D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 3, May/June 2001, p. 16 - 17)

According to the author, a candidate in Kenya’s presidential elections, an ‘African Renaissance’ cannot be achieved by the present governments and states in East Africa. He believes it must be brought about by civil society and “organised political forces with clear concepts and ideologies for change”. At the same time, a radical change in governance would be the precondition to revive the capability of the state to provide basic services for the people.

It is not until recently that the concept “African Renaissance” became popular, no doubt as a result of the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, calling for it. Concerned that Africa’s potential, both human and natural, is not measuring up to her place in the global political economy, Mbeki has campaigned for a new paradigm of development in Africa. This is a development that will begin with appreciating what exists in Africa, how it can be used for development, how it can be built upon and what complimentary efforts can come from outside as determined by social forces within Africa.

African renaissance is, to begin with, a rejection of Afro-pessimism. But it is a rejection that is not necessarily romantic. Nor does it seek to gloss over the problems of Africa; the negative forces in the development process are taken into account given their African origin as well as their external ramifications. Africa, as it were, is not extracted out of its history and the global dynamics which have shaped its destiny in the past and in contemporary times. In this regard, the dialectics of imperialism and struggles for national liberation need to be seen as providing the context within which this rebirth is to take place.

From being bogged down with problems of economic backwardness, political repression and external dependence, the renaissance in Africa is to be a product of the conscious will of social forces determined to bring positive changes to the lives of the African people. Systems of government that are autocratic and unresponsive to the needs of the people are to be replaced by those that are democratic and sensitive to the political rights of the people as well as their basic needs. Instead of using public resources to satisfy the personal and selfish interests of power elites, systems that ensure good economic governance where public resources are used for the public good are to be preferred. A participant citizenry in the affairs of a modern republican government is to be encouraged as opposed to docile and oppressed subjects.

The East African Scene

The three East African countries, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, became independent almost at the same time in the early sixties. They pursued more or less the same socio-economic policies during the first ten years of independence - with Tanzania emphasizing the importance of a social welfare state modelled along the lines of Scandinavian social democracy, but lacking the social and economic base to support such a policy. Hence Tanzania soon suffered the “Soviet disease”: a huge bureaucracy justifying its existence on performing public economic activities while merely surviving, and reproducing itself, on the wealth of society.

The social distinction between the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the rest of society soon became very evident. Political power and economic privilege started to go together; and with more public resources devoted to the reproduction of the state machinery, the state systematically deprived the rest of society of economic sustenance. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in agriculture, where the peasantry abandoned agricultural production aimed at selling their commodities to marketing boards; they simply disengaged from the state and recoiled into subsistence agriculture. Sooner or later, the state discovered it was losing the basis of raising taxes, hence the ability to finance social welfare, maintain public utilities and build infrastructure.

Although Kenya flirted with socialism only at the level of rhetoric, state intervention into the economy was just as heavy, if not heavier, than with her Tanzanian counterpart. But Kenya was lucky in the sense that it had a massive expansion of the frontiers of private property to individual entrepreneurs - in agriculture as well as industry - during the first 15 years of independence. Further, the public waste of resources by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, through corruption and other ways, set in much later. It was not until the mid-eighties that the social, political and economic decay set in as the presidential authoritarian regime became less and less sensitive to popular discontent, and more and more ruthless against its opponents. The spirit of resistance has always been resilient in Kenya, even though it takes time to realise its objectives. Forces of change have, however, of late been outdone and out-manoeuvered by the authoritarian regime itself. Thus, although society has for long been ready for a change in the political regime, agents of this change have failed to accomplish their tasks as a result of a regime that succeeds, almost at every turn, to force its opponents to fight the battle on its own terrain, obeying its own rules and more or less adopting battle cries that it uses for its own troops!

Uganda has had a much more tragic history. The first nationalist regime of Milton Obote’s Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) in the sixties was overthrown in a bloody military coup led by Idi Amin in 1971. What followed was close to 10 years of allround disaster in Uganda. A brief comeback by Obote in 1979 to 1985 did not improve matters; society had been so dislocated that the politics of this First Republic could not reconstitute any meaningful political community. It took Museveni’s National Resistance Movement and Army (NRM and NRA) to reconstitute the political community, provide the state with new legitimacy and inspire people to have confidence in government so as to bring back civil life into Uganda. But even this is now threatened by civil war and conflicts in and around Uganda within the Great Lakes area. As the state continues to spend more and more public resources on war, it will tend to deprive its own people of needed services, hence invite resentment. This, in turn, may invite more repression from the state, hence set the stage for a rebirth of the discredited authoritarian regimes of the past. Ugandans are already sensing this development as being at their doorsteps.

The human condition

Whatever the differences in their political economies, the three East African countries now have very similar problems with regard to the human conditions and the predicament of their people.

Politically, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have yet to establish working democracies. In the recent general elections in Tanzania, the ruling party - CCM - only gave lip service to democratic procedure. In Zanzibar, the opposition fared much worse than their Kenyan counterparts in the 1997 Kenyan General Elections.

In the meantime, Uganda last year conducted a referendum the subject matter of which was hardly amenable to being subjected to a referendum as such. It had to do with whether or not Ugandans were ready or not ready to accept the practical application of a Bill of Rights in making political choices!

Kenya is currently engulfed in a convoluted exercise of how to review the constitution where there is a wide divide between the state and civil society over the matter. There is more controversy over the procedure rather than the content, and very little discussion of the content itself. The controversy reveals more a distrust and discontent with state power rather than a disagreement over the process of reviewing the constitution itself.

In the meantime, in all of the three East African countries, societies are facing tremendous problems of social reproduction as poverty and ravenous diseases spread almost unchecked. The AIDS pandemic is perhaps the most dramatic. But more ominous are diseases that are supposed to have been eradicated but which have come back with a vengeance. Malaria, a disease that kills many more than AIDS/HIV, is now more prevalent than ever before.

In this context, it becomes a big insult to the societies when governments waste scarce resources through corruption and mismanagement. When even more resources are wasted servicing debts that only circulated between state bureaucrats locally and those abroad (among donors and foreign governments) the people become doubly cheated.

In this kind of context, what does the African renaissance really mean?

Not a government initiative

The very nature of the state and government makes it difficult to envisage the African Renaissance as a government or state initiative. The state has failed to do so much that it cannot possibly champion a grand idea like the African Renaissance. Indeed, to rekindle the capacity of the state to deliver basic services, radical change in government is a necessary precondition. This must be a project of civil society and organised political forces with clear ideas and ideologies for change.

East Africa has great potential for such a project in civil society. In Kenya, in particular, there are many organisations that are focused on various issues. But there seems to be surprisingly little concern for Pan-African issues, contrary to the experience in the 1960s. There are many NGOs focused narrowly on “development problems”, constitutional issues, conflict management, etc. But organisations that are established to discuss ideas, to lead society to build future images of itself are surprisingly absent. Such discussions as the African Renaissance are engaged in only sporadically.

In Uganda, on the other hand, there is the headquarters of the Pan-African Movement. Uganda, in spite of its many problems, has always been a much more vibrant society intellectually. Civil society, though small as compared to Kenya, tends not to be too insular; it is always looking outside.

The current engagement of the Ugandan state in internal conflicts of neighbouring states may appear a more state-centred, perhaps expansionist, version of this external orientation of the Ugandan society. But it is an orientation at variance with what Ugandans themselves would prefer. It is not the kind of renaissance that may bring about an improvement in the living conditions of Ugandans.

Nkrumah’s vision of an African renaissance was that it was a necessary condition for Africa’s development. Nyerere saw this renaissance as something that could be realised piecemeal, beginning with regional integration as building blocks for eventual African unity.

Although little has been achieved through regional integration since independence, the new initiatives seem to be more serious, though at times suffering from duplication. The old East African Community, perhaps the most successful in post-independent times, collapsed under the weight of political bickering and neo-colonial economics. Attempts to revive it currently seem to be jeopardised by the multiplicity of loyalties of its members to other regional integration initiatives. For example, the Tanzanian government is torn between being a member of the Community and a member of South African Development Community (SADC).

One wonders whether this should be a decision purely of the Tanzanian government or that of her peoples. Recently, when the government announced her intention to withdraw from the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Tanzania Chamber of Commerce and Industry asked the government to reconsider her decision; the government went ahead to stick to her guns. What would happen should the Tanzania government decide to pull out of the Community in spite of the fact that the Community Headquarters are in Arusha, Tanzania?

The rebirth of Africa into an epoch where development will be people centred, where people will be involved and engaged in the making of public policy must provide the alternative to this current state of affairs where state action is so removed from the aspirations and needs of the people. In the absence of this, the African renaissance will remain a good subject for seminars and conferences organised by governments and not something that captures the imagination of the people and leads to programs of action at the level of social, political and economic changes.

Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o is the candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Kenya in the next presidential elections. This paper was presented at the conference “Africa works?!”, November 21-22, 2000 in Munich, and is reprinted from epd-Entwicklungspolitik 23/24/2000.