I believe it is the celebrated political theorist, Mutahi Ngunyi, who first accustomed Kenyans to referring to their various ethnicities as “nations”.
Prior to that, we had long known them to be “tribes”.
His argument though, was very persuasive. He pointed out that in the centuries before colonisation, the various indigenous ethnic groups which now constitute “the people of Kenya” were completely independent political and economic entities.
Whether ruled by councils of elders; or by chiefs; or even by the occasional “paramount chief”, each ethnic group was, distinctly, one people who spoke one language and had their own internal governing structures.
It took the advent of colonisation for these separate groups to accept to be contained in one country – what was initially the “Kenya Colony” and is now “the Republic of Kenya”. And Mutahi Ngunyi’s key insight was that most Kenyans, even now, are still willing inhabitants of what one historian recently referred to as “the cage of nationalism”.
Their first loyalty is to their “nation” in the precolonial sense of that word.
Kenyans may rejoice when their country is referred to as politically stable and democratically mature.
But with only about 100 years of belonging within a recognised political border and with a previous history of having consisted of dozens of separate “nations”, can we really be sure of this?
Well, maybe for a start we can dismiss the idea of political maturity. Thanks largely to the election of one Donald Trump in the US in the 2016 election, we now know that there is really no such thing as a “mature democracy”.
And after all those years when so many of us media commentators used to routinely express our frustrations that the Kenyan voters lacked “the maturity and objectivity” shown so conspicuously by American voters. After all the respect we gave to such American voters believing that, unlike us, they could be relied on to support “issues” rather than ethnicity or race. Is it not hilarious that American commentators now borrow from us, African media commentators, routinely referring to “tribalism” to explain the manifest political trends in their country?
It would seem that any democracy being “mature”, is largely a matter of appearances. And that given the right set of circumstances, voters will quickly retreat, psychologically, into their tribal communities.
But what about political stability?
This is something far more valuable than any mirage of “democratic maturity” as it is the foundation of economic growth – which in turn is the key to job creation, perhaps Kenya’s most critical and existential challenge.
And here as well, we have Trump to thank, for exploding the old myth that job creation and economic growth were in some way linked to democratic maturity.
Despite President Trump comprehensively infantilising the American presidency, the economy did not perform all that badly under him.
But back to political stability:
I have noticed that many of our influential religious leaders tend to confuse political stability with “consensus”. And they constantly appeal for such consensus as a way to resolve our many differences.
But outside of a situation where a country is fighting against an external aggressor, such consensus is actually exceedingly rare. Political divisions are the norm in all democracies. That is why we have elections – so as to decide which group will get to form the next government, while the losers wait for the next election.
Well, the problem here in Kenya is that, since the return to multiparty elections in 1992, following every election, those who end up on the “outside” tend to be – in demographic terms if not necessarily in terms of total votes cast – a clear majority.
While those on the “inside” are usually stigmatised as being “from only two tribes” – the tribes of the president and the deputy president. This is no recipe for long-term political stability.
So, to the extent that the Building Bridges Initiative is intended to change this and bring greater inclusivity to Kenyan politics at “the Big Table” where we all know “the National Cake” is sliced up – the BBI is at least worth considering.
