than tell the world what accounted for the blinding human cruelty being meted out for what the perpetrators saw as payment for past ethnic traumas, it endlessly asked in faux naïveté, why people could be so inhuman.

The backlash

It was then the backlash started. The war may have been in Congo, but doors began to be shut in my face in government offices in Kampala. Shielding behind media ignorance and international lack of curiosity had enabled them wage wars in four countries with the comfort that the usual tropes of reporting Africa would shield them. The furiousness with which the reactions came left me stunned. I began to hear of the moves to get rid of me from the newspaper long before it happened.

Back in the day, the newspaper I worked for had yearly run country supplements of Rwanda. After a series of stories, on the troubles in Eastern Congo, the supplement hung in balance, the expected hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising threatened. As a reporter who may never earn that much money over a career, there is not much choice between your journalism and a paper merchant’s profits. I recollect the hostility at the paper itself, the kvetching from advertising salesmen who saw my reporting as financially ruinous. My notebooks disappeared. Journalist colleagues whose relationships to Kigali you had taken as a joke, took on a different character. Kagame’s reach, we understood, was everywhere, and newspaper offices are great places to plant eyes and ears. The failure of my paper to stand by me as a reporter, and the increasing telephone harassment, plus the decision I was reaching to become a fulltime writer, led me quit the media. If your editor and publisher cannot stand by you, there is little you can do about such matters.

I got busy finding ways of being a writer, including spending 3 years in Kenya. Rwanda receded from my mind. But I had gained a further insight. Legitimate, even useful scrutiny, let alone criticism, is not allowed in Rwanda, even if its well-meant. I immediately understood that Kigali’s temper tantrums would ensure that Kagame never ran out of enemies. Seeing enemies everywhere you look is not great leadership. There is a psychological term for it. I had not learnt anything new, really. I had merely joined the ranks of those familiar with the ugliness of our region’s politics, the people who expect any day to have to run into exile. I was not in bad company. I calmed down and moved on.

Till October 2017. That month, the big story (the month before Museveni had trashed the parliament) was that five Ugandan police officers had been arrested for the kidnap and extra-judicial deportation of Rwanda dissidents.

You had to have followed Rwanda closely enough, or been to school with some of the characters close to the show to have understood what that headline meant. There had always been much talk about the vaunted Rwandan security and intelligence, of their capacities and determination. I had always doubted that, particularly after enduring run-ins with a handful of them and taking note of how amateurish they were. I had also been in class with some, and they were not what you may describe as top of the class, as it were. They are good when you don’t fight back. When you do, they do precisely what Kagame has done; draw down the barricades and get nasty. Closer to the truth was that Rwanda is too small a country for others to spend energy worrying about. Some residual sympathy had perhaps led others to look the other way. It wasn’t that they were better; it was that others were benevolent towards them.

Toxic anger

I doubted that when it came to it, Rwanda could match the intelligence capabilities of say South Africa. Or Uganda, when it came to it. Slinking about dark corners and spiking people’s tea, sticking knives into “enemies” is one thing. The net effect is to get you marked out as evil and untrustworthy. It is another to have the economic and diplomatic clout of countries dramatically bigger like South Africa, or even small ones like Uganda whose economy you actually depend on. The problem of toxic anger the junta is afflicted with means they fail to tell friend from foe.

Because it could rely on it, Kigali took Uganda for granted. Either way, by 2017 something had gone wrong enough. Kigali, it seemed, had overstepped its bounds at last. You easily guessed that they had interfered with the power dynamics of Uganda. At such a sensitive time over his hold on to power, Mr. Museveni would have been unhappy.

This unease is to the extent that nearly everyone – not just politicians, lawyers and journalists, but even mobile money booth owners – is afraid to receive phone calls, especially from strangers, but also from anybody who is not an immediate family member. Friends are now suspecting friends. Like Rwanda, Uganda is an overripe boil.

We still do not know the full details of the matter. But former Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura, perhaps the most unqualified man to have ever held the post, was said to have inadvisedly played a role in the matter, as rumor had it, getting too close to the Rwandans. His erratic behaviour in 2017 may now be clearer in hindsight. In effect, the general had appointed himself the government of Uganda, making the kinds of commands way beyond his ken, as if he had become prime minister, speaker of parliament, chief justice and chief executioner. Not even president Museveni exercised that much authority. It remained for even his boss to join the dots, follow the lines linking him with Rwandan high command to smell something off. What did a police inspector need a political base for; why did he need a foreign policy? Was CID so inadequate that he had to have his own intelligence network? The drama of Kayihura’s downfall added to the political unease in Uganda.

We live in a state of fear. Phone calls bring unease; who might be listening, who is reading the emails? Friends suspect friends; colleagues in offices are unsure of each other. Like Rwanda, Uganda is an overripe boil. Rwanda appears to be falling over the cliff first. We are not far behind.

The central charge against the five officers, and which charge in reverse facsimile ricocheted from Kigali as “Uganda detaining Rwandan citizens without charge” – Kagame’s primary casus belli, was that they were arresting and extra judicially deporting Rwandan dissidents.

For over two decades, Mr. Kagame had won wars in which the other side was not really shooting back, and waging undeclared espionage wars others weren’t too interested in. The risk of going too far was always there, of waking up governments with vaster reach and resources.

And that is what has happened. The blowback started in South Africa. We do not as yet know the extent of this drama unfolding in Uganda, but the alacrity with which Kigali reacted (remember the adage – whatever you do, don’t make any sudden moves) would seem to indicate that the Ugandans knew exactly where to go and which tender spots to touch. By barricading himself and the people he leads in, a move with serious repercussions, no matter which way this story heads, Mr. Kagame has betrayed his state of mind. What he has done is beyond serious. He has drawn unkind attention from the world, who read in this move, not sophistication, leadership, cool-headedness, but cruelty. It behooves a leader not a drop of good to be seen as cruel. It’s not the time to build walls, or close borders with countries to north and south of your country. You remind the world of what and who it wants to forget.

That’s the wider world for starts. In East Africa, this has drawn the scrutiny of people in Kenya and Tanzania for whom Rwanda was far away, a country to be sympathized with. The interruption of regional trade is touching constituents that once could be counted upon to remain distant and unconcerned which way things happened over there. In Uganda itself, Kagame’s action is bringing up sentiments that had plateaued into disinterest. It has also curiously given Mr. Museveni some boost of badly needed sympathy in Uganda. It’s a strange thing, nationalism. Now some of Mr. Museveni’s opponents suddenly understand that it is okay for them to criticize him; they don’t like it that much when a foreign president does the same. Kagame is attacking, not just the Museveni government, but their Museveni.

We can’t tell how it’s going down inside Rwanda itself. But there, the issues are immediate. Rwanda needs Uganda for education, for health, for food more than Uganda needs Rwanda. The drama has been coloured by stories, such as that of the three sisters, whose lives have been imperiled by the closure of borders.

Then, in the middle of it, word came that Mr. Kagame had also closed the border with Burundi.

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda is centuries old. As with the current character of Uganda, the bits of the ancient story we understand starts with the narrative of the ancient empire of Bunyoro-Kitara, when at the height of inter-Africa migrations, peoples ran into each other. Scars from the dim mists of time fester today, with broad implications for inter-ethnic divisions in Uganda and beyond.

Whichever way these reactions go, it is still early days, the opening pages of a book of raw emotions. The real story is still to hit its stride. Part of the reason we cannot tell where it will end is because we may be too horrified to begin thinking of it.

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda

But do we not lose perspective by getting caught up in the moment of the drama? Do we care enough to know the story of Rwanda?

Rwanda’s relationship with Uganda is centuries old. As with the current character of Uganda, the bits of the ancient story we understand start with the narrative of the ancient empire of Bunyoro- Kitara, when at the height of inter-Africa migrations, peoples ran into each other. Scars from the dim mists of time fester today, with broad implications for inter-ethnic divisions in Uganda and beyond. The peoples of Rwanda-Burundi, including bits of Eastern Congo, played parts in the stories of the formation of Ugandan kingdoms, and they did not emerge winners. But that is ancient history. Of immediate relevance is how Rwandans ended up living in Uganda in such numbers.

The colonial wars that the British fought in Uganda were some of the most serious in the region, along with the wars the Germans brought to Central Tanzania. By the 1920s, it is reported, the population of Uganda had been growing negatively for three decades. The religion-inflected civil wars in Buganda (which were actually class wars), the Bunyoro genocide, the wars of conquest in the East and North, and the collapse of pre-colonial medicine, along with the interruption of agriculture, more Ugandans had died than were born for close to three decades. Nothing new; all of it very British. They simply did not care that black people were dying because of their imperial strategies. It is what they did in the Americas, in Australia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, etc. Hence, the introduction of the cash crop economy foundered under severe shortage of labour. The British actively encouraged immigration from Belgian holdings. There are dramatic pictures taken at the time of the way stations doling food, medicine and shelter along the migration route from the Rwandan border into central Uganda. Shirtless, barefoot Rwandans, their beddings rolled up on their heads, are captured in grainy images making the two week walk from the border to central Uganda.

Writing in his book, Kampala-Uganda in 1951, the late American anthropologist, Edwin S. Munger, who died in 2010, wrote that “For thirty years, the principle labor (sic) migration route has been that travelled by the Banyruanda and Barundi from the Belgian mandates into Buganda. Historically, Ruanda-Urundi’s high, steep-sided hills have produced more people than food to feed them. In many years the issue was blunt: go or starve…a carryover from the old days of hardship is the attitude in Ruanda-Urundi that one mark of manhood is a trip to Uganda. The traditions of battling with lions and elephants, of fighting bandits, living off the country, and surviving where many died still give the emigrant prestige on his return home.”

The image in Uganda from the 1920s onwards of Rwandans and Burundians (the difference was subsumed under the generic “Banyarwanda”) that emerged was unfortunate and unfair. Xenophobia in Uganda, particularly in Buganda, served to see these immigrants not as victims of cruel colonialism as the Ugandans themselves were, but as peripatetic, woebegone itinerants who worked for a meal. There were many eager to blend in, to become integrated, if only to avoid the unkind stereotype.

Life in Belgian territories was unpleasant, even by the unpleasant standards of colonialism. Arriving in late colonial Uganda, with somewhat better amenities, was for other reasons beside just food and work. “Perhaps here is partial confirmation of the physical hardships of the route from Ruanda- Urundi to Mengo (now greater Kampala) District,” Munger goes on. “Whole wards of Barundi and Banyaruanda are hospitalised with tuberculosis and general malnutrition.”

The image in Uganda, from the 1920s, of Rwandans (and Burundians, the difference was subsumed under the generic “Banyarwanda), that emerged was unfortunate and unfair. Xenophobia in Uganda, particularly in Buganda, served to see these immigrants, not as victims of cruel colonialism as themselves, but as peripatetic, woebegone itinerants who will work for a meal. And many were those eager to blend in, to become integrated, if only to avoid the unkind stereotype. They were escaping similar circumstances, but in one of the failures of African societies, those they ran to did not treat them well.

Particularly in the metropolitan Buganda, where a mix of aristocratic and racial hierarchy (not unknown in Rwanda) had created a caste system under the British, the immigrants, penniless and ill, were despised, and the timidity this produced is to be found today, three generations later. And as Munger notes, intermarriage tended to happen mostly at the social margins, because the Rwandans (and the women later followed the men), meant lower dowries demanded at nuptials.

The Buganda government, under the indirect colonial rule which left it in charge of broad swathes of its subjects, viewed the arrivals ambivalently. They were refugees; they were badly needed labour. After a few years, the Kabaka’s government began to tax them as its other subjects, a tacit act of admission. Those who could, integrated swiftly, taking on new identities and names.

The more urgent immigration into Uganda, of Rwandans and Burundians, was yet to come. But it resulted in a multi-layered extra-Rwandan diaspora. There are the integrated, who bare Ugandan names, have Ugandan parentage and are largely unhappy about the way the later immigrants served to tarnish their image, to say nothing of complicating hard-won relationships.

Amongst those that broke off from the Ugandan army and returned to Rwanda, the spearhead group were not from this earlier exodus. This group of latter immigrants came in 1959.

Throughout, the Ugandans had not behaved well towards their guests. The country had not come without its share of pain. The love was not bottomless. And today, the integration is so profound that any Ugandan saying anything anti-Rwanda, may well be insulting a grandmother. They had learnt that not being accepted was not the worst that can happen. Keep your head down and blend in. Loss of identity was not the worst. And the worst did come. The 1959 migrants did not keep their heads down. The entire region paid a steep price for their indiscretion.

The second wave of migration and its consequences

With agricultural reform, by chiefly terracing the hills to stem soil erosion, the Belgians had managed to rein in famine in Rwanda. But the Belgians had ruled by divide et impera, elevating to the dangerous levels of ethnicity, what some have described as a class system, “Hutu” and “Tutsi”. They had favoured the “Tutsi”, for much of their colonial rule, with the “Hutu” treated as underdogs, who for instance were not allowed to acquire higher learning. By the racist means of the time, anthropologists and sociologists had said were non-African, non-negroid. But it was a difficult question. Nazi conquest and racial theory was so repugnant that the Belgians themselves abandoned the racialist bifurcation of their Rwanda-Burundi colony. Unfortunately, rather than create a level, unifying policy, they started to favour the Hutu instead. So that when it came, they handed over independence to the majority Hutu.

Almost immediately, the Hutu began to persecute the Tutsi. And it this crisis that led to the second wave of migration, in 1959. They were a different group now, not really peasant, but with a grudge in their hearts. In Uganda, Mr. Museveni recruited many from this group into his rebel army that fought against the Obote II government in the early 1980s. When Museveni overthrow the sclerotic Tito Okello junta that had itself overthrown the Obote government just six months early in 1985, he appointed many Rwandan refugees into government and the army. There was uproar in Uganda over the inclusion of foreigners in sensitive positions. Kagame himself had been head of a spy agency in Uganda.

Under pressure from Ugandans, Mr. Museveni understood he had to let them go. Hence, when they broke away in 1990, after helping set fire to Uganda, there was something of doom about it. They clearly weren’t coming back. But the worst was at the other end. Much as it has always been said that Mr. Paul Kagame, who inherited leadership of the Rwanda Patriotic Army rebel group after the death of its leader, Fred Rwigyema. After four years of fighting, which started in 1990, hardliner Hutu leadership unleashed the 1994 genocide. The militarization of politics in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and Congo, has meant that the four countries have been in one form of warfare or the other for nearly 60 years.

The matrix of governing a country with sharp divides, and doing it by force, is not one that Mr. Kagame’s temperament seems suited for. It may be gratifying to defeat your enemies. But you have to be a Nelson Mandela to win them over. You must win them over, for these conflicts are circuitous. Soon the other side can, and will, rise to power. It’s a question of time.

Increasingly intolerant governments have characterised Uganda and Rwanda, at a time when all over the continent, countries are settling down to stable governance. What is the point? What plans do Messrs. Museveni and Kagame have this region? Much as it is clear to all who pay attention that the unfortunate weaponising of ethnicity has perhaps trapped both men in power, it is still puzzling because there seems to be no end game in sight, except endless corruption and more militarization, which will require even more corruption to maintain the patronage system, and more militarization to fend off the disaffected. We have become trapped in a loop without exits. Decades ago, the citizens waited patiently because it seemed that real change could come. But if after these many years a pregnant woman has to sneak across a border, that begs the question, as Oliver Cromwell once asked of the British Parliament; have you not sat here too long for any good you can have done?

Shutting down the border is symbolic of the increasing pointlessness of the two regimes.

They came into power at the time that the cold war was ending. The period of rapid coups and countercoups in Africa, funded by the rival capitalist and communist power blocs ended then, with the result that whoever had been in power at that time, tended to remain so for a bit longer. Put simply, the power balance that might have kept the two men honest was not there. Crucially then, these quakes we now feel in Uganda and Rwanda, are not casual. They are the deep rumblings from shifting global tectonic power plates. In the past, when they were at loggerheads, the British Foreign Secretaries jetted in to knock their heads together. Agony “Aunts” Lynda Chalker and Claire Short, British ministers of the 1990s and 00s, would have been here already. But the British now have their hands full back home, and need benevolent foreign secretaries to go knock their heads together, enduring the cruel reversal of the foreign policy technique they so perfected, of keeping countries they wished to rule at each other’s throats. The absence of steadying British and American hands right now, in this conflict, has exposed the lack of political and management skills in Kigali and in Kampala. It has exposed the fact that Uganda and Rwanda have for decades now been run as client states. In the absence of the Anglo-Saxon power-meisters, Museveni and Kagame are learning cruelly the difference between monkey and organ grinder. It is left to the East African Community states, Tanzania and Kenya, to try and sort the situation out. But it takes a fool to bet on that strategy working. Twice, first in 1985, then in 1994, both Kenya and Tanzania attempted to sort political problems in Uganda and Rwanda out. But the rebel leaders then merely inked their names to agreements reached in Nairobi and Arusha, whilst using the interim to move their forces closer to the capitals. With spectacular disasters. Those rebels? They are now called President Museveni and President Kagame.

How does that now happen? Did Nairobi and Dar es Salaam ever forgive the slight? Do they trust the two men? But, that is the wrong question. The question is, what power backdrop are the two men now banking on? If we can answer that question, maybe we can predict how they plan to plunge us into new rounds of war. Global power dynamics have eroded the neoliberal economic system they had learnt to game. What is emerging now requires skills beyond wearing military fatigues and firing AK 47s at target boards.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete Gambia’s former President Yahya Jammeh orchestrated the embezzlement of nearly US$1 billion of public funds and illegal timber revenue during his 22-year rule, looting the treasury in a long- running conspiracy that crippled one of the world’s poorest countries.

While president of the compact West African state of 2 million, Jammeh frequently drove his black stretch Hummer from his official residence in Banjul, the capital, to a lavish private estate in his home village of Kanilai.

His route took him past the central bank, the social welfare office, and the headquarters of the state telecom company. These were some of the institutions Jammeh pillaged by elevating privileged civil servants to prominent positions and empowering a group of corrupt businessmen led by a key Hezbollah financier.

Thousands of documents obtained exclusively by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project lay bare for the first time the massive scale of Jammeh’s corruption. They show how he hijacked government funds and departments, set up private accounts at the central bank, and built a patronage network while ruling the country through a combination of guile, unbridled power, and violence.

What was not withdrawn in cash by Jammeh’s officials or funnelled to bank accounts controlled by the president went to businesses that received lucrative contracts (or for unknown purposes). Some was sent to foreign shell companies about which little is known. The transfers may have violated Gambian law.

Just how much of the great Gambian heist ended up in Jammeh’s own pockets — through offshore accounts or bags full of cash — is still unknown.

Adama Barrow, the country’s current president, estimated in 2017 that Jammeh stole about 4 billion dalasis ($90 million) from public coffers. An official investigation known as the Janneh Commission of Inquiry is currently examining financial misconduct during his rule. And at the end of last year, the United States announced that Jammeh had been banned from entering the country, citing evidence that he had been involved in “significant corruption.” The documents analyzed by OCCRP show a web of fraud that far exceeds the figure offered by Barrow, who defeated Jammeh at the polls in 2016 but was only able to oust the former president after neighboring states threatened a military intervention.

Jammeh was the worst of dictators, but because he ruled a nobody country, nobody cared.

“He ran the country like an organized crime syndicate,” said Jeggan Grey-Johnson, a Gambian activist and communications officer at the African regional office of the Open Society Foundation, a pro-democracy and good governance organization.

“Jammeh was the worst of dictators, but because he ruled a nobody country, nobody cared,” Grey- Johnson said.

Jammeh spent some of the stolen money on his palace in Kanilai, where he had his own private mosque, built a jungle warfare training camp, and kept camels, hyenas, zebras, and other exotic animals.

In total, Jammeh and his associates looted or misappropriated at least $975 million. Among their biggest targets:

$363.9 million from the state-run telecoms company; $325.5 million in illicit timber revenue; more than $100 million in foreign aid and soft loans from Taiwan; $71.2 million from the Central Bank of The Gambia; $60 million from the Social Security and Housing Finance Corp., which manages disability, housing, and pension payments; and $55.2 million from the state-run oil company.

Jammeh spent some of the stolen money on his palace in Kanilai, where he had his own private mosque, built a jungle warfare training camp, and kept camels, hyenas, zebras, and other exotic animals. The looted funds also supported a lavish lifestyle that Jammeh’s average official monthly government salary of about $6,000 could never sustain.

Other spending was designed to portray Jammeh as a benevolent and generous ruler, but not typically in ways that benefitted ordinary Gambians, who eke out a living in an economy that is literally dependent on peanuts, a top export. In 2010, using diverted money, Jammeh held a tribute concert for Michael Jackson after the pop superstar’s death. He also hosted a Miss Black USA beauty pageant in Gambia using $1.1 million illicitly diverted from the Port Authority.

The spending did little to address Gambia’s needs. The country has poor health care, few basic services, and under 1,000 km of paved roads. According to the World Bank, its external debt at the end of 2017 was $489 million — less than the amount Jammeh allegedly stole.

The United Nations criticized Jammeh during his final election campaign for threatening to kill off the country’s most populous ethnic group — the Mandinkas — and put them “where even a fly cannot see them. The former president gave himself five titles, insisted he could cure AIDS (but only on Mondays and Thursdays), and proclaimed that he would stay in power for a billion years if Allah wanted him to. He is now in exile in Equatorial Guinea, where he allegedly spends his days on a farm carved out of the jungle.

Ruling with an Iron Fist

In its 2015 report on Gambia, “State of Fear”, Human Rights Watch detailed accusations that included “enforced disappearances,” torture of political opponents, the summary execution of more than 50 African migrants, and the murder or disappearance of two journalists.

The sentiment was typical of a president who ruled through terror. At the center of his ability to strip Gambia of its meager wealth was Jammeh’s ruthless control of the government and its institutions. After capturing power in a bloodless coup in 1994 at just 29, he quickly deployed an array of official and unofficial security forces to silence dissent.

In a climate of fear, and with the complicity of a powerful circle in and out of the government, Jammeh’s brazen corruption continued unchecked for more than two decades.

The Jungulers, an unofficial unit of about 40 men largely drawn from the Presidential Guard, carried out the most egregious offenses. In its 2015 report on Gambia, “State of Fear”, Human Rights Watch detailed accusations that included “enforced disappearances,” torture of political opponents, the summary execution of more than 50 African migrants, and the murder or disappearance of two journalists.

In a climate of fear, and with the complicity of a powerful circle in and out of the government, Jammeh’s brazen corruption continued unchecked for more than two decades.

Merely questioning Jammeh’s often erratic rule could result in entire departments being seized. When a senior official at the state-run oil company questioned the president’s office on whether its income could be exempt from taxes, Jammeh responded by seizing control of the company’s bank accounts and diverting its funds for his use.

His micromanagement of government affairs allowed him to exert “complete control” over Gambia, said Fatou Camara, who twice served as Jammeh’s press secretary between 2011 and 2013.

“Every minister would wait for him before they made decisions,” Camara said. “Everything had to wait for the Office of the President to agree.”

Jammeh’s human rights abuses and corruption went largely unchallenged by the international community because of his country’s small size and relative obscurity. A wave of violence across West Africa during his reign — in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone — also helped him fly under the radar. “The Gambia wasn’t even like a back-burner issue — it was a backwater issue,” said Cameron Hudson, a former West Africa analyst for the CIA.

The ‘Number One Bank’ as a Slush Fund

The Central Bank of The Gambia was known as the “number one bank” among Jammeh’s staff because they knew its coffers would continually be replenished with public money.

Central banks are only supposed to regulate local banks, control currency in circulation, and set interest rates. Typically, individuals can’t have accounts. But Jammeh treated Gambia’s central bank as his personal slush fund.

Much of the time, the money he stole flowed electronically between domestic and foreign accounts. But sometimes the cash literally traded hands. Beneath the hum of air conditioning units in a loading bay on the central bank’s east side, presidential aides were known to shove suitcases stuffed with dollars, euros, and other currencies into waiting vehicles, according to testimony received by the commission of inquiry. The official investigation, led by lawyer Surahata Janneh, has not yet released its final report.

On one occasion, when Jammeh wanted to withdraw cash from the central bank, his office wrote directly to the bank’s second deputy governor with a blunt request that circumvented lawmakers and regulators. The bank complied.

Amadou Colley, the central bank’s governor from 2010 to 2017, told the commission that Jammeh and his cronies exerted significant control over the institution. Government records, testimonies, and directives show senior bank officials routinely allowing the president’s office unfettered access.

Colley, who declined to comment for this story, testified that he saw officials close to the president withdraw funds without proper paperwork. Able to obtain withdrawal notes from Jammeh’s office only occasionally, he resorted to accepting hastily-written statements from those retrieving the money that they had been “directed by President Jammeh [or] the Office of the President to make this withdrawal.”

Documents obtained by reporters show that Jammeh diverted over $71 million from the central bank’s reserves in just a few years. He used three main techniques: hijacking the bank’s accounts, creating new accounts on which he and his chosen aides were sole signatories, and using dormant accounts (which are seldom found at well-managed central banks). Sometimes he ordered the withdrawal of cash from accounts without any funds, causing them to become overdrawn.

Accounts such as the Consolidated Revenue Fund received millions of dollars every year from income taxes and other sources. There is little accounting for how money from the fund was spent between 2007 and 2016, despite laws that require parliamentary approval of expenditures.

Thousands of internal bank documents reviewed by OCCRP revealed other major accounts Jammeh plundered.

They included:

The International Gateway Account: This account received revenues from Gambia’s state telecommunications operator, known as Gamtel. The practice of collecting such revenues, earned from long-distance telephone calls and internet services, occurs in every country. In Gambia, however, a disproportionate 82 percent went to private companies through secret contracts that bypassed the country’s regulatory body. About $363 million disappeared this way. The remaining 18 percent which did land in the account was largely withdrawn by Jammeh’s office without explanation. Among other things, the president spent the money on cattle, vehicles, and extravagant carpets. The Special Vision Account: Once the International Gateway account was emptied, Jammeh turned to this account, also funded by Gamtel revenues and intended to finance his development plan for Gambia. From July 2014 until January 2017, Jammeh’s office diverted about $43 million — with $35.7 million taken as cash. Jammeh’s close business associates were among the beneficiaries. Other expenses included doctors’ salaries, a donation to fight the West African Ebola outbreak, and funding for Jammeh’s personal charitable foundation. The last transaction occurred two days after Jammeh went into exile in 2017. The State Aircraft Fund: This state travel fund was financed by donor aid from Qatar, tax revenues, and other sources. Jammeh’s office withdrew cash from the account without stating any purpose and used it to purchase a luxury jet, buses, and vehicles from a close associate. The State Security Account: This account was set up by Jammeh’s office with no declared purpose. About $466,000, or 95 percent of its funds, were diverted from another account called the Consolidated Revenue Fund and used for cash withdrawals, entertainment, travel, payments to Jammeh’s favorite wife Zeinab, and other expenses. Mineral-related accounts collected royalty payments from private mining companies such as Carnegie, Sand Mining, Gamico, and Heavy Minerals. Though this money was intended for the Consolidated Revenue Fund, the payments fell under the control of the president’s office, which oversaw the use of $4.9 million. The Office of the First Lady: There is no such office in Gambia, but Jammeh created this account, filled it with public revenues, and spent the entire $35,706. The National Youth Development Fund: Dozens of scholarships were awarded to young African-American women who Jammeh brought to Gambia to compete in the 2007 Miss Black USA beauty pageant, which he hosted. The fund also paid for maintenance on Jammeh’s jet and other expenses. The source of the $4.5 million that passed through the account is unknown. The Green Industry Account: Although the central bank is not allowed to open accounts for private entities, an account named Green Industry — presumably after a private company of the same name — was created. The source of the funds, which were illegally transferred to the company’s account at Trust Bank, is unclear. The Fish Landing Account: Funded by revenue from a 10 percent fee on fish caught by trawlers in Gambian waters, this account received multiple requests from withdrawals from Jammeh’s office.

During Jammeh’s rule, the central bank became heavily indebted. One of his government’s first acts in 1994 was to take out a secret $25 million loan in the form of a bond. Decades of fraud, hidden debts in the form of bonds, and account manipulation followed, draining the bank of its revenues. Almost 40 percent of the bank’s spending went toward interest payments on debts, according to OCCRP’s analysis.

In a 2015 letter to the International Monetary Fund, while Jammeh was still in power, central bank officials wrote that the institution remained highly indebted because of significant interest charges, bad investments, over-lending to the government, and violations of its own rules — described as “policy slippages.”

Today, the central bank remains in dire straits. The country owes lenders 130 percent of its gross domestic product, mainly due to “external arrears” incurred by the Jammeh administration, the IMF said in May 2018.

Jammeh’s manipulation of the central bank may have violated several of Gambia’s laws, including the Government Budget and Management Accountability Act of 2004, the Social Security Act of 2010, and the Public Finance Act of 2014. He has not been charged with any crimes.

“Jammeh ran the country like it was his own,” said William Gumede, an economist and chair of the Democracy Works Foundation, a South African pro-democracy group. “Who can question you when everything is considered yours?”

Gambia’s current government did not respond to requests for comment. The government of Equatorial Guinea did not respond to requests to reach Jammeh.

The true scale of Jammeh’s thefts from the central bank may never be fully known.

Taiwan Led the Way, Hezbollah Followed

Jammeh’s thirst for public money began soon after he captured power in 1994. In 1995, he recognized Taiwan’s independence from China in a strategic establishment of diplomatic ties also made by several other African countries. In doing so, he opened the door to some $100 million in foreign aid.

The East Asian island’s development assistance was deposited into a “Special 3M” donor aid account at Citibank, the New York-based lender. Documents show that $35 million of the funding was dispersed in less than two years.

In total, $58 million was processed, primarily by Citibank, meaning the account was presumably overdrawn. The bank transferred the money to just over 20 beneficiaries, allowing the funds to vanish into the accounts of Jammeh and his close associates, including Mohamed Bazzi, one of the country’s richest and most influential businessmen, whom Jammeh used as a middleman.

Some of the world’s biggest banks — including Barclays, Citibank, HSBC Bank, and Standard Chartered — approved transactions for what would turn out to be Jammeh’s seizure of state funds for his personal use

Bazzi, identified by the U.S. as a key financier for Hezbollah, introduced another financier who invested $35 million in Gamtel, Gambia’s state-owned telecommunications provider. He and other Hezbollah-linked businessmen were the primary beneficiaries of oil and telecommunications monopolies worth more than $100 million.

In a statement to reporters, Citibank declined to comment on possible legal violations of standard anti-money laundering, due diligence, and “know your customer” requirements as well as potential violations of U.S. laws regarding banking secrecy, corrupt practices and even terrorism laws.

Standard Chartered declined to comment and Barclays declined to comment on the record. HSBC did not respond to requests for comment.

Former World Bank anti-corruption specialist Richard Messick said U.S. law enforcement might have been working with the banks to monitor where the funds were going. “It’s possible they reported the transactions to the authorities,” he said. “I know of cases where law enforcement authorities have … ‘spooked’ the account holders … so that they could see where it was going to. So that’s not all beyond the pale.”

“Assuming the banks didn’t alert authorities to the transactions moving the money out of the accounts, they should have applied enhanced due diligence … to ensure the money wasn’t being laundered,” Messick said.

Keep Your Friends Close

None of Jammeh’s plundering would have been possible without the close network of advisers he posted to key positions and shuffled around at will. The aides, often used as signatories to bank accounts and loan agreements, played a key role in his money transfer schemes.

Jammeh’s right-hand man, Gen. Sulayman Badjie, was identified in commission testimonies as the president’s enforcer — both in politics and in business. Even as he ran the country as second-in- command and headed its armed forces, he also provided protection for Jammeh’s timber smuggling operation. Badjie could not be reached by reporters.

The secretary-general of the Office of the President, Nuha Touray, was a crucial intermediary between Jammeh’s office and various government departments. Documents obtained by reporters include directives Touray signed that authorized the seizure of bank accounts and the sacking of public officials who questioned orders.

In addition to Jammeh’s official salary, his personal bank accounts reveal that Bazzi paid Jammeh $500,000 a month for several months. Bazzi testified to the commission that he paid the sum to the president’s account for 20 months and the money was related to an incentive to the president for a telecommunications deal that Bazzi organized for his associate, Ali Charara, another Lebanese Hezbollah financier.

Bazzi did not respond to requests for comment.

Jammeh’s favored officials shared in his prosperity, but were also vulnerable to his propensity for violence and punishment.

Many officials who fell out of favor found themselves incarcerated alongside journalists, political activists, human rights campaigners, and those perceived to be gay or lesbian in the country’s notorious Mile 2 prison.

Touray told the commission that failure to carry out the president’s orders resulted in one of three consequences: “dismissal, imprisonment, or disappeared.”

Exiled in Comfort in Equatorial Guinea

Jammeh’s plundering ended after his seesaw exit from power in 2016, a spectacle that briefly captivated the world. After losing the presidential election to Barrow, a former property developer, on Dec. 1 of that year, the strongman shocked the region by conceding defeat.

But in true Jammeh style, he quickly reversed course and rejected the outcome. As President-elect Barrow called for an investigation into human rights abuses and corruption under Jammeh’s regime, the outgoing president appeared to be buying time to get his affairs in order.

After seven weeks of negotiations, which brought several prominent West African heads of state to Jammeh’s palace for talks, the embattled leader fled the country on Jan. 21, 2017, on a Falcon 900 private jet owned by the government of Equatorial Guinea and used by its president.

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, known as Obiang, is a longtime friend of Jammeh. The two men have a similar propensity for using state finances for personal gain and quashing opponents. According to media reports, they even owned houses next to each other in Potomac, Maryland.

Once Jammeh arrived in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea’s island capital, Obiang granted him refuge from the chorus of human rights and anti-corruption campaigners who were seeking to put him on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

Jammeh remains in Equatorial Guinea to this day, nearly 5,000 km from Banjul and the commission investigating him.

Back in Gambia, the people Jammeh hurt most are hoping for better times at the hands of the government of Barrow, his replacement. “We’ve been told that our pensions will be increased by 100 percent,” said Abubacarr Dem, 79, a retired civil servant who lives near the capital. “That’s good if it works out. For now, we haven’t seen it. I don’t even know whether they have enough money there for us.

With additional reporting by Saikou Jammeh and Daniela Lepiz.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete Often depicted as a rich world disease, cancer is becoming a concerning public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa. More than two-thirds of the people who died from cancer in the past few years lived in low- and middle-income countries. Many risk factors, such as high infection rates of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B virus (HBV), and human papillomavirus (HPV) or increased tobacco and alcohol consumption are increasing the rates of cancer in many regions.

Cancer death disparities among rich and poor countries are quite significant, and action must be taken immediately to provide accessible and affordable healthcare to those in need. Although many of those deaths can be prevented at relatively low cost, cancer doesn’t seem to be a priority for donors.

Why is cancer becoming a Third World phenomenon? When did the shift in cancer cases to the Global South take place? And why are risk factors more prevalent in low- and middle-income countries as opposed to rich countries?

The current burden of cancer in Africa

Cancer is the name given to a collection of diseases characterised by the rapid multiplication of a group of malignant cells that start spreading into surrounding tissues. It is a multifactorial disease that is caused by the transformation of normal cells into tumours. The disease is caused by the interaction between an individual’s genetics and the exposure to external agents, such as radiation, chemical carcinogens (tobacco, asbestos, arsenic), and certain viruses, parasites, and bacteria. Bad lifestyle habits, such as an unhealthy diet, may also increase the risk of developing this disease. The risk of cancer is much higher in adults than in children. As an individual gets older, the immune system isn’t able to protect the organism against the uncontrolled growth of malignant cells, and cellular repair mechanisms become less effective. At least one death in three from cancer is caused by one of the five principal behavioural risks: high body mass index, lack of physical activity, low fruit and vegetable intake, tobacco use, and alcohol use.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death across the world, with 8.8 million deaths every year – nearly one death in every 6. Up to 70 per cent of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, and the numbers keep growing every year. In Africa, the most common cancer types are cancers of the cervix, breast, liver, and prostate, together with Kaposi’s sarcoma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Each one of these cancers has at least one specific risk factor that is strongly linked with poverty, endemic diseases, or lack of proper preventive strategies that characterise many regions of the Global South.

Tobacco alone is the leading risk factor for cancer and is responsible for almost one-fourth of cancer deaths. Harmful use of alcohol and tobacco use are running rampant in many African countries. The burden of tobacco-related deaths in Africa has increased by 70 per cent, from 150,000 reported deaths in 1990 to over 215,000 in 2016. And these numbers may very well be the tip of the iceberg, given how comprehensive data on cancer incidence and mortality in Africa is extremely scarce, if available at all.

Infections due to hepatitis B and C viruses and HPV are also a key risk factor for liver and cervical cancer, and many African health systems lack the resources for mass vaccination programmes needed to stop these diseases from spreading. In low- and middle-income countries, these infections are responsible for nearly 25 per cent of cancer cases. Common epidemic diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, are also known risk factors for other cancers, such as Kaposi’s Sarcoma and lung cancer.

Why is cancer a death sentence in Africa?

A diagnosis of cancer is always terrible news, but it can be a much more devastating experience in a country like South Sudan than, say, in Japan, Canada, or Germany. The highly industrialised nations already found that the best way to deal with cancer is not to treat it (although this is still possible), but to prevent it. Or, at least, to diagnose it as early as possible, when it is still possible to stop it from spreading through the body with lethal consequences. In sub-Saharan Africa, where early detection and prevention are not widely available, the risk of getting cancer and the risk of dying from it is nearly the same.

Since specialised facilities to treat cancer are often not available, and the data to drive cancer policies is sorely lacking, when patients are diagnosed with cancer in Africa it is usually already too late. Many patients only receive a diagnosis when they’re very close to dying. Treatment services are available in less than one-third of the cases in low-income countries, compared to 90 per cent in high-income ones. In more than 20 per cent of African countries, access to cancer treatment is not available at all. And even when treatment is available, lack of medical literacy regarding cancer may mean that the treatment received is not the right one. The number of specialised oncologists in Africa is abysmally low, and many doctors are simply not knowledgeable about cancer to provide appropriate care. For example, a past study of breast cancer patients in Nigeria showed how several women kept being treated with antibiotics or other ineffective medications for months or years before receiving a proper diagnosis.

National cancer registries are rarely found, and even when they exist, they must rely on obsolescent technologies, sparse and unreliable data, and underdeveloped facilities. This news is particularly depressing since early detection may easily prevent between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of cancers. Just to name an example, HPV alone is known to be the cause for 70 per cent of all cervical cancers, the most common malignancy in the African region. In North America, a series of massive vaccination campaigns against HPV have reduced this risk at least five-fold. And even when vaccines are not available, routine cervical cancer screening and early treatment can detect this disease while it can still be treated, effectively preventing up to 80 per cent of cervical cancers.

An epidemic coming from the Western world?

It has often been said that cancer is a disease of the industrialised world, and has thus been associated with the Western world more than with the poorest African regions. Following the traditional Western paternalistic narrative, in Africa people die of starvation much before they can reach the age where cancer usually starts manifesting. In a curious and horrible turn of events though, this assumption may hold more truth than we may think. The Western industrialised nations brought cancer to Africa, starting with the wanton exploitation of its land to strip it of its natural resources regardless of the catastrophic environmental consequences.

Environmental factors are important contributors to the burden of cancer, especially in some regions. For example, petroleum spills and over-extensive environmental exploitation of the Niger Delta region caused vast contamination of ground, soil, air, and water. The local population has been exposed for decades to high levels of many dangerous carcinogens, ranging from dioxins to benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Benzene alone was found at levels that are 900 times above World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations. To protect themselves from the acid rains that ravage this region, people must seek shelter under asbestos roofing, which is another known carcinogen that may cause lung cancer. And when the crops and the livestock are contaminated by oil spills, increased risk of cancer of the digestive tract is nothing but an obvious consequence.

Mozambique and cancer: A history of strife

Cancer is a disease, and like any other disease, it becomes much more problematic in all regions affected by poverty and lack of infrastructure. Decades of civil war and struggle left many African countries with no healthcare system or wrecked and devastated the (few) existing facilities. Droughts, insufficient sanitation, and poverty exacerbate the damage already precipitated by civil and military strife, with many health professionals preferring to leave their countries to go to Europe and the U.S. in search of better wages.

For example, during the 1970s, the primary healthcare system in Mozambique was well developed, and the local facilities treated a large number of patients every day. The government had invested substantial resources in vast vaccination programmes that were able to provide coverage to more than 90 per cent of the population, reducing the risk of many types of cancer. Until the civil war exploded. When the anti-communist group RENAMO supported by the CIA and conservative U.S. forces started attacking FRELIMO, they decided that the best way to hit their foes was to destroy the country’s infrastructure. Schools, roads, hospitals, and health clinics were destroyed, and as Mozambique descended into civil war, the government had to make severe budget cuts to the public health expenditure. Corruption started running rampant, and in a country plagued by poverty, paying the bribes required by many doctors and nurses was often impossible. Many African countries are now taking steps to address the rising cases of cancer in their countries. In 2016, Kenya’s National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) made a commendable choice. Radiation therapy, surgery and four courses of chemotherapy per year are now included among the services provided for free for the 18 per cent of Kenyans covered by the fund.

Today, no radiation therapy centres are available in Mozambique, leaving all patients who suffer from the most common cancer types in this country (cervix, breast, and prostate) without adequate treatment. Without proper infrastructure, natural disaster emergencies, such as cyclones and flooding, also cause the spread of malaria, which rapidly becomes endemic in many areas. The overall health conditions of the population is atrocious, with HIV/AIDS and malaria prevalent among both adults and children. In Mozambique, the rise of cancer is nothing but a consequence of war as HIV constitutes a risk for Kaposi’s Sarcoma, while malaria is a risk factor for Burkitt’s lymphoma among children.

It is time to draw a line

Many African countries are now taking steps to address the rising cases of cancer in their countries. In 2016, Kenya’s National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) made a commendable choice. Radiation therapy, surgery and four courses of chemotherapy per year are now included among the services provided for free for the 18 per cent of Kenyans covered by the fund. Before this plan was launched, the prices for cancer treatment in the country used to be way out of reach for a majority of Kenyans.

However, much more needs to be done, from strengthening the drug supply chain systems in public facilities to prevent stock-outs to dealing with the chronic absence of specialists in a country where there are only 22 oncologists for a population of 46 million. Today, it is very hard for all Kenyans to access those services, and additional costs make long-term cancer treatment hardly affordable for most families. But the Kenyan experience is a prime example of how much can be done even in countries with limited resources.

In November 2017, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) and the African Cancer Coalition (ACC) released new cancer care guidelines that take potential economic constraints into account, as well as focusing on the most commonly diagnosed cancers in each region in sub-Saharan Africa. Countries such a Nigeria established a partnership with the University of Birmingham to teach pathologists how to detect and diagnose cancer over Skype. Evidence-based cancer care can provide more affordable and ethical solutions to treat cancer without compromising health outcomes, such as providing fewer but larger doses of radiation to reduce the costs.

Today, modern medicine teaches us that cancer is a deadly disease that is often resistant to most treatments and that the most effective approach is one that combines education and prevention. Prevention should be at the core of any system that wants to have a chance to win the war against cancer, especially when resources are limited. A focus on primary care and prevention over curative care saves more lives, is less expensive, and is less stressful for people who simply avoid cancer rather than facing it.

Cancer screening programmes, new cancer treatment guidelines, and vaccination campaigns saved countless lives, but it’s still hard to win this fight when so many African countries do not understand that they must allocate their resources to train more specialised healthcare workers and establish more advanced facilities. Any modern nation has the duty to invest its budget on its human capital, the most valuable resource, and rely on local resources instead of seeking help from abroad. Countries such as Kenya, Rwanda, and Nigeria are trying to make cancer services accessible to their populations, and by doing so, they teach us a fundamental lesson – that fighting cancer isn’t just a battle that is fought inside hospitals; it is a war that is fought at the political table, first and foremost. Only with adequate investments and proper healthcare infrastructure can African countries stand a chance against this deadly disease.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete When Le Monde profiled the African-born businessman Vincent Miclet in November 2018, it called him the “Gatsby” of Francophone Africa. The inference was clear: opulence and decadence combined in a single name.

Gatsby was the fatally-flawed character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, whose fabulous wealth was obtained through mysterious – and possibly illegal – means and whose machinations led to his downfall. Vincent Miclet was presented as somewhat exotic: a slick, fifty- something millionaire playboy, born and educated at Baccalaureate level in Africa, his business acumen, in his own words, “self-taught”. In a self-serving interview with Le Monde, Miclet hoped to portray himself as a business genius cheated by Angola’s corrupt generals. (However, the businessman did not respond the questionnaire sent to him for this article.)

Buddies and bribes

According to Liberation, Miclet owes his business success to a combination of showy connections and bribery (in French: “Bling Bling et Bakchichs”). It was thanks to his French-African connections that Miclet expanded his business interests across Africa, launching him to number 180 on France’s rich list. And, as Miclet himself told Le Monde, “In Africa, you can’t do business without paying commission (baksheesh).” And he proudly admitted that his personal commission on deals was 30 per cent.

For 20 years Vincent Miclet had operated under the radar. However, a relationship with a French reality TV celebrity in 2013 propelled him onto France’s gossip pages. They gleefully documented this divorcé’s life of luxurious excess during his four years with glamorous Ayem Nour, with whom he fathered a son. Pictures of the couple showed a man in his early fifties with plump unlined features, streaky blonde highlights, and a receding hairline.

After the split from Ayem Nour (which he publicly and unchivalrously blamed on his interfering mother-in-law, Farida), he sold their vast villa in the Dordogne for nearly 30 million euros. The sumptuous Moroccan palace he calls home is reputed to rival that of the King of Morocco. It’s where he played host to the notorious Alexandre Benalla, the former bodyguard of French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron, who was fired after he violently attacked the May 1st protesters.

How did the son of non-profit workers become so rich and well-connected? Born in modest circumstances to French non-profit volunteers in Chad, Miclet portrays himself as a self-made business genius – but many suspect that his good fortune can be attributed to modern-day buccaneering.

According to Le Libre Penseur, Miclet’s French-African network was built on connections to the Masons and Corsican Mafiosi. Libération reported that Miclet hired Benalla as a bodyguard for the mother of his child and then engineered a new career for him via another friend, the veteran French-African business fixer Philippe Hababou Solomon. Miclet is also reported to have been the link between Benalla and Marc Francelet, another interesting Frenchman whose criminal record seems to have presented no obstacle to his security connections.

After his school days in Africa, Miclet set up his first company, Cash Distribution (a cargo transport company) in 1984. He was 19. Within five years he had entered the food supply business, expanding from dried fish to oil, tomatoes and rice – allegedly becoming the number one importer of rice to Congo.

His entry into Angola is said to have come about thanks to the Féliciaggi family connections (the Féliciaggis had connections to Congo, the Corsican mafia and the disgraced former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua).

According to Liberation, “It was the Corsican connection that led Miclet directly to Angola, where a general close to the president opened the doors to juicy business deals supplying contracts.”

By 1995, he was already reported as partnering with China to supply food and uniforms to the Angolan Armed Forces before diversifying into international logistics and construction. He also went into a joint venture with the French company Necotrans to establish and operate a port terminal in the Angolan capital, Luanda, which, he boasted, was the largest refrigeration plant in Africa.

So what went wrong? Why was he forced to make a hasty exit from Angola amid complaints of undelivered goods and missing millions?

Victim or villain?

In Le Monde, Vincent Miclet alleged he was the victim of a cabal of corrupt Angolan generals. He painted himself as the king of imports in Angola, in partnership with then Minister of State and Presidential Security Chief, General Manuel Hélder Vieira Dias Júnior “Kopelipa”.

In 2011, President Dos Santos received intelligence that Tajideen was suspected of funding a terrorist organisation. He summoned the Presidency’s Civilian and Military Chiefs of Staff (Carlos Feijó and General Kopelipa, respectively) to draw up a plan to buy out Kassim Tajideen and expel him from Angola.

He wasn’t lying; his pre-eminence in the import sector came about because the Angolan élite needed a straw man when they ousted the previous “king of imports”, the Lebanese businessman, Kassim Tajideen. Tajideen (currently serving a prison term in the USA) was the majority owner of the Arosfran Group of companies, (amongst them Afribelg, Golfrate and Muteba), which together imported $50 million-dollars-worth of foodstuffs per month, that is $600 million a year.

Feijó and Kopelipa came up with a scheme to create a new company that they named Nova Distribuidora Alimentar e Diversos, Lda (NDAD), which aimed to buy out the entire assets of the Arosfran Group in Angola (including 170 warehouses) for $150 million. Another of President Dos Santos’s close associates, General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento “Dino”, obtained a personal loan of $150 million to this end from the Angolan Investment Bank (Banco Angolano de Investimento, BAI).

Several highly-placed sources told Maka Angola that Feijó and Kopelipa co-opted Vincent Miclet and his secretary, Adélia Bandeira El-Bichuti, into lending their names to the company to mask the involvement of politically-exposed persons. Miclet omits this detail from his account. He says he negotiated directly with Kassim Tajideen’s lawyer, Rui Ferreira, for the buy-out.

Yet by 2011 Ferreira had left his legal practice upon being appointed President of the Constitutional Court (today he is Supreme Court President). Questioned by Maka Angola, Judge Ferreira justified his role, denying a conflict of interest (which would have been contrary to Angolan law): “It’s true that I was across the sale of the Arosfran Group to NDAD in 2011 and that I had a semi-supervisory role in the process,” he stated. “As is well known, I was a lawyer in private practice for 23 years, between 1985 and 2008. And during that time, I was the legal consignor for a number of the companies in the Arosfran Group, including Golfrate and Afribelg, which belonged to Kassim Tajideen. Back then it was the largest organisation in the field of food distribution in Angola, in particular for essentials.”

However, upon his appointment to the Constitutional Court, Rui Ferreira ceased to represent his previous clients. When the Angolan President decided Kassim Tajideen had to be forced out of Angola, his Chiefs of Staff consulted Judge Ferreira, as he recalls: “They [Carlos Feijó and General Kopelipa] approached me to request my assistance on a matter of national interest. Because of the trust and respect I’d established with Tajideen over the many years of our previous professional relationship, they sought my help to persuade him to agree to an exit deal.They argued that this was a delicate matter of exceptional national interest in that a quick agreement needed to be reached, without dispute, so as not to affect essential food supplies.”

Judge Ferreira’s former client, Kassim Tajideen, was suspicious that the Angolan government was trying to oust him without payment and the President’s envoys needed Ferreira to serve as an unofficial go-between, simply to reassure Tajideen that he would be fully compensated. In these circumstances, said Rui Ferreira, “I agreed. Because it was a request from my country’s government which considered that I was uniquely placed to help them resolve this process, which was in the national interest.” He emphasised that there was no remuneration or other benefit to him and justified his role as an act of patriotism and good citizenship.

“I did what I did. It was nothing more than an unpaid ‘good offices mission’ required of me by my country’s government in the national interest,” he explained. “Both parties accepted that this was a ‘good offices mission’ and welcomed it. I did not act (in an official capacity as lawyer) for either party, but simply as a facilitator of the agreement.”

Miclet and NDAD

The contract for the sale of all the Arosfran Group’s assets was signed on 7 June 2011 by Kassim Tajideen and Vincent Miclet, the latter signing in his capacity as a “partner and manager of NDAD”. Out of the $150 million bank loan obtained by General Dino, two-thirds ($100 million) was paid directly to Kassim Tahjideen in September 2011 to compensate him for his expulsion from Angola. (He is banned from returning to Angola for a period of 20 years.)

As for the other part of the BAI loan ($50 million), well, it simply vanished.

Rui Ferreira admits that he was kept in the dark on the finer points of the deal: “Only some months later, after the fact, and without my being officially informed, did I hear on the grapevine who the real owners of NDAD were.” He names no names but sources have told Maka Angola that the real owners were Generals Kopelipa and Dino.

For his part Kopelipa’s erstwhile civilian colleague at the Office of the President categorically denies any involvement in NDAD. “The fact someone worked or held a senior position in the Office of the Presidency doesn’t mean they automatically enjoy illicit advantages of any kind,” said Carlos Feijó. (That was his only government role, from 2010 to 2012, after which he returned to the private sector and academic life. He’s currently a tenured Professor of Law at Agostinho Neto University.)

Feijó confirmed to Maka Angola that the expulsion of Tajideen and the compulsory purchase of the Arosfran Group were the result of a United Nations subpoena received by the Foreign Ministry of Angola regarding Tajideen’s links to Hezbollah. “I immediately advised [the President] that we must comply without hesitation. My understanding, from the constitutional and legal point of view, was that the Angolan State could not directly intervene and confiscate [the business] as we have no law providing for confiscation of assets unless there has been a guilty verdict in a court of law.”

“At the same time”, said Feijó, “we had to be cognisant of the fact that the Arosfran Group was the main operator in the import and sale of the vast majority of foodstuffs, in particular what we refer to as the ‘essential basket of goods’, and that any action taken against Arosfran could have a grave impact on the inflation rate which we were at pains to control.”

For these reasons, it was believed that the best solution would be to find a private Angolan-owned company to acquire the real estate and assets of the commercial companies in the Arosfran Group.

According to Carlos Feijó, “As General Dino led Kero [a supermarket chain] and had knowledge and experience of the market, he was charged with finding a financial solution, which involved taking out a loan from the BAI.” “Dino arranged the BAI financing. I was not part of what followed. The rest is a private matter which had nothing to do with me.”

Why Vincent Miclet? Because General Kopelipa already knew him from his role as a conduit for Chinese supplies to the Angolan military. Feijó says it was because they already had a business relationship that Miclet was chosen to act as the head of the Arosfran Group.

“All I know is that, from a business point of view, there was a decision to set up an Angolan commercial company and use that for the subsequent acquisition of the Arosfran Group”, explained Feijó. “There was a legitimate contract of sale and purchase of the Arosfran Group’s real estate and assets,” he added.

To the best of his recollection, Vincent Miclet and his secretary, Adélia Bichuti, drew up the inventory and valuation of the Arosfram Group based on consultations with Rui Ferreira who had worked with the Group: “To clarify, I mean Rui Ferreira’s private law firm, because I must emphasise that I have no knowledge of whether he was still a partner in that law firm.”

However, once other lawyers took over to draw up the agreement documentation, he says neither he nor General Kopelipa and Dino played any further part in the negotiations. “I must emphasise that I did not see either of the Generals (Kopelipa and Dino) involved in the negotiations. I would say that General Dino’s role was only to arrange the financing.”

Once there was agreement for the sale of the Arosfran Group, the Interior Minister drew up the order to expel Kassim Tajideen from Angola and ban his return. Tajideen was subsequently found guilty of money laundering and funding Hezbollah and was ordered to pay a $50 million fine. He is currently serving a five-year prison sentence in the United States of America. Some months later, President Dos Santos replaced Carlos Feijó and by 2013 the latter had returned to his private legal practice and took no further part in public life. His subsequent role was in his capacity as head of a private law firm after he was contacted to “try to resolve a situation in which NDAD was in technical bankruptcy, without the wherewithal to pay off the contracted loan”. From 2013, Feijó’s legal firm supplied a lawyer on monthly retainer to NDAD.

Documents received by Maka Angola show that NDAD was bankrupt and incapable of honouring its commitments. At this juncture, General Dino then reappeared to organise the restructuring of the formal shareholder composition of NDAD, with legal assistance from the office of Carlos Feijó.

The remaining $50 million of the debt to Kassim Tajideen was paid off towards the end of 2013, largely thanks to a second loan of $45 million obtained from Banco Privado Atlântico (the BPA, since renamed Millenium Atlântico), also arranged by General Dino.

In Feijó’s view, the relationship with Miclet had broken down due to the poor financial situation. He said there was a loss of confidence (in Vincent Miclet) and an erosion of trust between the various parties involved in the creation of NDAD and the takeover of the Arosfran Group. The reason given was Vincent Miclet’s “erratic management” of NDAD and the lack of clarity regarding conflicting interests between NDAD and Miclet’s company Angodis, which also supplied the Angolan Armed Forces.

“The issues between Vincent Miclet, Kopelipa and Dino resulted in General Dino submitting a criminal complaint to the DNIAP [Direcção Nacional de Investigação e Acção Penal – the National Directorate for Criminal Investigation and Action]. I didn’t see it necessarily as a criminal situation but rather a civil matter which could be resolved through the courts,” said Feijó.

Adieu, Vincent

On February 25, 2015, measures were put in place to rescind the 80 per cent stock quota allocated in the name of Vincent Miclet and the 20 per cent quota in the name of Adélia El-Bichuti and re- allocate them instead to Paulo César Rocha Rasgado (80 per cent) and Samora Borges Sebastião Albino (20 per cent) both of whom were frontmen for General Dino. The process made no reference to any compensation or payment to the outgoing “partners”. After all, they were not the real owners.

However, Vincent Miclet then demanded a pay-off of $56.6 million as “recompense for the acquisition of merchandise by three of his companies” – Pointpark Limited (registered in Dubai), Taycast Investiment Limited (also registered in Dubai) and Angodis – Angola Distribuição, Lda.

The already murky situation was further complicated by grave doubts about the legality of the transactions between them. The contract to supply the Defence Ministry was not with Angodis but his other firm Pointpark; however, Angodis received payments on Pointpark’s behalf.

There is documentary evidence that nefarious schemes were afoot. For example, on 30 May 2015 Angodis wrote to General Kopelipa and the then Defence Minister, Cândido Van-Dúnem, to effect the return of $64 million “received in error”. Maka Angola has not been able to verify whether the sum was, in fact, returned.

It seems fair to say that the arrangement between Miclet’s companies and the Angolan Defence Ministry were not entirely above board. One of the best documented examples of theft by Miclet’s companies was that they devised a strategy to hold back a proportion of the supplies delivered to the Angolan Armed Forces. In his written reply to Angodis, dated July 18, Lieutenant-General Francisco Firmino Jacinto (Director of the National Directorate for Administration and Finance at the Defence Ministry) begins by explaining the [erroneous] transfers as having been a “budgetary manoeuvre…to avoid their having to withdraw this amount from the Finance Ministry”.

It seems fair to say that the arrangement between Miclet’s companies and the Angolan Defence Ministry were not entirely above board. One of the best documented examples of theft by Miclet’s companies was that they devised a strategy to hold back a proportion of the supplies delivered to the Angolan Armed Forces. Paperwork prepared by senior officials working for Angodis, Pointpark and NDAD show that between 2011 and 2013 Miclet’s companies kept back $20 million of food that was already paid for.

Everyone wanted a piece of the pie

Vincent Miclet committed his version of events to paper in a report for the then President José Eduardo dos Santos, a copy of which was obtained by Maka Angola. In it, he says negotiations [to acquire the Arosfran Group] began in April 2011 and were chaired by “Mr Rui Ferreira, in the presence of the interested parties”.

He went on to state: “On April 7, 2011, Mr Rui Ferreira drew up and signed a contract for the sale and purchase of the fixed and liquid assets of the commercial branch of the Arosfran Group.” He said that initially the Group had demanded $327.3 million but eventually settled for $144.5 million.

Further: “On April 5, 2011, on ‘orders from above’ [generally understood as coming from the Angolan President], the BAI bank granted a loan for the purpose of payment for the contractually agreed price for the parcel of assets as signed by the parties, with the transfer taking effect on July 20, 2011 of US $100 million to the Alicomerce company.”

Miclet said that thereafter he used his own funds to restructure the company and pay for imports. But his summary of events gives the game away when he refers to an intervention by the President’s sister, Marta dos Santos, being interpreted as “treachery” by the “partners” (Generals Kopelipa and Dino). The fact is that they were the real owners of NDAD, not Miclet. He simply lent his name to the enterprise and ‘managed’ the company on their behalf until it was more or less bankrupt and they lost faith in him.

Why was NDAD was in such financial distress? Perhaps because the key figures were bleeding the company dry. Although NDAD reported profits of $1.5 million in its first year of operation, former employees agreed that there was no transparent accounting system in place. Indeed, NDAD’s accounts were handled by Adélia Bandeira, an accountant with Miclet’s firm, Angodis. A former NDAD executive told us: “We [NDAD staffers] had no means of knowing the day-to-day financial situation of the firm.”

With NDAD nominally under new “management”, things came to a head in August of 2013 when Miclet flew his private jet to Luanda for the transfer or powers to Paulo Rasgado and Samora Albino. His jet was prevented from leaving. A furious Miclet blamed General Dino.

As his price for stepping away from NDAD, Miclet is said to have demanded compensation of $82.5 million, which he claimed was the value he had injected into the restructuring of the business and its import activities. After an audit by Deloitte, his erstwhile “partners” offered him a sweetener of $26 million, which Miclet rejected.

In spite of his ouster, Miclet tried to regroup, in particular via his new oil and gas venture, Petroplus Overseas. But according to African Intelligence (IOL 814) his firm has “lost the lion’s share of its portfolio” in Gabon as well as its permits in Mali. Having taken so much of the pie over the past couple of decades, it appears Vincent may have bitten off more than he could chew.

*D. Quaresma Santos contributed to the English version of this report.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Winter Is Coming: Why Our National Debt Is Illegitimate, Unjust and Unsustainable…and Why We Should Be Worried

By Samuel Marete “The Luo community is happy Raila is back at the centre,” intoned our physician friend, Dr Sam Owino. In the last twelve months, since the surprise political rapprochement between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his antagonist-in-chief Raila Odinga, the talk about town has been how the Luos are now reaping from the so-called “Handshake”. “We’re no longer the political bogeyman of the state,” reiterated the Nairobi physician. “It has never been fun carrying the tag and burden of oppositional politics in the country for all these years.”

After the Handshake, which had been preceded by a piercing palpable tension across the country, Raila, the leader of the nascent opposition outfit, the National Super Alliance (NASA), broke ranks with his colleagues Kalonzo Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetangula to sue for peace with President Uhuru of the Jubilee Party. “Koro wan eisirkal,” (We’re now in government…we’re no longer in the opposition) said Raila soon after the Handshake, a statement that was reiterated by President Uhuru. A visitor to the country soon after the combustible double elections would never appreciate and digest fully the import of that statement.

To a section of the Luo community, “being in the political cold,” is a phrase they identify with all too well. “The Luo people have been in the opposition effectively since 1966, when President Jomo Kenyatta shunted his Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga,” said Bernard Oduor, an advertising and marketing manager of a Nairobi-based publishing company. “Let another community shoulder the weight of being always on the receiving end of the state’s anti-development brutal policies and constant violence.”

No community in Kenya has borne the brunt of the state’s political malice and economic sabotage than the Luo people, observed Oduor. “The Luo people have suffered the greatest political harassment and assassinations in this country, starting with Argwings Kodhek, who was killed in January 1969. Six months later, Tom Mboya, perhaps the greatest of Luo leaders, was killed, possibly by the same forces that took care of Kodhek through a freak accident.”

That same year, 1969, the government detained Jaramogi with other Luo leaders for standing up to Jomo and the Kiambu Mafia’s imperial tendencies, recalls Oduor. “It was a cruel testament of the political harassment by the successive government of Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi that by the time multipartyism was being re-introduced in Kenya, in 1991, Jaramogi was already frail, old and sickly.” A multiparty election was held in December 1992 and Jaramogi was elected the MP for Bondo. A year later, on January 20, 1994, Jaramogi was dead.

From 1963 to 1978, Kenya had been a de facto one party state. But in 1982, just before the attempted military putsch led by Kenya Air Force officers on August 1, 1982, the country become a de jure one party state, after Jaramogi and George Anyona, the firebrand politician from Gusiiland, walked to the registrar’s office at Sheria House and demanded to register their party – the Kenya African Socialist Alliance (KASA). Feeling threatened by the duo’s courage and determination to register a new party, one afternoon Moi summoned MPs and asked them to change the constitution to make Kenya a one-party dictatorship.

“Even though Robert Ouko, the brilliant foreign affairs minister, worked for the Kanu government and was a loyal lieutenant of Moi, they still got rid of him, proving that no Luo politician was good enough for a Kenyan government,” opined Oduor. “It has been a tortuous long journey and it’s time we enjoyed some respite.”

Broken promises

In the aftermath of a contested August 8, 2017 election and the subsequent boycott of the second presidential election on October 26, 2017, the state visited violence on members of the Luo community in Nairobi County, and especially in the lakeside town of Kisumu, which is perceived as a base for the Luo community. In both cities, hordes of youth from the ghetto suburbs of Kibera and Mathare in Nairobi and Nyalenda and Kondele in Kisumu rioted, protesting the gross mismanagement of the election procedure. Many of the youth who were felled by the bullets of state security personnel were Luo youth.

“The Handshake was meant to cool the political temperatures, which were threatening to soar overboard,” said Steve Ochuodho, a researcher in African history. “It was to allow for the country to go back to its normal self and stabilise, with the aim of the country hopefully taking off economically. True, the country stabilised, but nothing much has really happened thereafter.”

“Contrary to popular belief being peddled by ‘Raila evangelists’ that the Luos are now in government, nothing could be further from the truth,” noted Ochuodho. “Luos aren’t in the government and more than ever before, they are languishing in poverty. I fret every time I hear that Luos are now enjoying and I ask: Which Luos are these? If there are any Luos in government, they must be Raila’s friends or his relatives from Siaya County,” added the researcher.

The promises that Raila made after the Handshake, ostensibly to the Luo community, are nothing new, explained Ochuodho: “They are the same promises Raila has been making since 1997 when he merged his fledging National Democratic Party (NDP) with Kanu. Since then, it is the Odinga family that has continually grown rich at the expense of the Luo people. Because of these Raila Handshakes, the Luo people are treated as the Odinga family’s captives to be traded with politically any time the family wants to reap financially from the existing government.”

“There are no deliverables, neither are there fruits to be harvested from the Handshake,” said Ochuodho. “All what we are hearing is what it intends to do, It is classic political brinkmanship.” All what the Handshake has done is to entrench even further retrogressive leadership in Luo Nyanza.”

“Through the Handshake, Cyprian Awiti, the Homa Bay governor, came back. Every Luo voter, wherever he or she was, knew Awiti was never going to survive a by-election if the court upheld the petition.” Former Kasipul MP Oyugi Magwanga had successively petitioned both the High Court and the Court of Appeal, only for the Supreme Court to uphold his election victory in August 8, 2017.

With the coming by-election in Ugenya, Raila has already told the voters ahead of time that they should not let him down – that they should return Christopher Karan, who the court found had engaged in electoral malpractices, pointed out Ochuodho. “Kik ukuod wiya jothurwa, (Please don’t embarrass me), Raila told the voters when he went there recently. Even though Karan is unpopular, the ODM party still gave him a direct ticket.” David Ouma Ochieng, Karan’s chief opponent and the immediate former MP, whose petition was heard by the High Court in Kisumu, will be mounting a soap box when the by-election comes up on April 5, 2019.

“The Luo people were not ready for the Handshake,” said Mike Osilo, an information technologist in Nairobi. “Because they were ready for war. The state’s unceasing violence against the Luo people had created in them an appetite for unstoppable bloodshed. They were prepared to go the whole hog.”

Osilo said this hardline stance had been fomented during the October 26 fresh presidential elections when elections did not take place in four Nyanza counties (Homa Bay, Kisumu, Migori and Siaya). “For the first in the history of post-independent Kenya, a people had successively held back a state with all its militarised violence. From then on, the people decided there was no turning back and then the Handshake happened.”

“The Building the Bridges Initiative, the result of the Handshake, has now become a parastatal,” quipped Osilo. “It was meant to give jobs to the favoured boys. Everything is business as usual. If the Handshake and its appendage, the BBI, was serious in developing Luo Nyanza, it would have started by reviving Ahero Irrigation Scheme and the Chemilil, Muhoroni and Sony sugar factories…”

Osilo said Raila’s Handshake compensation promise to the families that lost their relatives in the last election, especially in Kisumu, has remained just that: a promise. “Immediately after the Handshake, Raila went down to Kondele, the site of the greatest state violence visited on a people. Scores of youth were killed by the GSU and Raila that night told their families that the government was going to compensate them. The people were in a very uncompromising mood, but Raila managed to calm them down. Twelve months later, there is nothing to show for that promise.”

“Let it be on record: The much talked about dredging vessel brought to Lake Victoria actually preceded the Handshake – Raila just hijacked its launching on January 19, 2019. Likewise, the ongoing resuscitation of the Kenya Breweries Limited plant in Kisumu is not a product of the Handshake: KBL had already given the farmers the go-ahead [before the Handshake took place] to start sowing sorghum. As for the ferry transport on Lake Victoria, the World Bank had already mapped the lake for its Lake Victoria Transport programme as far back as 2016,” noted Osilo.

“One year down the line, the Handshake had become a forum for exchanging insults,” said Ochuodho. “Those who used Ruto to thrust a poisoned dagger into Raila’s back are the same people who are now are using him to stab Ruto in the back.” In Ochuodho’s view, “Canaan had become a mirage”, whose climax was deporting Joshua Miguna Miguna, a deportation Ochuodho squarely blames Raila for. “I can tell you this, the Handshake will not last – it will soon collapse, and after it collapses, Raila will walk away in shame, this time accompanied by old age.” The referendum which is supposed to be the outcome of BBI is “already poisoned,” summed up Ochuodho. No bridges built in Kisumu

In the lakeshore Kisumu city, the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI)’s first anniversary went unnoticed. The residents we interviewed were resolute that the Handshake was still a puzzle and shrouded in mystery. Hence, the rapprochement means different things to different people. One year after it took place, it still dominates public discussions, eliciting more questions than answers.

“Did the Handshake simply substitute Luo-Kalenjin elite rivalry with the Luo-Gikuyu elite one? Are the Gikuyu elite now holding the ring between Raila Odinga and William Ruto? Who really is our enemy?” posed a middle-aged man at the Bunge la Wananchi (Peoples’ Parliament) meeting taking place under the huge canopy of an oak-like tree off the Kisumu-Kampala Road where real politik is earnestly and hotly debated during the lunch break.

For some of Kisumu’s residents, what the Handshake has succeeded in doing is resuscitate puzzling questions that revolve around Raila’s political deftness and survival instincts. “Raila’s an avid football fan and right now he has the ball…will he, this time just get away with a high ball against William Ruto? If he does, will Ruto, stand between him and the goal? Or, will he this time finally score the winning goal, now that the referees of the presidential tourney seems to be on his side?” mused Willis Ochieng. “Ruto is not a leader, he’s a dealer. There’s no doubt he would be bad for the country – he’s unsympathetic to the feelings of the people. But that aside, the big question that has been disturbing us is, just what is in it for the rest of the spectator crowd?

At the Kondele highway interchange, we met Shem Matiku, a cobbler who plies his trade below the interchange. Kondele was the site of fierce battles between the battle-hardened youth of the sprawling ghetto, who fought back the paramilitary police, the General Service Unit (GSU) in August 2017 after the first presidential election. Matiku had since put that terrible period behind him: “I’m an optimist. I believe Raila has the best interests of his people. Uhuru, unlike Ruto is not a hardliner, he could be a hard bargainer, but a bargainer nonetheless and that is why he made a pact with Raila.”

“Ruto’s too forceful,” reflected Matiku, in between shining his customers’ shoes. “It is as if he’s forcing the people to elect him: it’s either his way or the highway.” The cobbler observed that until Raila went into government, development in Luo Nyanza was lopsided. “Now we’re beginning to see some development our way: Kenya Breweries has reopened its factory and construction of roads has commenced and corruption is being fought…you know what…Raila helped Uhuru see state corruption in the government. Let the spirit of the Handshake flow. We support it one hundred percent.”

However, George Collins Owour, an astute civil society leader, is utterly unimpressed by the Handshake. “We wanted to put up a monument in honour of the victims of political violence, preferably at the Jomo Kenyatta sports ground and have Raila Odinga launch it,” said Owuor. “A monument that would tell the story of the victims of political violence, and a constant reminder to the youth of the dangers of political violence, while at the same time establishing a link between poverty and politics. The monument had been also intended to occupy a space for discussing political violence and how it distracts and destroys lives of many unhinged youth. It would remind them of the dangers of disorganised and unhelpful protests and thereby discourage them from participating in them.”

“The youth are always ready to participate in protests, but where are they now? Some were killed and maimed, others were arrested and falsely accused of robbery with violence and are now languishing in jail, having been forgotten,” lamented Owuor. “The irony is that the county government of Kisumu, while rejecting our proposal, was quick to fast track its own plans of erecting a statue in memory of Jaramogi Odinga.”

“Jaramogi initiated the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation, which inspired small- and medium-scale business initiatives in Nyanza region. As a social democrat, Jaramogi also led popular grassroots movements for political and cultural awareness in the whole of East Africa,” said Prof Anyang Nyong’o, the Governor of Kisumu.

While the contribution of Jaramogi among the Luo community is in no doubt and cannot be contested, whether in Luo Nyanza or, indeed the entire country, to seemingly bury the history of the youth, who have paid with their lives for fighting for democracy, is callous and deceitful, bemoaned Owuor. “Let us not kid ourselves – the Handshake has not worked for the youth: the boda bodas (motor cycle riders), street vendors and hawkers are still suffering – some lost their lives, others are today living with live bullets in their bodies. Nobody talks about their plight and President Uhuru and Raila have largely forgotten about them.”

Owuor said it would be pretentious to build bridges when the youth have been neglected. “The youth had been promised Canaan. Instead what they got was a Handshake between two political bigwigs who cared for nothing as far as the youth were concerned. Because of this, Raila cannot hold a rally in Kisumu – the youth are still very embittered.”

The divided opinion of Kisumu residents suggested that the Handshake was a self- preservation elite pact. Raila’s core political constituents, still hurting and nursing post- presidential election injuries and injustices since 2007, and suffering biting hunger pangs in these economic hard times, have been forced, yet again, to defer their quest for justice and reparations.

The civil society leader said BBI was a reward for the boys. “I’ve been seeing them in seminars taking selfies, and we’ve yet to see a preliminary report of its findings. If BBI was working, we wouldn’t have heard the kind of political rhetoric and bitterness we witnessed at the Kirinyaga governors’ conference. Truth be told, BBI has been overtaken by events…stupid…succession politics is the order of the day.”

The divided opinion of Kisumu residents suggested that the Handshake was a self-preservation elite pact. Raila’s core political constituents, still hurting and nursing post-presidential election injuries and injustices since 2007, and suffering biting hunger pangs in these economic hard times, have been forced, yet again, to defer their quest for justice and reparations.

Hard feelings, brought about by past betrayals by a cross-section of the Gikuyu elite, the construction of a few road projects, the appointment of a few sons-of-the-soil into public offices, and some subsidy for the beleaguered sugarcane farmers to numb the Luo people’s raw wounds, as they cheat them again, are still very real.

The mixed reactions also revealed a wide gap between the politics that the Handshake enabled at the county level – where incompetent, corrupt, and nepotistic leadership is the name of the game, and where Raila’s hard core support base yearns for a clean and competent government that can deliver healthcare, food, and clean water – and national-level politics, where the very same Raila has been baying for the blood of some of the corrupt, inept and ethnic chauvinists in charge of various ministries. Drunk with power by proxy

At the county level, the Handshake, it seems, is politics as usual. It starkly reminds Kenyans, especially residents of Kisumu, Homa Bay, Siaya and Migori counties, that their political fortunes or misfortunes since independence have risen or fallen hard with every elite pact, and the ever changing political coalitions, mostly beholden to expedient political interests.

“This time, it’s a call for a big sacrifice from Raila’s political ambitions, an exchange for the quest for justice for the electoral malpractices and victims of police violence, for some ‘development’,” and ultimately, Raila’s quest for the presidency or premiership,” posited Martin Augo.

If Raila’s core support base yearns for competent and accountable county governments is unmistakable, then the Handshake seemed to make such demands only at the national government level, points out Willis Ochieng, a tenderprenuer who has worked in several county governments in western Kenya. “The Handshake,” said Ochieng, “ilituliza joto la siasa, lakini wananchi bado hawana huduma. Ma MCAs, wamesahau hata watu wao kabisa. Wanapigana bunge kujaza mifuko yao tu.” (The Handshake cooled the political temperatures, but the people still lack services. These MCAs have completely ignored the people who elected them. They fight in their respective assemblies to fill their pockets).

In several social media platforms, Kenyans envy the counties that have made remarkable progress and built infrastructure that makes county residents proud, such as the stadium in Kakamega County, the hospital in Makueni County, and the level-six hospital in Kisii County. But hardly anyone envies a hyacinth-free Siaya or Homa Bay or a world class football stadium in Migori. Raila’s strongholds, it seems, have nothing to show for the six years of the devolved government experiment.

One hears only an occasional gnashing of clerical teeth, a dissatisfied Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) Bishop James Ochiel of Southern Nyanza diocese, but hardly a gnashing of the second liberators’ teeth, the custodians of the spirit of the struggle against bad government, among them the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party’s honchos.

Drunk with power by proxy, the party, it seems, is wasting its energy, distracted by chasing “the rat that is escaping a burning house” rather than putting out the fire that is consuming the house. ODM, it seems, reserves its harshest punishment for minnows, inconsequential transgressions and comical infractions, rather than the life-and-death violations of the men-only governors of its core ODM political base – men who, except for Prof Nyong’o, are seen as corrupt, nepotistic, incapable and fantastically generous with cash hand-outs, often given to a few hangers-on as they ride out a lacklustre two-term tenure at the helm of the Homa Bay, Siaya, and Migori county governments.

The ODM mandarins and Raila evangelists would rather they shadow and listen to the double meaning of Aisha Jumwa’s supposed disloyalty and sexed-up taunts of kiuno kiuno (hip gyrations) or “Kanugo e teko,” in Kisumu-speak. Aisha Jumwa’s flaunting of her sex appeal, which seems to gain the ire of the mostly male ODM party honchos, might look comical, but it is a timely reminder than the ODM party leaders may have to work extra hard to keep women’s support. Many women who support the party are hurting and hard done by tough economic times.

No justice for victims of political violence

In Kisumu’s Obunga slum, we sat down with two women outside the aptly named New Obunga Pub, who out of fear of reprisal from ODM Kisumu party hacks requested anonymity. “Risasi oweyo goyo udi wa. tear gas orumo,” (The bullets have stopped hitting our houses and the tear gas is no more), said the lady with a spec of gray hair. “The only respite we have now is that people are no longer running helter-skelter…we, at least, can move freely,” intoned her younger friend. “But there is nothing much else: there is no business, no income, we can’t buy anything because we don’t have the money. You just hustle as hard and kama kawaida (as usual nothing has changed). There is no work for the youth.”

Many, especially women, are still hurting and carrying the scars of the political violence of the 2017 presidential elections. They are also deeply impacted by the tough economic times. “Women were raped. Some lost family members, and although some of the victims formed a support group and were given food at the Kenyatta sports ground, they didn’t get any other help,” said one of the women, a human rights defender, who was hunched over an old model laptop plastered with stickers.

Justice for the victims of political violence has remained a sticky sour question. Unlike their counterparts from Central Kenya, many of the internally displaced people (IDPs) or returnees who came back to Kisumu and neighbouring counties are still waiting for the token financial compensation for the loss of land or livelihood.

The majority of the victims of the recent political violence feel let down by their elected leaders. At best, the elected leaders have been opportunistic and at worst indifferent to the plight of the victims. Shena Ryan, who works with a youth group that runs a charity for the poor living with HIV on the outskirts of Kisumu city, said, “It’s not enough to pay for the funeral expenses and give hand-outs to the bereaved for cheap publicity. A politician’s still a politician, always looking out for cheap glorification.”

Ryan reckons that the Handshake had restored stability, no doubt, because “Kikuyus could now again trade freely in Kibuye. We went to the streets, to protest electoral injustices, and some of us were killed. No one has got justice. They are telling us the OCS Nyalenda will be charged. Until these policemen are charged, it will remain just a narrative.”

Said the social worker, “I wasn’t for the Handshake and now, with the knowledge of hindsight, it would have been better had we not poured into the streets. Until the two buffaloes who shook hands come back to the people, purposefully apologise to the victims of the police violence, that Handshake means nothing. Recently, when the duo visited [to attend Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s memorial in Bondo], we were told, ‘Do not heckle Jakom. Who’s Jakom?’” The Handshake has returned us into a one-part state; we are all now in the Jubilee Party.”

In place of the elected leaders, a consortium of civic organisations comprising the Kisumu City Residents Voice, the Kondele Justice Centre, the National Informal Sector Alliance and Kisumu Joint Bunge Initiative, among others, have stepped in to pursue justice for at least 67 people who incurred various bodily injuries, both in the run-up to and after the 2017 presidential elections.

The consortium has petitioned the office of the Chief Justice of Kenya, asking Justice David Maraga to establish a tribunal to look into how security officers singled out and policed Luo Nyanza region during the last general election, to pursue justice for the victims of police violence, and to recommend the prosecution of the police officers who may be found to have been culpable of violence.

Mixed fortunes

Kisumu residents feel that their elected leaders are also indifferent to their economic plight. “Tich tire” (I’m hard at work) says Governor Prof Anyang’, who valorises the Protestant work ethic. But his constituents, such as Willis Ojwang’, retort, “Tich tire; to kech kecho,” (You are hard at work, but hunger bites sting).

Kisumu is no longer stuck in a socialist-like rut of drab municipal and civil service housing, uniformly dull in a state of disrepair, and the old ubiquitous rickety and dusty Peugeot 404 plying the Kondele- Kondele route that were kept on the narrow and badly maintained roads by the combined genius of the city’s mechanics and take-no-prisoners drivers.

The regional marine transport into the port of Kisumu is as good as dead. And the railway tracks are buried deep in the soil. Yet, the urban poor now cruise through the city’s new road networks and underpasses, four or five passengers in a tuk tuk, (rickshaw-type three-wheeler taxis) or as one or two passengers on a boda boda. Its streets, especially in the CBD, all the way to Kisumu International Airport, are well lit at night.

But the city has not yet turned a corner. Its economy is not yet as dynamic as its demography, especially as it draws in other East Africans, such as the Burundians and more Ugandans, who are hawking consumer goods in search of surplus incomes. More than the Protestant work ethic, Kisumu’s economy is in dire need of structural change, the revival of agricultural sectors and ventures into agribusiness, if only to mitigate the widening gender inequality gap and meet the demands of regional integration.

“How can Raila be happy with the Handshake when it has does nothing for us in Nyanza?” posed the women. “At least during the coalition government, the fish factories were revived. The nusu mkate [half bread] government delivered some economic dividends. The recent pact seems to have no economic agenda for the urban poor who bore the brunt of police brutality in the last presidential elections.”

Although the revival of the KBL Kisumu plant held hope for some, the two women we talked to in Obunga complained that the plant employs people from Nairobi, Uganda, Nyakach, and Machakos, not the residents of Obunga as they had hoped. Worse still, for women who have been left out of the city’s better-paying male dominated boda boda and the car wash businesses, the fish processing companies, which used to employ many women directly and indirectly through trading in mgongo wazi (fish skeletons) is closed. “It was big business for all. But with the coming of the Chinese fish, the companies closed. These companies now use their big freezers and cold rooms to store and redistribute Chinese fish,” said one of the women.

“Prostitution is rife here,” one of the women told us. “If you guys stayed a little longer, you’d see a traffic of women moving up towards Kondele, Gwara-Gwara or Ka-Lorry where sex goes for as little Sh20 per shot. What has the Handshake done for us? It has pushed us into sex slavery,” moaned the woman dejectedly as the sun was setting on Obunga slum.

Youth too have missed the BBI boat. If university students’ campus politics is a good indicator for the shifting political alliance, then Kathy Gitau, the articulate, urbane, and charming vice chairperson of the Maseno University students’ council knows all too well how significant local politics, including campus politics, are intricately tied to the centre.

Clutching a long list of names of students who deserve bursaries this semester, which are due for submission, she agreed that the Handshake, “had cooled down political temperatures …brought political stability, freedom of movement, and good working relationship across ethnic divides, and on campus, bridged the ethnic rift between students”, making it possible for her and team to invoke the spirit of the Handshake to canvass for votes. As a coalition of three women and four men, and as a coalition of a Luo (chairperson), a Kikuyu (vice chairperson), a Luhya (treasurer), a Kisii and Turkana, they had been elected.”

Stated Gitau: “Before the Handshake, it was hard for a Kikuyu or Kalenjin to get elected by the students. Ethnic discrimination against the Kikuyu and Kalenjin was rife among students. ‘Why should we give you a piece of cake here when you have the national cake?’ argued the students. Our competence, individuality, strong gender and ethnic balance swept us into office. All candidates in our coalition, except one, were elected. We won by a landslide,” said Gitau.

Still, Ms Gitau had some reservations. The Handshake, she said, “has bridged the divisions among the ordinary citizens who can now interact freely, but it has also widened the rift among the political class. It has killed the opposition. Raila now has a central role in government because he seems to have edged out Ruto. This could, as well, affect us, pitting us in an endless cycle of disputes and divisions.”

She, however, admitted that she still doesn’t understand what the Handshake is all about. “Is it supposed to end in a referendum? If so, how will we participate in a process whose outcome or end game is unknown or seems predetermined? What is in it for the youth? Be that as it may, the Handshake seems to have shifted the focus away from the Big Four Agenda issues of food, healthcare, housing and industrialisation.”

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