This week, my reflections on ethnocentrism in Kenya are based on the ethnic audit of the Civil Service by the National Cohesion and Integration Commission. Although some newspapers have called the findings as a "shock," the report confirms what most Kenyans are sure of: that civil service appointments - and most employment for that matter - are based on political patronage.
The Commission's heart was in the right place when they did this audit. Hopefully, the audit will slow down the naïve arguments about employment on "merit" but which do not address the amazing coincidence between "merit," "hard work" and ethnocentrism.
However, goodwill is not enough to atone for the major theoretical flaws that make the report another tragic manifestation of benevolent tribalism.
As I have said earlier, the main foundation of ethnocentrism in Kenya is the "our turn to eat" mentality which is cannibalistic and exploitative. Our ethnocentrism is cannibalistic - as Nyerere aptly observed - because it reduces fellow human beings into mere objects whose toil, sweat and blood is for us to harvest without owing them any decency in return. This ethic becomes more savage when it comes to the civil service, because civil servants are paid by tax-paying, struggling and hardworking Kenyans, and are entrusted to protect and enhance the public's educational, physical, environmental and social wellbeing. In an environment where human beings, their creativity and accomplishments are considered a cake to be shared, ethnocentrism becomes essential to referee the scramble and jostling for whose turn it is "to eat."
That mentality emerges from Kenyans' failure to mature from mere laborers for the colonial masters into workers for the nation. Many employees feel that they are working for the boss, or for the institution, but never for themselves and society. A considerable number of employees are bitter and miserable because their attention is focused on the discrepancy between themselves and the boss, forgetting that they benefit from engaging in work. And when that boss is of a different ethnic group, she or he is easier to hate; but when the boss is of the same ethnic group, the "community" benefits. This attitude is expensive for the country; we lose a lot of money and suffer from an unnecessarily high cost of living to compensate for the widespread stealing, fraud and inefficiency, and worst of all, for the cynicism and disconnection between personal behavior and social responsibility.
What Kenya needs, therefore, is a healing our souls so that we see the value of work as not only as economic, but also as social and spiritual. However, the ethnic audit of civil service reinforces "our turn to eat" outlook by turning civil service jobs, which should be opportunities to serve, into loot to be shared. Indeed, one revealing instance of the extent to which the Commission's report has reinforced this mentality is in a front-page headline that read "Large tribes given unfair share of jobs." But more than that, the report depicts all Kenyans as wanting to be in the civil service, and the civil service as a fortress whose walls Kenyans are scrambling to scale so as to get in.
The ethnic audit is also intellectually weak. It makes grand conclusions about political patronage and ethnocentrism based on numbers alone, without using any theoretical tools to interpret those numbers. This laxity is disappointing; especially coming from commission made up of educated individuals and headed by a PhD holder. Numbers may represent the result of political patronage, but they say little, if anything, about the mechanisms of political patronage. It would have been more helpful to know the policies and recruitment practices in place that make the numbers so skewed. For instance, employment could be skewed by informal networks in which people alert others of vacancies or act as referees for job candidates. Income levels also play a role because communities where few people can afford newspapers, let alone have access to the internet, are likely to find out about the job vacancies too close to, or way past the deadline.
Consequently, data which would have been more telling about inequality in Kenya would have been a look at the infrastructure and social amenities available in different regions, as well as the level of health, education and commerce in the different parts of the country. That way, it would matter less the ethnic group one comes from and more the region in which one lives. There is no indicator of social inequality more visible than the Kenyan landscape. You don't need to know the tribe of a region's residents to see how they have been discriminated against; you just need to look at the roads, the buildings, the hospitals and the schools, and then the wounded spirits and weakened bodies bending under the weight of a selfish ethnic leader would just confirm what your eyes can see. It's not rocket science.
But that's the thing - the ethnic audit is not about inequality; it's about the proportion of people with access to national loot in relation to the total population of their ethnic group. That means that members of the same ethnic group who grow up in Homa Bay, in Lokichoggio, in Mandera, in Nyeri or in Kwale are all treated the same, even though each person's access to social amenities is immorally varied. It does not matter the state of the regions from where they come as long as their presence in the civil service is proportionate to their ethnic population.
That could easily translate into all civil servants (since there is apparently no Kenyan life outside the civil service) of a particular ethnic group coming from Nairobi and its environs, rather than from the maybe-remote region where the group is historically located. In this way, the founding principle of the Commission's audit is no different from that of politicians. As many said in 2008, when politicians say that their tribe is discriminated against, they are referring to a clique rather than to the whole community. The majority of the people whom rich and powerful politicians refer to as "my community" remain in poverty as the bloated leaders eat their way at the top. However, it would appear that the Commission is content with such a state of affairs as long as the numbers are proportion to the general population. In other words, the Commission distinguishes itself from politicians not in thought but in motive: yet another case of benevolent tribalism.
Elevating tribal populations into indicators of the state of our nation is intellectually shoddy and perpetuates the mystification of tribe that continues to paralyze the Kenyan soul. One of the reasons we are obsessed with tribe is because we have blown it up into a simplistic formula that explains a multitude of sins. In turn, tribalism as a magic spell makes us resigned to being dominated by larger-than-life political leaders, and provides us a mechanism to escape from identifying and uprooting the concrete political and social values and institutions which entrench Kenyan leaders as ethnic demigods.
Demystifying tribe requires a deep love for humanity that would inspire research, rigorous thought and readiness to risk one's life in identifying and exposing the networks, theft of public resources, sabotage of development, and the coercion tactics used by politicians, especially in rural areas, to transform tribes into Kenyan monsters. For instance, just a sustained examination of how Ruto and Uhuru have mesmerized the press and endeared themselves to their supporters can make us citizens more cautious about manipulation. However, the Commission took the easy route and used ethnic percentages as indicators of injustice in Kenya.
On the other hand, we cannot entirely blame the Commission for its obsession with tribalism and tribal tolerance, because its terms of reference were just as restrictive. The main function of the Commission is to identify and fight against cases of discrimination on the basis of tribe, as part of the efforts to make Kenya "cohesive" and "integrated." The problem with cohesion and integration is that they do not deal with the quality of who and what are to be cohesive and integrated, yet anyone, even those in criminal gangs, can be cohesive and integrated.
Cohesion and integration across the schisms created by poor politics and ethnic bigotry will not make Kenya a nation. Only humanization and humane politics will. And to do so, we need a radical theory that takes into account who we are and where we have been, and defines what we should be as a nation based on our identity as human beings.
