KENYA AND NIGERIA SHARING A DEADLY VIRUS
OKELLO OCULI argues that both countries were more interested in consuming imports instead of promoting industrialisation
In 1964, China’s Foreign Minister, Chou En-Lai, visited Kenya. At a Press Conference before departure he uttered the wise words:’’KENYA IS READY FOR A REVOLUTION’’.
Kenya’s President Jomo Kenyatta reacted with rage; a mixture of panic and defence of ‘’national sovereignty’’. He did not send messages of gratitude for a warning by a Chinese veteran of armed struggle and Communist revolution from 1922 to 1949.
John Nottingham, a former British colonial administrator of Nyeri District during the ‘’MAU MAU’’ guerrilla war, recalls that officials detained Kenyatta at Kapenguria to give him the false crown as the leader of ‘’MAU MAU’’ warriors. They knew that he was derided as a delusionary pacifist by its young leaders.
Isolating Kenyatta in a desert area of northern Kenya, colonial officials imposed on him a post-war plan in which he would protect economic interests of European immigrants: including land from which they had expelled Kikuyu and Kalenjin ethnic groups.
Exploding as China’s guerrilla war for liberation won victory, it seems reasonable to assume that ‘’Mau Mau’’ leaders meant to echo the name of MAO TSE TUNG (later changed to MAO ZEDUNG), whose heroic exploits they admired.
The MAU MAU lost the war. A freed Kenyatta made an important speech to European immigrants with the title of ‘’SUFFERING WITHOUT BITTERNESS’’. He accepted a loan from the British government for funds to be used to buy back land from those racist immigrants who chose to leave Kenya for Australia, New Zealand and racist South Africa.
Kenyatta showed no love for Mau Mau fighters. His critics have alleged that the land bought with the British loan was distributed mainly to politicians from his party; top civil servants and his extended family members.
Chou En-Lai must have been aware of the bitterness among those who had hoped that the war would give them land stolen from grandparents with gunshots by foreigners. They were being joined by new waves of people who fled rural poverty; and were starving in urban slums. They had the collective anger, humiliation and hunger that were waiting to be ignited by voices calling for spontaneous murders. They are called the ‘’LUMPEN PROLETARIAT’’. The Chinese Communist Party had experience of taming them into a revolutionary armed struggle.
Jomo Kenyatta’s reach for free farms bought from foreigners with money borrowed from Britain was a case of intellectual laziness, historic irresponsibility and greed by a new African ruling class. They lacked the dynamic energy for innovation and daring. Their White predecessor had built economic enterprises in a hostile land far away from England. The Kenyans were selfish consumers of what had been PRODUCED by ‘’capitalists’’ that had built economic progress in Europe.
This trait preceded those who benefited from General Yakubu Gowon’s policy of ‘’INDEGINISATION’’ of foreign shops and other businesses. Like the Kenyans, British colonialists had denied them opportunity to be innovative INDUSTRIALISTS by importing Indian, Lebanese and Greek traders to be intermediaries between British industries and ‘’cash crop’’ farmers. Britain remembered that big American farmers and industrialists cut off their colonial economy from British industries.
Kenyatta turned against his Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and dismissed him for being a friend of socialist China. He decreed a ‘’One-Party State’’ and banned Odinga’s party because he was expected to win the 1966 general election and throw him into history’s dustbin.
Like Gowon, Kenyatta’s beneficiaries became corrupt. Unlike Gowon who was tossed out in a military coup, he carried out a coup against democratic politics.
In 1967, a British magazine had quoted Kenyatta of saying that he would create an ‘’ARISTOCRACY’’ because it ensures stability in Britain. By 2002 there was loud condemnation of corruption by a cabal of Gikuyu-Embu-Meru ethnic trinity which monopolized contract awards and recruitment into government jobs. By 2007 the bitterness exploded into a horrendous post-election violence which threatened to breakup Kenya along ethnic cleavages.
Instead of pulling Kenyans into one dynamic economic nation, Kenyatta organized a ritual of Gikuyu taking oaths to prevent other ethnic groups from taking the presidency. In 1993 the cancellation of M.K.O Abiola’s election victory dramatized the high cost of ethnic exclusion in Nigerian affairs.
Gowon’s government earned huge amounts of foreign income as oil revenues. ‘’UDOJI AWARDS’’ increase of salaries EXPORTED billions of Nigeria’s oil revenues into IMPORTS from industrial economies of South Korea, Britain, Japan and the European Union. The rural poor received nothing.
Kenyatta’s ‘’ethnic aristocracy’’ shared with Gowon’s ‘’intermediary’’ ruling class the affliction of the virus of consuming imports and not investing national collective genius into inventions and industrialization.
In 2007, Raila Odinga manipulated the starvation of unemployed youth for his election campaign. In Nigeria, religious clerics mobilized the ‘’wretched of Northern Nigeria’’ into murderous and destructive ‘’Boko Haram’’ movement.
Prof Oculi writes from Abuja
