WILLY MUTUNGA: Hustlers have realised they were lied to

On the 60th anniversary of our independence (12 December 2023), I glorify and celebrate the links and continuities of our resistance for land, resources, and freedom.

I also celebrate and glorify the struggles the world over for a just, free, peaceful, non-militaristic, non-eugenist, non-racial, non-sexist, non-ethnic, gender-just, ecologically safe, prosperous, equitable, and socialist planet.

Once President Moi prophesied that the nationalist party at independence, Kenya African National Union (Kanu), would rule our Motherland for 100 years.

The various Kanu dictatorships since independence celebrate their sixty years of misrule, yet again.

The youth of this country needs to ensure that Moi’s prophesy does not come to pass.

They should know there will be in this country a national democratic revolution under the leadership of a political leadership that is, at a minimum, anti-imperialism and anti-comprador bourgeoisie. The latter rule the country as agents of the latter.

Kenyan history has to focus on 68 years of colonialism and 60 years of neocolonialism.

Both periods have witnessed the theft of our lands, resources, and freedom, unacceptable poverty and inequality; the denial of the people’s material interests such as universal education, universal healthcare, shelter, water, clean environment and sanitation; and unacceptable unemployment that denies us of our human dignity.

Both education and employment are part of the fundamental mainstay of human dignity.

This history of 128 years is also our history of heroic resistance and struggles against foreign domination, oppression, and exploitation.

Colonialism was resisted from the beginning of its occupation. We have our heroines and heroes of this resistance. History has recorded these struggles.

The Mau Mau Liberation Movement, with its armed wing known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), has erroneously been called the “peak” of these struggles when in fact the struggles have continued.

The independence movement was a link and continuity when the KLFA retreated from the War of Liberation.

After independence there have been resistance underground and above ground by movements: Trade Unions, Women’s Rights Movements, Cooperative Movements, Patriotic media, the December Twelfth Movement, Mwakenya, the struggles for human rights, social justice, and struggles for national democratic and transformative Constitution.

We have also had our radical and patriotic political opposition ever, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), whose radical Wananchi Declaration is reflected in some of the provisions of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

Now our fifth liberation is about the struggles to implement the 2010 Constitution through a political leadership that is anti-imperialism and anti-comprador.

Such political leadership will end the politics of division (race, ethnicity, clans, gender, generation, region, religion, occupation, and English Premier League) and build a united sovereign nation that births the politics of issues, global, regional, and national.

As surely as I see an uprising in Kenya on the horizon I can also see such an alternative political leadership on the horizon. That is my prophecy.

In both periods we have witnessed foreign domination, exploitation, oppression, and attacks on our sovereignty as a people. We remain in a slave plantation called Kenya where the national rulers or agents are what Malcolm X famously called “house niggers.”

Our comprador bourgeoisie is the ancestors of our version of house niggers, the chiefs, religious leaders, politicians, corporate entities, and our 8300 billionaires that benefit hugely from our recolonisation and occupation.

This comprador class has benefited from being supporters of the masters of the plantation in Kenya. The refrain “the British never left” is still true.

Of course, our international situation is our occupation and lack of freedom, thanks to the foreign domination, exploitation, and oppression we daily experience from the West and East.

Since World War II, and before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, revolutionaries have described this international situation as based on the imperialism of the Triad (US, Europe, and Japan), the social imperialism of the Soviet Union, and the emerging social-imperialist superpower of China.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we see struggles for a multi-polar world, best expressed in the coalition called BRICS. Collective Africa is a bystander of these developments although it is the one that faces the danger of continued occupation and colonisation.

China’s policy of recolonisation debts has been euphemistically dubbed “legal” by those in Africa who see China as a liberating country for the downtrodden of the third world.

We should expect such solidarity from China. Indeed, they call it cooperation, which is a euphemism for the acceptance of being dominated, occupied, and exploited.

It is also our international situation that wars are going on the danger of superpowers inflicting the planet with World War III looms large. Here, I am not a prophet of gloom and doom. That war remains on the cards.

We, in Kenya, should start discussing this international situation seriously. We seem to focus on the comprador bourgeoisie and their respective factions and their struggles.

None of the factions has the will or the desire to run to Kenyans when orders are given to them by foreign interests.

We all know that chiefs, home guards, wanyaparas, bwenyenyes do not have the love of the Motherland to do such a thing. Their wealth, status, and future are anchored on them being eternal sellouts of the Motherland.

President William Ruto should be praised for a political campaign in 2022 that brought the class question into the open. He coined the two classes as dynasties and hustlers.

There is no doubt this campaign caught the imagination of the hustlers, Kenya’s working class. Now the hustlers have realised they have been lied to.

The middle classes know they have subsidised the dictatorships since independence through their acceptance of politics of division.

Now it is the time to connect the links and continuities for resistance under the current situation.

The best way to do that is to announce the birth of a movement and a political party that will midwife the new struggle against foreign interests and compradors.

The youth of this country should realise they have two options: Form both the movement and national party I have called for or face without any preparation the realisation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s prophecy that Mau Mau is coming back.

Wa Thiong’o’s prophecy has always been the nemesis of Moi’s prophesy.

Mau Mau comes back when you realise that the Motherland belongs to foreign interests. And that the country is still a slave plantation.