Shaking Kenya’s “Exceptional” Democracy

Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim

“It is ironic that the West, represented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, is tightening its grip on a country as debt-ridden as Kenya, leaving some of its people with no choice but to migrate to Europe, while the West itself is adopting strategies to eliminate the root causes of drying up migration at its African sources.”
Kenya was in the headlines between the last week of May and the last week of June.
Its President, William Ruto, visited the United States last May in the first official visit by an African president since 2009.
On June 25, the vanguard of the mission, consisting of 400 police officers, landed as part of a mission supervised by the United Nations UN and funded by the United States US and Canada to restore security and stability in Haiti, which was the same day that popular demonstrations broke out in Kenya against a draft resolution before parliament to increase taxes on the people.
We will see from the interaction of these incidents with each other how the West, which calls for democracy in the world, is destabilizing a nation with an “exceptional democracy” in its own description.
The purpose of the bill that President Ruto presented to Parliament for approval was to provide $207 billion through tax measures that would enable Kenya to pay off the debts that weigh it down.
A debt that amounted to 68% of the gross national product.
As a result, the government pays a quarter of its income to pay off debts and interest. The decision was a classic case of burdening the people with a debt that did not come to them in their pensions. And it is known that it went into the pockets of their ruling elite.
The salary of the MP who was to vote on the bill is the second highest salary for a parliamentarian in the world ($85.8 million) in a country where the average income is $2,000.
To make matters worse, those who carried Ruto to the presidency two years ago expected something else from him after he promised them manna and quails.
The democracy that the West had accepted from Kenya was the first victim of the Kenyan movement against the tax bill. The West came to believe that Kenya had an “exceptional democracy.”
But the physical and verbal violence meted out to the movement’s government cast a shadow over its cherished democracy. Thirty-nine citizens were killed in clashes with police outside parliament and in other neighborhoods.
The police called in the army to contain the demonstrations. Ruto called the movement a betrayal of the country and attacked “democracy in an unprecedented way” and described its leaders as “criminals.” The next day, he came to his senses and refused to sign the bill, saying a word that would remain against him no matter what: “
The people have spoken.” The first thing that occurred to a commentator about the movement was that it would make US think because “trade and common security interests cannot grow at the expense of democracy and the rule of law.”
The chances of democracy are of course diminishing in a country like Kenya that has lost its “balance of the budget,” as the English say. This control has become in the hands of the likes of the World Bank WB and the International Monetary Fund. They have made it a condition for Kenya to be granted more loans if it quickly repays its debts. The Kenyans’ reaction to this dictate is what put their democracy to the test.
The World Bank WB and the Fund, the pillars of the global system that is the achievement of the democratic West in the post-World War II world, are shooting themselves in the foot with their words when they restrict the likes of Kenya from repaying its loans, restricting them in a way that leaves no way for its youth except revolution, which borrows from the fabric of democracy as we have seen, or migration to the West, which almost robs the West itself of its democracy by handing over its governments to the far-right parties seen.
It is ironic that the West, represented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, restricts debt-ridden countries like Kenya, leaving some of its people with no choice but to migrate to Europe, while the West itself adopts strategies to eliminate the root causes of drying up migration at its African sources.
The European Union EU has a financial fund for this purpose, from which it spent € 441 million on Africa in 2022 to finance countries including those providing job opportunities for their youth so that they can remain in their country without crossing the Mediterranean. US, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, mobilized state and private sector resources to invest in long-term development projects to reduce immigration from Latin America. It received $1.2 billion in aid to create broader opportunities for its people that would make them independent of immigration.
How can it be logical to restrict a country to pay its debts to the millimeter on the one hand, while on the other hand it seeks to avoid the impoverishment resulting from this restriction with emergency funding that does not provide anything? This is what we call a cure-all. It is also no secret that Kenya has achieved a status in the West, as we have seen, by volunteering to send 1,000 police officers, joined by 350 police officers from Jamaica and the Bahamas, to help the Haitian police restore law and order.
The United States US and Canada will finance this mission, which is supervised by the United Nations UN .
Kenya, by volunteering, has helped these two countries, which have become exhausted from rescuing or even occupying Haiti.
US’s relation with it is old and included its military occupation from 1915 to 1934. The United Nations UN first showed interest in Haiti in 1990, when it supervised presidential elections after the coup against its president, Aristide, in 1991. It then returned on a civilian mission that ended with its expulsion by a decision of the military regime in 1994, to come under American leadership in the same year with a peacekeeping mission and the restoration of democracy, with Aristide as president as he was.
This mission was during which the Haitian army was dissolved and removed from service, to be replaced by the police aided by US.
The United Nations UN left in 2000 after completing its mission, to return in 2004 on a combing operation to restore security and order, to remain until 2017, to leave without being mourned by many Haitians.
The Kenyan movement dragged its bloody tail on its police mission in Haiti, which was part of Kenya’s shared security interests with US . The question arose for human rights organizations after the bloody confrontation in Kenya: What if the Kenyan police did in Haiti what they did to their own people? This is an inevitable question because soldiers of a recent UN mission in Haiti were cursed with the rape of women on the island, and some of its soldiers even spread cholera among the population. Moreover, the decision to send Kenyan police to Haiti was not approved by the Supreme Court there.
It ruled that sending Kenyans on a military mission is limited to the armed forces, or to countries with which Kenya has protocols in this regard.
Sending Kenyan police to Haiti was a violation of democracy that was unexpected from an exceptional democracy. Commentators warned that Kenyan police may not have anticipated what they would encounter from Haiti’s quicksand.
The Haiti crisis is not a challenge for which police are assigned.
Rather, it is a nightmare of urban warfare in which you will encounter fearless enemies who have transformed in the space of three years from gangs to fierce militias.
They occupy 90% of the capital, divided into fiefdoms, each gang controlling one or more of them.
They acquired their sniper skills from their job as guards in their neighborhoods. The gangs know the entrances and exits of the city and are skilled at fighting in the midst of group conflicts with each other. There are even a prominent number of them who were in the country’s police or received military training. Weapons are widespread, with a million weapons counted in 2020 and increased by smuggling.
This is a war that someone wondered why a police force was sent to fight it, not an army.
On the other hand, the police that Kenya came to appoint are in their weakest state. The gangs killed 43 of them in the first half of 2023. Their centers were burned and their leaders were assassinated, so their morale declined and recruitment for them decreased by 30 % in 2023 compared to 2022. They suffer from a shortage of weapons because their supporters in America and Canada fear that the weapons available to them will leak into criminal hands. And because police officers live in neighborhoods controlled by gangs, they find their ways and the gangs connected, and low or no pay may force them to cooperate with the gangs.
It seems that the criticism of many of the West for the principle of its central call to spread democracy in Africa is not a far-fetched exclusion.
Here we see the oldest democracy in exceptional Africa scattered in the winds of its interests and purposes.