Dr. Kituyi is Right; African Politics has no Respect for Economic Rationality
The UNCTAD secretary General, Dr. Mukhisa Kituyi was recently in Nairobi, Kenya. This was on Tuesday 9th May 2018. He was invited to hold an early evening two-hour long interview on governance issues at the Citizen Television; he was interviewed by Jeff Koinange, the rambunctious journalist currently working with the citizen TV. Items of the interview were wide in scope, they ranged from china in Africa, continued improvement in the manufacturing based GDP in Ethiopia, politics of self-identity in Kenya, intra-state trade in Africa, the Raila-Uhuru hand-shake as a symbol of the precocious political intrigues behind 2022 presidential elections in Kenya , peace in the Southern Sudan, oil and politics of natural resources in Africa , Ali Dangonte and the future of manufacturing sector in Africa , drought, food shortages, floods and other environmental disasters in Kenya , constitutional change and governance architecture in Kenya, poverty concentration and foreign debt crisis in Africa, ICT and commerce as well as gender empowerment towards corporate democracy in Kenya .
While responding to one of the initial questions about current political culture of the winner-takes-all culture in connection to the current social progress in Kenya, Dr. Kituyi remarked that African politics has no respect for economic rationality, especially the nature of political culture in Kenya where reward for political solidarity does not consider the need to protect national economy, national cohesion, entrepreneurship and social progress. In this observation Dr. Kituyi was, right black and white.
Similar position is taken by Thomas Beckett and Francis Fukyama. Beckett and Fukuyama are currently the most resourceful scholars on politics of International development. Thomas Beckett has always argued that patrimonial capitalism, where those in power amass wealth by exploiting the powerless masses is the key reason behind persistent poverty in Africa, Latin America and Asia as well it is the primary social force behind the widening gap between the North-South divide. In a similar tandem, Fukuyama (2016) in his book Political Order and Decay; Why Democracy Fails attributes the social problems of poverty, unemployment and recurrent political tensions in Kenya to the entrenched culture of political patrimony and clientellism. Fukuyama criticizes that in Kenya; those that show political solidarity to the incumbent government by socially identifying with the ethnic nationalism of those managing the current executive power will not be punished for their acts of corruption and all other acts of public indiscipline. Good analogy will obviously, conclude that this is one façade of the culture of political irrationality that often betrays economic rationality in Kenya as decried by Dr. Kituyi.
About governance architecture, Dr. Kituyi strongly persisted that the institution of politics is too good to be left for the bad people, that African leaders and especially, political leaders in Kenya have to change from the current political culture in which political solidarity is dead blind to the open societal sores like corruption, ethnicity and political irresponsibility to a new fashion of political thinking which is fully oriented to the moral duty of taking Kenya forward as a nation. According to Dr. Kituyi good politics is possible where there is sober thinking and un-blemished patriotism; these are inescapable ideals of good politics that guarantees economic dividends for the leader and the led.
Dr. Kituyi blamed African countries for borrowing from the West only to use the borrowed money on financing recurrent expenditures, like the wage bills for the civil service, instead of borrowing to finance development projects. This is one of the reasons why most of African countries are under heavy burden of foreign debt. To overcome such hurdles for better paces towards economic and social development, African countries are encouraged to bench-mark on the Scandinavian counter-parts on how to develop and maintain the economic-friendly civil service and economic sized cabinets. To develop the type of cabinets that enable the African economies to enjoy lower non-investment costs, the cabinets that have ministers properly cultured against irrationality of conspicuous consumptions, but not the cabinet which collectively behaves like a certain Governor of one of the poorest Counties in Kenya, he always flies in a first class category along with his secretaries and personal assistants when going to Europe on a non-official trip.
It was under the above contexts that Dr.Kituyi questioned and cautioned African traders not only to be going to China to buy, but instead to go to china whith goods produced and manufactured from Africa to be sold to the consumers in China . This can be done smoothly if African governments can move a step-forward to negotiate with the manufacturers from China to come and establish their factories in Africa so that the process of value addition can be done from Africa before exporting to China and other overseas market. This approach will lead to diffusion of technology in Africa as well as creating jobs for the youthful African labour suppliers.
There are a lot of facts in Dr. Kituyi’s observation that Africa should exhaust the available opportunity of trading with itself before thinking of exporting to overseas. This is economic fortune that can only be fully enjoyed if there are reliable infrastructures and security systems as well as monetary currencies that can allow intra-African trade to thrive without necessarily involving the colonial and the neo-colonial masters. The intra-African trade which means free movement of technically qualified labour from one African country to another without eventuality of malicious opportunism through social dumping which happens by a country sending its most illiterate and most un-resourceful trash of people to another a country .The way Nigeria does to other African countries and same way Ugandan illiterate horde of sex workers, hotel waiters, boda-boda riders, sugar cane seller, hawkers, barber-shop keepers, roasted maize sellers and boiled eggs hawkers currently flow un-checked to Lodwar town in Kenya.
Governance architecture is the heart of political disrespect for good economic choices. Flawed constitution and flawed constitutional culture are the key musketeers that tread the social spaces of African politics the way the hobgoblins and the specters that came from the nether world to haunt the politics of Europe as imagined by Karl Marx. Similarly, it is the bad constitutions and failure by political leaders in Africa to respect the good elements in the bad constitutions of their countries that have led Africa to the sorriest political experiences like those evinced in Southern Sudan and Central African Republic. This does not mean that there is a good constitution in Kenya, no. That’s why there is palpable tempo for constitutional change in Kenya. An exercise which Dr. Kituyi argued that should not be about creating political positions in the government for the members of the powerful political class. But it should be all about making a constitution that vouchsafes inclusivity, accountability, transparency, equity, human rights and rule of law.
Alexander Opicho writes from Lodwar, Kenya