It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ cause and effect, he was correct in predicting that the new politics, built on a foundation of rivalry laid by his predecessor and himself, would take ethnic shape. In competitive political systems, argues Paul Collier, parties look for the easiest way to establish their superiority in voters' eyes. Providing services like health, schools and roads is one way of winning approval, but such things are very hard to deliver. Another way is to play the ethnic identity card: ‘And that,’ says Collier, ‘is incredibly easy.’

      Analyst Gerard Prunier has christened Kenya's post-independence system of rule a form of ‘ethno-elitism’.⁷ A pattern of competing ethnic elites, rotating over time, was established which made a mockery of the notion of equal opportunity. This was viewed as a zero-sum game, with one group's gain inevitably entailing another's loss. In Francophone Africa, the approach is captured in one pithy phrase: ‘Ote-toi de la, que je m'y mette’ – ‘Shift yourself, so I can take your place.’ In Anglophone Africa, the expression is cruder, bringing to mind snouts rooting in troughs: ‘It's our turn to eat.’ Given how unfairly resources had been distributed under one ethnically-biased administration after another, starting with the white settlers, each succeeding regime felt justified in being just as partisan – it was only redressing the balance, after all. The new incumbent was expected to behave like some feudal overlord, stuffing the civil service with his tribesmen and sacking those from his predecessor's region. When no one shows magnanimity, generosity dries up across the board.

      It's actually possible to quantify the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ approach in terms of parliamentary seats, ministerial positions and jobs in the state sector, as each regime doled out appointments to those deemed in the fold. According to one study, during the Kenyatta era, the Kikuyu, who accounted for 20.8 per cent of the population, claimed between 28.6 and 31.6 per cent of cabinet seats – far more than their fair share – while the Kalenjin, accounting for 11.5 per cent of the population, held only between 4.8 and 9.6 per cent. With Moi's arrival, the Kikuyu share of cabinet posts fell to just 4 per cent, while the Kalenjin's share soared to 22 per cent. It was a similar story with permanent secretaries, where the Kikuyu went from 37.5 per cent under Kenyatta to 8.7 per cent under Moi, while the Kalenjin went from 4.3 per cent to 34.8 per cent.⁸

      In theory, of course, a particular ethnic group could hold the lion's share of key government jobs without it distorting national policy. In fact, the entire arrangement was premised on the pork-barrel principle. Hoeing their Central Province plots in bare feet and ragged hand-me-downs, a minister's constituents might feel they had little, individually, to show for their community's pole position. The top men stood at the apex of frustratingly inefficient pyramids of dispersal. But what was the alternative? ‘The grassroots perception is, if we elect a member of our elite, he can at least talk to the elites of the other tribes,’ says Haroun Ndubi, a human rights campaigner. ‘People will say: “This is someone who can speak English with the others.”’ And if a local hero consistently failed to pass at least a fraction of what came his way along the chain, he could expect to be unceremoniously dumped come the next election.

      The difference being on the right side made was illustrated when the ministry for roads and public works published estimates for spending on road-building in July 2006. Regions whose MPs formed part of Kibaki's inner circle got far more than was allocated to areas whose leaders were in opposition. Once Nairobi and the tourist hub represented by the Maasai Mara were excluded, allocations to the home constituencies of vocal government critics were nearly 320 times less generous than those to constituencies of trusted presidential aides.⁹ The parliamentarians made some barbed remarks when this extraordinary gap was exposed, but passed the road budget without amendment. This, they knew, was the way the game was played.

      Where does each individual draw the limits of his or her compassion, beyond which duties of kindness, generosity and personal obligation no longer apply? I was raised in a household where my parents drew them in totally different places, according to their very different characters and backgrounds.

      As an Italian, my mother grew up in a country whose government had given birth to Fascism, formed a discreditable pact with Hitler, and launched itself on a series of unnecessary wars which left Italy occupied and battle-scarred. There then followed a seemingly endless series of short-lived, sleaze-ridden administrations. The experience left her utterly cynical about officialdom. Although she dutifully voted in every election, the malevolence of the system was taken for granted, and she would happily have lied and cheated in any encounter with the state had she believed she could get away with it. But no one worked harder for her fellow man, for in the place of the state she maintained her own support network. An instinctive practitioner of what sociologists call ‘the economics of affection’, my mother had a circle of compassion drawn to include a collection of needy and lonely acquaintances. She visited their council flats bearing cakes, sent amusing press cuttings to their prison cells, queued at the gates of their psychiatric hospitals. Hers was a world of one-on-one interactions, in which obligations, duties, morality itself, took strictly personal form, and were no less onerous for it. The glow she radiated was life-enhancing, but its light only stretched so far, and beyond lay utter darkness. Protecting one's own was vital, for life had taught her that the world outside would show no mercy. She was not alone in her ability to get things done without the state's involvement. ‘Il mio sistema’ Italians call it: ‘my system’. Italy is, after all, the birthplace of the Mafia, the ultimate of personal ‘sisteme’, and my mother's mindset was instinctively mafioso.

      My father, in contrast, was typical of a certain sort of law-abiding, diffident Englishman for whom a set of impartial, lucid rules represented civilisation at its most advanced. He was raised in a country which pluckily held out against the Germans during the Second World War and then set up the National Health Service in which he spent his career, and his trust in the essential decency of his duly elected representatives was so profound that he was shocked to the core by British perfidy during the Suez crisis, and believed Tony Blair when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When, as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, I mentioned – with a certain pride – that I usually managed to get home without paying my bus fare, he explained disapprovingly that if everyone behaved that way, London Transport would grind to a halt. Remove the civic ethos, and anarchy descended. A logical man, he saw this as the only practical way of running a complex society. It also, conveniently for an Englishman awkward with personal intimacy, enabled him to engage with his fellow man at a completely impersonal level. Not for him my mother's instinctive charm, the immediate eye contact, the hand on arm. He felt no obligation to provide for nieces and nephews, and had a cousin come up for a job before one of the many appointment boards on which he sat, he would have immediately excused himself. Nothing could be more repugnant to him than asking a friend to bend the rules as a personal favour. What need was there for a rival, alternative sistema, if the existing arrangement of rights and duties already delivered?

      My father's world view was typically northern European. My mother's characteristically Mediterranean approach would have made perfect sense to any Kenyan. In an ‘us-against-the-rest’ universe, the put-upon pine to belong to a form of Masonic lodge whose advantages are labelled ‘Members Only’. In the industrialised world, that ‘us’ is usually defined by class, religion, or profession. In Kenya, it was inevitably defined by tribe.

      Western analysts have remarked on Africans' ‘astonishing ambivalence’ towards corruption,¹⁰ but it is not so surprising. Under the colonial occupiers and the breed of ‘black wazungus’ who replaced them, the citizen had learnt to expect little from his government but harassment and extortion. ‘Anyone who followed the straight path died a poor man,’ a community worker in Kisumu once told me. ‘So Kenyans had no option but to glorify corruption.’ In a 2001 survey, Transparency International found that the average urbanite Kenyan paid sixteen bribes a month,¹¹ mostly СКАЧАТЬ