In this article I compare the crisis in Kenya with that of Greece some years back by taking words out of the mouth of the man who was in charge of Finance at the peak of the crisis Prof. Yanis Varoufakis. I felt the pain the ‘failed Greece Finance Minister’ as he prefers to call himself went through in 2015 as international media at the behest of international lenders piled blame on Greece and lied that Yanis had ‘come to the table without a proposal’. It was painful to see how the liberal right dismissed the left to which Syriza, then in government, belonged for lacking what it takes to govern. We hurdled in corners as we reflected on this disheartening news flashed in every Western legacy media then, in a lecture room at the Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver Canada where I was a visiting speaker at a Conference on extractives as a delegate from Africa. As we hurdled in small groups with the largely leftist group of professors that I can’t name now for good reasons, Syriza ultimately backtracked and accepted more debt to pay old debt in what Yanis calls ‘extend and pretend’. Soon Kenya will be in this rut I fear.
Rupture
Kenya is staring at an almighty rapture. First, its weak and broke sovereign is unable to come to terms with its hubris. Second, the ruling elites’ misreading of the Gen Z protests as ‘dangerous fantasy’ by a delusional and entitled generation, has placed the regime in the grip of a fierce and unrelenting embrace. Consequently the country is facing its severest test following weeks of protests led by Gen Zs who are opposed to the government’s lethal combination of bad economics and bad politics.
Whereas the toxic finance bill provided the impetus for the “leaderless, party-less and tribeless” Gen Z revolution, debt austerity that was embedded in the bill fueled the protests. But if anyone thinks that was the whole story, let me attempt to explain what is missed in the analysis. The 2022 elections produced a parliament – by this I mean both those in government and the opposition – and an executive, that are so much less talented. Arising from a campaign with the most slogan and cliche ridden political rhetoric in Kenya’s electoral history, the ruling party attracted and appealed to hustlers audiences by pitting the group against the other groups that they chose to call dynasties.
Looked at against the view that elections that coincide with recessions or difficult economic times for households and families seldom produce progressive governments, it is easy to see how, in a situation where public opinion is also manifestly manipulated such as in our modern democracies, elections midwife political monsters, right-wing populists and fascists as some scholars have argued. And there is evidence globally that the conundrum is made worse by the fact that we live in an era where shallowness is celebrated as an ideal, shouting is a form of discussion and repetition trumps good judgment.
Political Poison
The UDA campaign manifesto contained lofty promises by a political leadership driven by hate and who had no idea what is going on in the economic sphere. The manifesto was short by way of content or readiness to navigate the murky waters of the globalized financial system to which our economy is so enmeshed. That is the reason, two years in to office, the regime, instead of tackling income inequality and the crisis Kenyans hit by the economic assault are facing, the regime is still engaged in invective and vulgarity directed at containing the discontent of the losers. If the political rhetoric was right and the capacity of politicians was okay, perhaps the UDA regime would have known how best to handle the Gen Z crisis.
However, so low has the quality of politicians sunk, that most parliamentarians seemed unaware that the Finance Bill contained political poison for them in the name of IMF austerity measures. It was shocking to see politicians agree with IMF prescriptions of austerity upon ordinary Kenyans to cure the misadventures of Bankers who lent and politicians who borrowed in the first place. But this is another long story I do not wish to venture in to in this short piece. In putting this piece together I am heavily indebted to Prof. Yanis Varoufakis*, the former Greece Finance Minister whose prolific Economics career and a stint as the ‘failed Greece Finance Minister” as he chooses to refer to himself led him to a priceless reflection a Book he has titled “And the Weak Suffer What they Must” in which he chronicled the tribulations Greece went through in the hands of the EU and the Troika group of lenders in 2015, that led him to resign as Greece was plunged in to a debt hole from which there was little hope of recovery.
Binge Borrowing
Allow me to return to the what Yanis’s would call a ‘tragic misanthropic finance policy’ that unleashed so much revulsion, and put Kenya in the cusp of a revolution hitherto least foreseen by any observer of Kenya’s politics. To any keen commentator, it is now more clear that real power, does not reside in the political realm where our ruling political elite operate but remains in the economic sphere more generally but specifically with IMF and both the local and global lenders. What the Gen Z protests have done is to expose our rulers and oligarchs for what they are; their binge borrowing, their massive gambling extravaganza and the obscene entertainment they engage in at the expense of Kenyan lives.
The finance law had budgets for offices of first ladies, confidential budgets for state house, massive tax increases on bread, mobile money and cars, a new eco-tax on products considered harmful to the environment that would have the effect of increasing cost of items such as nappies, sanitary towels, computers and mobile phones. There were other taxes such as VAT on financial services and foreign exchange transactions, taxes on operation of digital marketplaces and content creation, and all this the government believed would reduce Kenya’s reliance on borrowing to fund its additional $2.7 billion budget.
The ‘Centrifugal Forces’
What many who are discussing the Kenyan crisis seem to skirt around is the effect of the toxic politics that UDA politicians adopted in 2022. Majority of voters, went to the poll essentially to piss off the outgoing Uhuru establishment, then their object of hate. Once in government, the Ruto administration thought they had power and could do whatever they wanted along the lines of the promises they made in their manifesto and what they felt Uhuru should have done but did not do. What they did not consider in my view is the role of IMF and other lenders. While the Finance bill had to be subjected to democracy, i.e. public participation in the democracy zone that is the political sphere, Ruto and his handlers seem to have forgotten that the creditors would foist decisions, read conditionality – made in the democracy-free zone that is the economic sphere, upon Kenya as they do other sovereign countries that owe money or who are broke or are choking with deficits. Like Ruto, many observers remain spectacularly unaware of the centrifugal forces that have driven Kenya to its current imbroglio.
Not surprisingly, Kenyans rejected the Bill in what was akin to a referendum but Ruto and his administration would hear none of this, choosing instead the path of crash and burn to please the creditors, rather than seize the perfect opportunity to marshal a smidgen of rationality to save an economy that is going bear shaped. The Gen Z protests that broke out were met with weapons, intimidation and brute force leading to the death of 60 young Kenyans, injury of thousands and disappearance of many others by hooded state police. The deadly violence soon led the president to concede and abandon the bill, sack his entire Cabinet and force the hand of the Inspector General of Police to resign.
Rebooting Kenya
The Gen Zs in their constructive disobedience were actually asking President Ruto and the 13th Parliament to come to terms with our economic reality and deal decisively with debt deflationary tendencies happening during a time of a great recessionary cycle. This was a call to reboot Kenya from misanthropic idiocy. Kenyans were saying to their president that to deal with threats that worry them such as jobs, corruption, healthcare, decaying cities, ruined villages, unemployment, college education etc. he needed to rally all and collectively craft something akin to Roosevelt’s New Deal or some reasonable utopia. Anyone would have thought that Ruto would be energised by the protests to rally his politicians to fix the rupture not as a Kenyan problem but as a systemic dynamite of instability arising from the dark cloud of debt deflation.
Sadly the president has totally missed the call. He has miniaturized a large complex problem by thinking his detractors are fanning a revolution with funding from Ford Foundation. He has then proceeded to adopt a lipstick-on-a-pig-approach that has seen him return half of his Cabinet members that he had sacked and introduce members of the opposition to the new Cabinet. The president has made some cosmetic changes in the security institutions and refused completely to address police accountability following the police killings and abductions of several youth some of whom have not been found to date. Politicians have completely misread the Gen Z revolution and gone back to their business as usual mode akin to solving a homicide without locating the dead body.
Things have changed very fast since the demonstrations started but good thinking is lagging behind. Politicians have failed to notice that Gen Zs are in politics out of necessity unlike them who play politics as a matter of choice. Politicians and their parties have gone back to their sectarian shouting matches and are now busy dismissing Gen Zs as coup plotters who have no clue what they want or where they would take the country if they were given a chance.
Uprising Tomorrow
What should Gen Zs do? Those who think that the revolution by the youth has been defeated will be in for a rude shock. One thing the political class will not be able to deal with is the new role of bullshit police the Gen Z have given themselves, where they choose who they should ‘salimia’ or ‘anguka nayo’ if they don’t pass the sniff test as a gadfly, something that can be traced back to Socrates who said the gadfly’s work was to wake up the city from slumber.
The other thing the politicians overlook is a sense of how long the dark cloud of deflation will be around, a factor that is cementing an alliance between the lost souls with Gen Zs, a collaboration that is defying the traditional hatred among leftists. It will be a game changer when Gen Zs combine forces in a super structure with Gen Zote an idea already in the works. Whatever else Ruto does, he has expended his political capital and popularity, so any plan he cobbles will be punched in the nose by reality as he continues to rack up new loans to pay old loans. Internationalizing the movement will be a critical imperative for Gen Zs because the nationalist economic groups pushing negative narratives will not be unique to Kenya and need an international uprising..
Dealing with poverty, public and private debt and low levels of investment will require economic thinking that goes beyond fancy, wishful thinking. The movement must speak about a serious economic alternative, one that roots for a solid investment bank that can issue bonds each year to implement a Green New Transition in order to create new jobs. The public debt must be written down, but this must be negotiated with creditors and the good debt restructured to give the economy time to turn around to bring hope back. Gen Zs are doing these discussions, take notice.
*Yanis Varoufakis speaks eloquently about the Greece Finance crisis and everything Greece went through and from which the country has not recovered resembles what Kenya is dancing around. I have juxtaposed most of what Greece went through in this article, the irony is cruel to say the very least.
