The traumatic experience we went through in 2007-08 doesn't seem to have taught some of us any lesson. Perhaps those who are insensitive to what happened and what we should not be attempting to do now regarding the use of violence for political ends are those who were least engaged in politics then. This lot of people includes the new political potentates in the county governments, especially some governors.
Political violence quite often goes hand-in-hand with primitive accumulation in pre-capitalist societies. Excited about acquiring wealth and capital in a setting where market competition is limited, or where it is made limited by the state or the absence of the same, primitive accumulators will bleed fellow human beings to death to get the wealth or capital they are after in an extremely ruthless manner.
Anybody who has watched the movie Twelve Years a Slave will notice how ruthless White cotton and sugar plantation owners treated African slaves in the plantations of the southern US in the nineteenth century. We also saw it in Kenya for 70 years with the White colonialists. To them black Africans were not workers but natives "made to work" so that they could slowly acquire the White man's ways of living, but without the political power and economic independence that went with that power. White settler primitive accumulation in Kenya was in essence no different from its counterpart in the southern US during the slave economy.
As fate would have it, a new set of primitive accumulators has been inadvertently created by the emergence of devolved governance. It includes a breed of governors who believe that, as bosses in the county government, they have the right and authority to use their offices to acquire wealth and capital in the shortest period of time by any means necessary. Anybody who stands on their way, or uses constitutional means to try and stop them in achieving their objectives, may invite the wrath of their power in a most ruthless manner.
They have taken the sentence in the Constitution that says "there are two types of government in Kenya" very seriously. What they very rarely remember is the fact that this sentence is followed by a qualifier: "Separate but interdependent". Separate, yes; but interdependent, no; especially when that interdependence means that what is defined as "state officers" includes them, thus implying that they are also subject to the limitations and constraints on the use of power by public officers such as themselves. They see themselves not as public officers but "lords in an estate which we own."
The Constitution gives any Kenyan the right to move anywhere, settle anywhere, work anywhere, assemble with fellow Kenyans anywhere within the republic. As long as a Kenyan citizen does all these things without violating any other existing law, he or she has the inalienable right and freedom to do so. Some governors do not think so. They take the counties as their fiefdoms: They own them.
Getting into those counties requires their permission. This is stated in broad daylight; unashamedly. One wonders whether there is no state instrument or institution that can immediately apprehend them for violating the Bill of Rights or Chapter Six of the Constitution. Yes, there are many state institutions that can do this. But the primitive accumulators have so much "loose change" in their hands that they can afford to buy anybody, and thereby keep them quiet.
If you look carefully the more politically ruthless or violent these governors are the more aggressive they are in primitive accumulation. They know that they have too much to lose if they lose their offices, so they will fight their political opponents in the most ruthless ways. They do not trust formal state power; hired goons are their own version of personal "county power".
These goons are armed with arsenals of weapons only reminiscent of the Chicago or New York mafia of Al Capone's type.
We are in for a rude shock if we believe these county potentates will bow to the will of the people through free and fair elections. The signs of the times were evident in what happened in Migori last weekend. The plot is likely to thicken in some other counties where the potentates rule supreme.
These developments must cause us some worry and lead us to take some urgent steps to safeguard our nascent democracy in the county governments.
Devolution was created for one major purpose: Giving an opportunity to ordinary Kenyans to have a real say in how their taxes are spent by a system of government "closest to them". They were to feel the difference between being oppressed or exploited by a post-colonial state and being governed by a system in which they live, and move, and have their being.
That is why devolution begins at the village council, which is the primary unit of governance at the grassroots. This village council is not simply an administrative unit; it is a politically participatory unit in decision-making for development hence, in county planning for development. The county government derives its power from the ordinary Kenyans who live in these villages. Kenyans must, therefore, see their lives change as a result of the more democratic manner in which public resources are used.
When governors divert the use of public resources to primitive accumulation they must, ipso facto, be ant people at the grassroots. They will very rarely appreciate the importance of village councils. At worst they will not establish them; at best they will formally establish them but ignore them in practice.
A new movement for Kenya's Third Liberation is obviously in the offing. This is the movement to liberate the county governments from political potentates who are primitive accumulators. This breed of people include executive committee members (so called "ministers") in the county government, together with their chief officers. In some cases, members of the county assemblies have also joined the bandwagon; they will defend the system of primitive accumulation and its ruthless use of political power to the hilt.
The current electioneering period has brought this out so starkly that it is almost frightening. Given the level of poverty in rural areas, human dignity has been thrown to the winds. Men and women throw themselves into the political auction arena, ready for their votes to be bought by the highest bidder.
Soldiers of the Third Liberation must begin confronting this phenomenon bravely and daringly, and must begin spreading the "liberation political theology" among the people. Poverty can dehumanise, and absolute poverty can dehumanise absolutely! That is the only reliable weapon with which the people can be liberated and the primitive accumulators pushed into a terrain of politics where they are at a loss on what to do.
Their immediate reaction will be, of course, to unleash political violence to frustrate any discourse that will resonate in the hearts and minds of the people. Like the colonial authorities, they will seek to make "their people" live in "closed districts", away from the reach of "troublemakers".
It may sound stranger than fiction, but these primitive accumulators exist in the counties. They are not about to lose political power through elections without waging the mother of all versions of political violence in modern Kenya. If the phenomenon is not stopped in its track now, it will grow worse in the next election.
The one-party system was crafted to midwife primitive accumulation. The "separate" county government system is being designed and nurtured deliberately by some governors to midwife primitive accumulation. No wonder they have fought tooth and nail to avoid accountability in the Senate, or to circumvent it, or to connive with equally ruthless late primitive accumulators in the national government to achieve their goals.