Post by Onyango Oloo on Oct 5, 2005 3:10:02 GMT 3
Onyango Oloo Pretends to be a "Political Scientist"
In the Sunday Nation of October 2nd, 2005 columnist Mwangi Githahu states that Kenya is a “failed state.”
Basing his commentary on the July/August 2005 edition of Foreign Policy
www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3098&src2=PJA05
among other sources, the Nairobi- based Kenyan senior journalist informs his readers that a failed state is:
"a government that has lost control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force… (or)… it can be more subtle… some regimes… lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services."
Mr. Githahu quotes Kenyan assistant minister for Foreign Affairs Moses Wetangula as dismissing the report as “balderdash and ridiculous in the extreme”.
I agree 100% with Wetangula’s assessment above- but he is way too polite and pulls too many punches. Our reasons for coming to the same common conclusion are however as divergent as rain and drought.
I do not think there is such a thing as a “failed state.”
In my opinion, the term “failed state” is a product of muddled thinking by conceited bourgeois academics in the Western metropoles force-feeding us half-baked unscientific concepts with no anchoring in concrete material conditions or describing actually existing contemporary human societies.
Why do I call it a graphic illustration of up thought processes from the mouldy crevices of imperialist ivory towers?
In the first place, because the concept “failed states” confuses and mixes up several discrete structures, institutions and historical social organisms.
Let me draw a few diagrams using bare words.
Wasomaji, stay with me as I retrace my steps to the definition offered for “failed state”:
"a government that has lost control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force… (or)… it can be more subtle… some regimes… lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services.”
That is where difficulties begin, right away from the get go.
You see, a “state” by definition CANNOT BE a “government”.
Over the last year or so, I have found the Wikipedia site to be among the handiest when I am rummaging around for some concise, precise, objective information about a subject.
So to its shelves I rush to raid the following nuggets of information about the concept of “government” and how it is distinguished from “state”:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
One approach is to define government as the dominant decision-making arm of the state, and define the latter on the basis of the control it has over violence and the use of force within its territory. Specifically, the state (and by extension the government) has been considered by some to be the entity that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory. This view has been taken by the political economist Max Weber and subsequent political philosophers. The exact meaning of it depends on what is understood by “legitimate”. If we use the term in an ethical sense, then this definition would suggest that an organisation might be considered a state by its supporters but not by its detractors. An alternative definition is to take "legitimate" violence to be simply that which has active or tacit acceptance by the vast majority of the population. In this view, the presence of insurrection or civil war against an entity would jeopardise its claim to be a state, provided the insurrection enjoyed significant popular support. Similarly, an entity that shared military or police power with independent militias and bandits could be considered to have a monopoly on “legitimate” violence but to be failing to enforce it, reducing its claim to statehood. In practice, such situations are often described as "failed states".
Do you see what I mean by muddled thinking?
The proponents of the “failed state” theory start by saying that “failed states” are “governments blah blah blah yada yada yada stop right there.”
It is like describing an index finger thus: an index finger is a type of hand which has several similar digit siblings- or saying that an eye is a type of a head that has eyelashes on it or a tooth is a type of a mouth. Or the reverse.
In the early 1970s I was among those Kenyan school children who were blown away by the magic of “New Math”. I remember being transfixed by the “new revelation” that 1 plus 1 does NOT equal 2; I recall the fascination with vectors and the trance like captivation of sets and subsets and how it made one a lucid logical thinker before adolescence actually faded away for good to replaced by the turbulent trial years of young adulthood.
So one can say that if we replace G for “government” and S for “state”, according to the definition above, G is a subset of S which ipso facto implies that G cannot be S or even equal to S because it is a component of S; G is not even a type of S; it is a part of S.
Pretty straight forward isn’t it?
Or so one would think!
So now let us rewind to the earlier definition of “failed state” cited by Mwangi Githahu:
“(A failed state is) a government that has lost control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force… (or)… it can be more subtle… some regimes… lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services.”
Just like a head cannot be reduced to an eye or a hand to a finger, a state (any kind of state) cannot be “a government” (any kind of government).
Kapish?
We can talk of the Kibaki government which is different from the Moi government which was distinct from the Kenyatta government that preceded it.
But all these governments were part of the SAME Kenyan neo-colonial state-TWAELEWANA LAKINI?
Logically, if a “failed state” cannot, by definition be any kind of “government”- what is it then, in conceptual terms?
That is what I want to know.
This is the kind of imprecise cavalier abuse of the English language that I am talking about. For some of us this European tongue was an external cultural imposition drilled into us via the agency of supple guava canes whipping our pre-teenage behinds every time we deigned to say hello to our siblings in our mother tongues within the confines of our rural primary school compounds. Because of that, many of us non-native speakers of this imperialist cultural vehicle are very diligent about the proper grammatical and for the purposes of this essay, SCIENTIFIC use and abuse of English words in a variety of linguistic, political and cultural contexts.
It is my contention that this linguistic sleight of hand is a deliberate con trick, a conscious obfuscation because it emanates from the digital and electronic quills of native speakers of the Anglo-Saxon Teutonic language.
To go off on a slight tangent. Because it was so scared of the word “politics” the Kenyan government renamed the POLITICAL SCIENCE department in Nairobi University Faculty of Arts as “Government”- just to keep the undergrads confused a bit because trust me, the Kenyatta and Moi regimes were not about to admit that they actually allowed “Siasa” to be taught at degree level using lecturers paid by the government from taxpayer’s money. How could the same serikali which told its citizens to “wacha Siasa” fundisha Siasa?
Back from my digression.
Whether petit-bourgeois academic hacks want to admit it or not, the major theorists of the State have been Marxist thinkers like say, Lenin, Engels and of course Marx himself. In order to cover this stubborn historical fact up, these petit-bourgeois doodlers will try and conjure up new pseudo-theories about the State. This joke called the “Failed State” is but the latest example.
So if we go back to the classics, from the true political pioneers in both theory and practice of this notion of the state, what do we find in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin and how can we use those theses and texts to understand the contemporary states that obtain for example in places like Canada, the United States, Norway, Rwanda and Kenya?
Well, let us take a look.
Here is Engels:
“As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order, the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory....The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes.... This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing....The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state….The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe." (F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State)
The undisputed classic work on the state is of course State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin that you can access via the link below:
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
From the foregoing Engels excerpt, we can see that the phenomenon of the State is historically determined and has everything to do with the emergence in human society of class divisions.
The State then becomes an instrument of coercion and can include things like the law, the army, the police, the prisons, the judiciary, the civil service and all that people refer to as the “government”.
Note that the “government” is a part of the state, it is not the state. In Kiswahili we get confused when want to say that Kenya is a neo-colonial STATE and when we want to say that Kibaki’s GOVERNMENT is undemocratic and corrupt.
Let me try and explain myself with a well-known example.
We all talk about the American government, which because of its Presidentialism, is highly personalized. Thus most people will prattle off the 234 differences between the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration; the Kennedy Administration and the Nixon Administration.
Where they get confused is when you ask them to describe the American STATE.
It is a state whose instruments of coercion- its ferocious military, its opaque bureaucracy, its Blue Blood Senate and oligarch stacked Congress; its conservative judiciary, its prison industrial complex, its Transatlantic security pacts, and manipulative media not to speak of its CIA and its hegemonic ideological control via the Entertainment Industry, the Christian Church, Madison Avenue, Universities etc is all geared to serve one purpose: the interests of international monopoly capital. In a very direct sense, it is not George Bush and it was certainly never Bill Clinton who was the real ruler of America. The real rulers of America have names like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Ross Perot, Steve Jobs, Michael Eisner and all those CEOs of Times-Warner, Monsanto, Texaco, Halliburton, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other corporate behemoths.
Because of the propaganda that emanates from the very same mainstream media that is owned and controlled by these huge corporations, Americans and people around the world sometimes forget that there is such a thing as an American state. These media outlets will deliberately big up and bring up certain aspects of the form of government to take focus from the real nature of the State. For example we will be told that America is a “democratic” country where “free elections” are held every four years to choose the next President; the judiciary is “free and fair” the freedom of the press exists and literally any immigrant arriving from JKIA has an equal shot becoming the next Donald Trump as a scion of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts or the Waltons.
So the differences between Bush and Clinton would be like the differences between Tupac and Mos Def or the differences between Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera- four distinct artistes in the rap and pop music genres- it is all a matter of style not substance.
People often forget for instance, that it was Bill Clinton who was the first to bomb Osama bin Laden’s presumed terrorist positions- and it was that great Liberal icon, John F. Kennedy who almost caused the Third World War with the Cuban Missile Crisis and began the escalation into Vietnam which reached nightmare proportions under his Democratic successor Lyndon B. Johnson. It was a Democrat, Harry S. Truman (a former member of the KKK) who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and supervised the beginning of the Cold War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman
and the fact that infamous Senator McCarthy started life as a Democrat before graduating into a Republican should cushion the shock that Ronald Reagan also kicked off his career as a Democrat. The late Senator Daniel Moynihan who some people credit with popularizing if not actually coining the racist term “underclass” and the stereotype of the “Welfare Mother” was also another well known Democrat from the supposedly liberal New York state.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Moynihan
In my opinion, a State can only be considered to have “failed” when it can no longer carry out its coercive functions of social control and consolidating the political power of the ruling elites.
Let us use that litmus to see if the Kenyan state has “failed”.
Has the serikali in Kenya failed to carry out its coercive functions of social control and consolidating the political power of the ruling Kenyan elites?
Well, let’s see…
David Mwenje and Reuben Ndolo two MPs were arrested by Kenyan police in flagrant violation of a court order that had ordered their release on bail.
Mwai Kibaki dished out public land to the Ogieks and Kimunya gave away a whole Game Park to the Maasai. Kiraitu Murungi has said that he will use resources from the state coffers to bankroll his Banana Government Project. Michuki and Mirugi have threatened to crush their Orange political opponents. Meanwhile Murungaru remains at his job and Ngaithe is still an ambassador despite serious scandals. The late Dr. Odhiambo Mbai was killed by thugs allegedly hired by the Chief Parliamentary Whip of the ruling party. Nyachae has warned Raila that he will be sacked. Mwiraria gave a waiver to Ndwiga and I do not know who else. In July riot police killed one demonstrator and injured scores protesting against undemocratic tendencies.
Need I go on?
My conclusion?
The Kenyan State is NOT a “failed state”.
No siree!
The neo-colonial state apparatus is working perfectly. The army has not been disbanded. The civil service is still operational. State propaganda is still being blared out of state connected outlets like KBC, the Nation and the Royal Media stable not forgetting Dr. Mutua.
But if we ask a different question we can get a different answer.
The question is as follows:
Has the current NARC government led by Mwai Kibaki FAILED Kenyans, in terms of living up to its pre-election pledges around constitutional review, job creation, truth commission, prosecuting economic saboteurs, empowering women and invigorating the youth?
You tell me.
Onyango Oloo
Toronto
In the Sunday Nation of October 2nd, 2005 columnist Mwangi Githahu states that Kenya is a “failed state.”
Basing his commentary on the July/August 2005 edition of Foreign Policy
www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3098&src2=PJA05
among other sources, the Nairobi- based Kenyan senior journalist informs his readers that a failed state is:
"a government that has lost control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force… (or)… it can be more subtle… some regimes… lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services."
Mr. Githahu quotes Kenyan assistant minister for Foreign Affairs Moses Wetangula as dismissing the report as “balderdash and ridiculous in the extreme”.
I agree 100% with Wetangula’s assessment above- but he is way too polite and pulls too many punches. Our reasons for coming to the same common conclusion are however as divergent as rain and drought.
I do not think there is such a thing as a “failed state.”
In my opinion, the term “failed state” is a product of muddled thinking by conceited bourgeois academics in the Western metropoles force-feeding us half-baked unscientific concepts with no anchoring in concrete material conditions or describing actually existing contemporary human societies.
Why do I call it a graphic illustration of up thought processes from the mouldy crevices of imperialist ivory towers?
In the first place, because the concept “failed states” confuses and mixes up several discrete structures, institutions and historical social organisms.
Let me draw a few diagrams using bare words.
Wasomaji, stay with me as I retrace my steps to the definition offered for “failed state”:
"a government that has lost control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force… (or)… it can be more subtle… some regimes… lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services.”
That is where difficulties begin, right away from the get go.
You see, a “state” by definition CANNOT BE a “government”.
Over the last year or so, I have found the Wikipedia site to be among the handiest when I am rummaging around for some concise, precise, objective information about a subject.
So to its shelves I rush to raid the following nuggets of information about the concept of “government” and how it is distinguished from “state”:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
One approach is to define government as the dominant decision-making arm of the state, and define the latter on the basis of the control it has over violence and the use of force within its territory. Specifically, the state (and by extension the government) has been considered by some to be the entity that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory. This view has been taken by the political economist Max Weber and subsequent political philosophers. The exact meaning of it depends on what is understood by “legitimate”. If we use the term in an ethical sense, then this definition would suggest that an organisation might be considered a state by its supporters but not by its detractors. An alternative definition is to take "legitimate" violence to be simply that which has active or tacit acceptance by the vast majority of the population. In this view, the presence of insurrection or civil war against an entity would jeopardise its claim to be a state, provided the insurrection enjoyed significant popular support. Similarly, an entity that shared military or police power with independent militias and bandits could be considered to have a monopoly on “legitimate” violence but to be failing to enforce it, reducing its claim to statehood. In practice, such situations are often described as "failed states".
Do you see what I mean by muddled thinking?
The proponents of the “failed state” theory start by saying that “failed states” are “governments blah blah blah yada yada yada stop right there.”
It is like describing an index finger thus: an index finger is a type of hand which has several similar digit siblings- or saying that an eye is a type of a head that has eyelashes on it or a tooth is a type of a mouth. Or the reverse.
In the early 1970s I was among those Kenyan school children who were blown away by the magic of “New Math”. I remember being transfixed by the “new revelation” that 1 plus 1 does NOT equal 2; I recall the fascination with vectors and the trance like captivation of sets and subsets and how it made one a lucid logical thinker before adolescence actually faded away for good to replaced by the turbulent trial years of young adulthood.
So one can say that if we replace G for “government” and S for “state”, according to the definition above, G is a subset of S which ipso facto implies that G cannot be S or even equal to S because it is a component of S; G is not even a type of S; it is a part of S.
Pretty straight forward isn’t it?
Or so one would think!
So now let us rewind to the earlier definition of “failed state” cited by Mwangi Githahu:
“(A failed state is) a government that has lost control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force… (or)… it can be more subtle… some regimes… lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services.”
Just like a head cannot be reduced to an eye or a hand to a finger, a state (any kind of state) cannot be “a government” (any kind of government).
Kapish?
We can talk of the Kibaki government which is different from the Moi government which was distinct from the Kenyatta government that preceded it.
But all these governments were part of the SAME Kenyan neo-colonial state-TWAELEWANA LAKINI?
Logically, if a “failed state” cannot, by definition be any kind of “government”- what is it then, in conceptual terms?
That is what I want to know.
This is the kind of imprecise cavalier abuse of the English language that I am talking about. For some of us this European tongue was an external cultural imposition drilled into us via the agency of supple guava canes whipping our pre-teenage behinds every time we deigned to say hello to our siblings in our mother tongues within the confines of our rural primary school compounds. Because of that, many of us non-native speakers of this imperialist cultural vehicle are very diligent about the proper grammatical and for the purposes of this essay, SCIENTIFIC use and abuse of English words in a variety of linguistic, political and cultural contexts.
It is my contention that this linguistic sleight of hand is a deliberate con trick, a conscious obfuscation because it emanates from the digital and electronic quills of native speakers of the Anglo-Saxon Teutonic language.
To go off on a slight tangent. Because it was so scared of the word “politics” the Kenyan government renamed the POLITICAL SCIENCE department in Nairobi University Faculty of Arts as “Government”- just to keep the undergrads confused a bit because trust me, the Kenyatta and Moi regimes were not about to admit that they actually allowed “Siasa” to be taught at degree level using lecturers paid by the government from taxpayer’s money. How could the same serikali which told its citizens to “wacha Siasa” fundisha Siasa?
Back from my digression.
Whether petit-bourgeois academic hacks want to admit it or not, the major theorists of the State have been Marxist thinkers like say, Lenin, Engels and of course Marx himself. In order to cover this stubborn historical fact up, these petit-bourgeois doodlers will try and conjure up new pseudo-theories about the State. This joke called the “Failed State” is but the latest example.
So if we go back to the classics, from the true political pioneers in both theory and practice of this notion of the state, what do we find in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin and how can we use those theses and texts to understand the contemporary states that obtain for example in places like Canada, the United States, Norway, Rwanda and Kenya?
Well, let us take a look.
Here is Engels:
“As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order, the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory....The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes.... This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing....The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state….The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe." (F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State)
The undisputed classic work on the state is of course State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin that you can access via the link below:
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
From the foregoing Engels excerpt, we can see that the phenomenon of the State is historically determined and has everything to do with the emergence in human society of class divisions.
The State then becomes an instrument of coercion and can include things like the law, the army, the police, the prisons, the judiciary, the civil service and all that people refer to as the “government”.
Note that the “government” is a part of the state, it is not the state. In Kiswahili we get confused when want to say that Kenya is a neo-colonial STATE and when we want to say that Kibaki’s GOVERNMENT is undemocratic and corrupt.
Let me try and explain myself with a well-known example.
We all talk about the American government, which because of its Presidentialism, is highly personalized. Thus most people will prattle off the 234 differences between the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration; the Kennedy Administration and the Nixon Administration.
Where they get confused is when you ask them to describe the American STATE.
It is a state whose instruments of coercion- its ferocious military, its opaque bureaucracy, its Blue Blood Senate and oligarch stacked Congress; its conservative judiciary, its prison industrial complex, its Transatlantic security pacts, and manipulative media not to speak of its CIA and its hegemonic ideological control via the Entertainment Industry, the Christian Church, Madison Avenue, Universities etc is all geared to serve one purpose: the interests of international monopoly capital. In a very direct sense, it is not George Bush and it was certainly never Bill Clinton who was the real ruler of America. The real rulers of America have names like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Ross Perot, Steve Jobs, Michael Eisner and all those CEOs of Times-Warner, Monsanto, Texaco, Halliburton, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other corporate behemoths.
Because of the propaganda that emanates from the very same mainstream media that is owned and controlled by these huge corporations, Americans and people around the world sometimes forget that there is such a thing as an American state. These media outlets will deliberately big up and bring up certain aspects of the form of government to take focus from the real nature of the State. For example we will be told that America is a “democratic” country where “free elections” are held every four years to choose the next President; the judiciary is “free and fair” the freedom of the press exists and literally any immigrant arriving from JKIA has an equal shot becoming the next Donald Trump as a scion of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts or the Waltons.
So the differences between Bush and Clinton would be like the differences between Tupac and Mos Def or the differences between Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera- four distinct artistes in the rap and pop music genres- it is all a matter of style not substance.
People often forget for instance, that it was Bill Clinton who was the first to bomb Osama bin Laden’s presumed terrorist positions- and it was that great Liberal icon, John F. Kennedy who almost caused the Third World War with the Cuban Missile Crisis and began the escalation into Vietnam which reached nightmare proportions under his Democratic successor Lyndon B. Johnson. It was a Democrat, Harry S. Truman (a former member of the KKK) who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and supervised the beginning of the Cold War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman
and the fact that infamous Senator McCarthy started life as a Democrat before graduating into a Republican should cushion the shock that Ronald Reagan also kicked off his career as a Democrat. The late Senator Daniel Moynihan who some people credit with popularizing if not actually coining the racist term “underclass” and the stereotype of the “Welfare Mother” was also another well known Democrat from the supposedly liberal New York state.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Moynihan
In my opinion, a State can only be considered to have “failed” when it can no longer carry out its coercive functions of social control and consolidating the political power of the ruling elites.
Let us use that litmus to see if the Kenyan state has “failed”.
Has the serikali in Kenya failed to carry out its coercive functions of social control and consolidating the political power of the ruling Kenyan elites?
Well, let’s see…
David Mwenje and Reuben Ndolo two MPs were arrested by Kenyan police in flagrant violation of a court order that had ordered their release on bail.
Mwai Kibaki dished out public land to the Ogieks and Kimunya gave away a whole Game Park to the Maasai. Kiraitu Murungi has said that he will use resources from the state coffers to bankroll his Banana Government Project. Michuki and Mirugi have threatened to crush their Orange political opponents. Meanwhile Murungaru remains at his job and Ngaithe is still an ambassador despite serious scandals. The late Dr. Odhiambo Mbai was killed by thugs allegedly hired by the Chief Parliamentary Whip of the ruling party. Nyachae has warned Raila that he will be sacked. Mwiraria gave a waiver to Ndwiga and I do not know who else. In July riot police killed one demonstrator and injured scores protesting against undemocratic tendencies.
Need I go on?
My conclusion?
The Kenyan State is NOT a “failed state”.
No siree!
The neo-colonial state apparatus is working perfectly. The army has not been disbanded. The civil service is still operational. State propaganda is still being blared out of state connected outlets like KBC, the Nation and the Royal Media stable not forgetting Dr. Mutua.
But if we ask a different question we can get a different answer.
The question is as follows:
Has the current NARC government led by Mwai Kibaki FAILED Kenyans, in terms of living up to its pre-election pledges around constitutional review, job creation, truth commission, prosecuting economic saboteurs, empowering women and invigorating the youth?
You tell me.
Onyango Oloo
Toronto