Cut out for Kenya

Colonialism was the birthday of the political and economic system of today. The development path was cut out and taken in by African countries having done little in deviating from the set course. Okech-Owiti, Lawyer and Joint Co-ordinator of CLEAN, takes us back and forth in time.

The development path in virtually all of Africa, in terms of both ideology as well as macro-economic policies, was charted out by colonialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonialism itself was the consequence of a bloated West European capitalism. At this stage of its development, capitalism had reached a point where the monopolistic capitalist firms needed new sources of raw materials and cheap labour, and new markets. This forced their governments to embark on acquiring territories not only in Africa, but also in Asia as well as South America. Attempts at acquisition by the various European countries towards the middle and second half of the twentieth century was haphazard, hence the historical title ‘Scramble for Africa’. It became necessary to negotiate these acquisitions so as to avoid war. This gave rise to the Berlin Conference of 1885-6 whose outcome was the General Treaty of 1886, in which the European powers allocated themselves various regions of Africa as their respective ‘Spheres of Influence’. The then Uganda, the ‘source of the Nile’ became a British sphere. So did Kenya, then seen merely as the gateway to Uganda.

Through a Royal Charter in 1888, the British crown entrusted the economic development in the then Kenya to a company called the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) of Sir William Mackinnon. The company was unable to create a stable administration and viable economy; it folded up its operations in 1895 when the British crown declared the East Africa Protectorate over its sphere of influence in the region.

The main tasks of the crown once it took over were two: establishing a legal framework and state structures, and engaging in profitable economic activities. It applied specific English laws into Kenya in 1897, and allowed the use of African customary laws under specified conditions. It appointed a Commissioner who was mandated to exercise legislative, executive and judicial powers. This was transformed in 1905. The outline of a nascent state modelled on the British system was established with a now-renamed Governor at its head.

At the economic level, the main challenges were the acquisition of productive land and labour, and the determination of who would be the producers. Land was acquired by passing legislation (between 1902 and 1915), which eventually vested all the land in the crown. Africans (or ‘natives’) became tenants at the will of the crown. This land was allocated to farmers imported mainly from Britain. These farmers became the movers of the agricultural economy, based on ‘native’ labour. Native labour was assured through the use of force, and legislation, which imposed a variety of taxes and regulated movement and employment of the Africans.

So by 1920 when Kenya became a British colony, the main framework for a peripheral capitalist economy based on expatriate farmers and native labour had been established. Later developments introduced manufacturing and commerce as important elements of the economy. In the 1950s, following the ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion and declaration of the State of Emergency (in 1952), an attempt was made to build an African middle class by giving some of them land and allowing them to engage in commercial farming. This basically emphasised the capitalist economic policy framework that had been introduced in the early part of the century.

On independence, the incoming nationalist government simply inherited the capitalist economic policy framework established during colonialism, although there was an attempt to temper it with welfarism – christened ‘African Socialism’ - beginning 1965. What it meant was that the government would participate in economic production, distribution, and regulation of the economy, as well as in providing free or subsidised services in the area of education, health and housing. This went on up to the 1980s when the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and bilateral donors imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). These programmes required the state to divest, deregulate and remove welfarism, and basically re-entrenched the ‘untainted’ capitalist economic policy framework.

The attempts in the 1960s to infuse ‘African traditional’ or ‘socialist’ egalitarianism into this capitalist system through welfarism were also largely unsuccessful. Kenya experimented with Jomo Kenyatta’s ‘African socialism’, Zambia with Kenneth Kaunda’s ‘Humanism’, Uganda with Milton Obote’s ‘the Common Man’s (sic!) Charter’ and Tanzania with Julius Nyerere’s ‘Ujamaa’ (‘Socialism’). The most radical of these was Tanzania’s ‘Ujamaa’. The rest were, at best, the capitalist ‘wolf’ in welfarist ‘sheep’s skin’! But none of these, except, perhaps, ‘Ujamaa’ seriously changed the socio-economic systems in the countries. Even ‘Ujamaa’s’ roots in Tanzania were not deep enough to weather the liberal capitalist onslaught of the 1980s launched by the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)), backed by the traditional capitalist bilateral donors in the form of structural adjustment. Then enter the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the African and other ‘Third World’ countries are no longer even able determine their trade and investment policies and regulations independently of the liberal capitalist ‘New Economic/World Order’.

Where colonialism left Bretton Woods took over… When will Africa obtain a second independence?