Kenyan Middle Class: You Cannot Afford to Ignore Party Primaries - Get Deeply Involved in Them!

The middle class is that group of people mainly comprising of professionals - medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, high school teachers, university lecturers, high level computer programmers, among others. Members of this group usually have at least one university degree or a prestigious diploma in some highly sought after area of expertise. They are neither very poor nor very rich. They are better off than the farm hands in rural Kenya, or the urban poor such as the artisans who eke out a living in jua kali sheds or in the go-downs of Nairobi’s industrial area.

Yet the compound term “middle class” is quite imprecise - quite elastic - as it is used to refer to people who can hardly get by with their monthly salaries to others who hold considerably well-paying jobs that enable them to go for a few holidays in plush resorts within the country and even overseas. What is common to all members of the middle class is that they do not own substantial assets in the form of land, houses and factories. Many live in homes that they are struggling to make their own through mortgage, a few have homes they can truly call their own, while many live in rented accommodation. This has led to categories such as upper middle class, middle middle class and lower middle class. Some people prefer to refer to this class by the French term bourgeoisie, but this term can be misleading, as it is used in Marxist theory to refer to the Western urban middle class that hastened the breakdown of Western feudalism and became the owners of the means of production in the capitalist society that emerged thereafter.

The foregoing is a layman’s definition of “middle class”, as a more precise definition should be expected from an economist, and I am not one. Yet the philosopher, the chemist, the historian, the mechanic, the sweeper and the so-called “mama mboga (small-scale green grocer)”, and everyone else has a right to comment on economic policies because they have a direct impact on his/her life. In the eighth chapter of his Practical Philosophy, the Late Prof. H. Odera Oruka made a helpful distinction between positive economics and normative economics, the former being the domain of those who have studied economics in an institution of higher learning, the latter the right of anyone wishing to reflect on the ethical standards that guide economic policy; so I gave my definition above from the point of view of normative economics.

My concern here is with the attitude of most members of the Kenyan middle class towards what we have come to call, imitating Americans, “party primaries” - the process by which political parties determine which of their members will receive party tickets to run for positions in an election. During the most recent American presidential elections, many wondered how the U.S. ended up with two quite elderly persons as contenders for the top job. One answer that was given was the apathy of the middle class during party primaries. In our case, many often wonder how political parties end up with persons with very little school education and often with a scandalous public ethic as candidates, and part of the answer is that many members of the middle class do not come out to campaign or vote during party primaries.

Why do many members of the Kenyan middle class stay away from this important exercise, where, in some cases, winning the party ticket is tantamount to winning the seat? One of the reasons is the chaotic nature of the exercise, where goons are hired to force specific results through ballot stuffing, intimidation, or even outright violence. I suspect that in the comfort of their homes, members of the middle class hope that the goons in support of their preferred candidates will have the upper hand. My suspicion is partly informed by the fact that during the 2007/2008 post-elections crisis, I heard members of this class who were discontented with the declared results celebrating the violence in the slums, but of course they themselves were not to be found anywhere near the railway that was being uprooted or the crude road blocks set up by the irate slum dwellers.

Let the truth be told: many members of the Kenyan middle class love comfort but fear taking risks in pursuit of comfort. They love to reap where they have not sowed, as illustrated by the way they took over government at independence despite not having gone to the forest to pressurise the colonisers into taking their leave; they were nowhere to be seen during the saba saba riots in the early 1990s, but have been quick to occupy the lucrative offices that have come with the expanded political space; they avoid voting at party primaries, but are the first to “reconnect” with victorious former school and college mates in order to get a share of the state largesse that comes with such positions.

On election day, many members of the middle class wake up late like they would do on a weekend, put on their "smart casual" wear, have their BEST (bacon, egg, sausage and toast) breakfast (if they can afford it), and then take a leisurely walk or drive to the polling station, all the while hoping that they can cast their ballots and get home without encountering any ugly scene. Once back home, they glue their eyes on the TV, particularly once the counting of ballots begins. What they fail to realize is that by having been absent during the party primaries, they had allowed the final results of the general elections to be predetermined to a considerable extent without their input.

 In the third chapter of his celebrated work, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon points out that the middle class in Colonial African states failed to play its role in the struggle against colonialism: “It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.” Fanon went on to assert that this class is plagued by intellectual laziness and spiritual poverty. In addition, he wrote that “In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.”

Early this year, and two days before her untimely death, the late young and truly beautiful Dr. Eunice Songa-Saraceno wrote an article which she titled “A CALL TO ACTION: Wake up Middle and Upper Class Kenyans! – The New Mau Mau Revolution”. In it she passionately urged the Kenyan middle class to get out of its comfort zone and to be agents of positive change (see https://thenewmaumaurevolution.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/a-call-to-action-wake-up-middle-and-upper-class-kenyans ).

Kenyan middle class: you have college education; you have access to some finance; your world has been broadened beyond imagination by your access to the Internet; you have massive social capital in the college and professional networks that you have formed over the years; many of you have some speaking and writing skills; you have access both to the poor who look up to you for assistance to meet their most basic needs, and you have access to the high and mighty who use your professional skills in their pursuit of self-actualisation. All this intellectual and social capital places you in a unique position to contribute to positive change in the social, economic and political life of our country, but you are under-utilising it. Instead, you prefer to spend your time eating out in “classy” places, buying toys (the latest mobile phones, state of the art cars, home theatres, town houses and country resorts, etc.), and crafting ways of amassing more cash, all the while abandoning your country’s politics to the basest of society. Get up and get involved in party primaries - campaign for your preferred candidates through your diverse networks and media, and show up to vote for them. If you are scared of goons at the polling stations, pool resources to hire security for the all-important exercise; after all, you do that for other ventures that you deem worthwhile. Only in this way will the poor masses benefit from your college education in which they have invested so much. Only in this way might we transform our politics into the civil affair that it ought to be. In this way we might even get election results that are so decisive that the vanquished side, whichever one it turns out to be, will have no option but to accept them and save us the kind of upheavals that are becoming characteristic of our elections. Yet in this final paragraph I am out of order on one point - I should say “we”, not “you”!

 

Reginald M.J. Oduor, Ph.D.