Kenya is now fully embarked on an experimental approach to generating economic development – what President William Ruto aggressively promoted as the “bottom-up” model for wealth creation, during his campaigns last year.
And I am glad to note that there is at least one thing on which there is national consensus when it comes to matters of economic development:
Broadly speaking, we agree that our country needs to provide an enabling environment for more foreign direct investments, which can create jobs.
Hence all the excitement whenever one of the big American tech companies announces that it is setting up a 'regional hub', for example.
Such a consensus did not always exist in this country. Up to the 1980s, any new investment from outside Kenya – or even from within it – was viewed with great suspicion among learned Kenyans, as possibly one more 'neocolonial' enterprise.
The idea here was – very roughly – that the only reason for some investor to come all the way from Europe to set up a factory here, was that the investor knew that the Kenyan government would acquiesce to 'slave wages' and insalubrious working conditions that would never be allowed in the investor's country.
And that the so-called investor would reap massive dividends at the expense of the working poor, and then promptly repatriate the profits back to Europe, leaving us even poorer than we were before this new factory was ever built.
That is no doubt an oversimplified version of the basic idea. But this was more or less what most Kenyan intellectuals – centred around the University of Nairobi, which was then the only university in the whole country – believed and taught at the time.
And what is even more amazing is that this somewhat xenophobic theoretical framework for economic development was largely the work of a single man, and a 'foreigner' at that. This was the famous Professor Walter Rodney, a citizen of Guyana, who in the early 1970s taught at the University of Dar-es-salaam, and in 1972 published his most influential book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
In trying to understand why this book proved to be so influential in Kenya – even among people who only knew of its title and had never actually read it – you have to bear in mind that this was just about a decade after Independence in 1963.
As such, most of the population still laboured under a psychology of victimhood; a conviction that foreigners who came with promises of benefits were not to be trusted.
Rodney’s basic thesis was – to quote from an online source – that “Africa was deliberately exploited and underdeveloped by European colonial regimes…Africa developed Europe at the same rate that Europe underdeveloped Africa”.
In short, he argued that it was no accident that Europe was rich, and Africa was poor. But rather that African poverty had in some way been engineered by the very forces that made Europe rich.
And from this it was easy enough to end up with the conclusion that although formal colonialism had ended, it had merely been replaced by a new and even more sinister and potent variety of economic domination – 'neocolonialism'.
What then cemented Rodney’s legacy was political martyrdom. He was assassinated in broad daylight in Georgetown, the capital city of his native Guyana, by a car bomb.
He was only 38 at that time.
Naturally, this led to speculation that he had been killed by agents of foreign imperialists. There were also reports that his assassination was a state-ordered intervention.
In any case (and turning to the present day) consider the kind of news item that was quite common here in Kenya in the run-up to the August 8, 2022, General Election, and which most newspaper readers would probably only glance at in passing.
This was a photo of a governor (and usually one seeking reelection) with a group of 'foreigners' engaging in a supposed 'groundbreaking ceremony' for some new investment that this 'foreign investor' was just about to plough large sums of investment capital into.
I don’t know if any of these staged events actually fooled voters. But about 40 years ago, it would more likely have backfired, given the dominance of Rodney’s 'underdevelopment' paradigm.
