If you listen carefully to the promises being made by the leading presidential candidates as we go into the final leg of the electioneering period, you will find they really boil down to the same thing.
What is being promised by Deputy President William Ruto and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga can be distilled as follows: First, that they will open more paths to the middle class for young Kenyans from poor families; and second, that they will at any rate greatly expand the size of our middle class.
None of that would make for a very effective political slogan. But the fact remains that this would be the main policy goal of just about any presidential candidate, who wished to see the country prosper.
But to get to the heart of this issue, we also need to first define what we mean by “middle class”. And this is not as easy as it seems.
Part of this is because so much of the economic activity in Kenya — as in much of Africa — takes place in the informal sector, which is both unregulated and untaxed.
This means there will be plenty of individual prosperity that is not captured in official statistics. And also, that governments can exaggerate how many new businesses they have helped to create.
I was once involved in a panel discussion that featured journalists from various parts of Africa and that is when I realised just how difficult it is to agree on what constitutes the African middle class.
One of the West Africans gave the examples of, on the one hand, a Nigerian market woman in some small town up north, who lives on a modest property she owns, and whose business it is to travel to Lagos to buy various vanity goods wholesale (synthetic hair “extensions”; perfumes; shiny trinkets) to sell to other market women. She has six children and spends most of her money on their education.
On the other hand, a young university graduate employed in the private sector, living in a nice neighbourhood and drives a nice car. But he owes the equivalent of his annual salary on that car, which he bought with a loan. And if he lost his job, it would take just two months for him to not only lose his car but to also be evicted from his nice apartment.
If you take an anecdotal perspective on the issue, then it is the young man who would appear to be solidly middle class. But if you looked into the numbers, you might find it is the (possibly uneducated) market trader who is truly middle-class.
Also, if you ask them, the young graduate would no doubt say he was middle class — indeed he would insist on it. While the market woman would likely say she was “a poor woman who is struggling to look after her family”. And despite having a stronger asset base than that graduate, she would probably laugh in disbelief if you told her she belonged to the middle-class.
Acknowledging all the complexities of defining the reality of being middle class in purely economic terms, we could say what clearly exists is a “middle class lifestyle” and that this is something we can recognise when we see it.
And it is this aspiration to a middle-class lifestyle that the leading presidential candidates are appealing to.
And speaking of middle-class lifestyles, I should add that one of the reasons so many ordinary people in Western European countries defined as “welfare states”, are firmly in the middle class is that their governments provide some of the things Raila, in particular, has been promising: Free education all the way to university; free healthcare; and a conditional social safety net for those who may need it.
In such countries, rapidly rising school fees weigh nobody down as we are here in Kenya. A medical emergency does not wipe out the family savings or sink the family into debt. And losing your job is not the end of the world.
Even when unemployed, the citizens of such countries can still maintain a decent standard of living.
