Ghosts of independence: Kenya confronts an unavoidable reset

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

In the year we lowered the Union Jack, Kenya sent $10,000 and relief food to a South Korea still sifting through its rubble. We were the ones with something to spare. It reads like a joke now, though we stood level then, and what sounds like vanity was simply how the beginning of a cycle feels.

Between 1963 and 1973, the economy grew by 6.6 per cent a year, a decade that was dubbed the Kenyan miracle. Our problem was not failing to start but what happened once we had begun. Or perhaps it was a false start.

I have been reading Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, which changed how I view our 63 years of independence.

Countries move in cycles of 40 to 70 years, he argues: an order works while the economy expands and everyone gets a little more, then eats itself as debt piles up and the argument shifts from growing the pie to dividing it.

He lists what a rising country needs: capable leadership, strong education, a culture of work and openness to better ideas. Most of these existed here, and we built schools with our own money through harambees where even the poorest gave what they had. What we lacked were leaders who intended to build rather than inherit.

Nowhere is that clearer than in land, which remains one of Kenya’s historic injustices. In 1950, South Korea capped how much land one person could own, gave the surplus to tenants working it, and compensated landlords through bonds that declined in value if held, pushing rent collectors into industry. We reformed too, but on a willing buyer, willing seller basis. So when the Million Acre Scheme transferred settler farms to Africans from 1962 through British loans, land went to those who could raise money — meaning those close to power. The men who had gone to the forest were told to buy back what they had bled for.

Jomo Kenyatta made this explicit at Kandara in 1965, when he turned on Bildad Kaggia, who had once been detained alongside him. Paul Ngei has planted coffee. Fred Kubai has built a big house. Kungu Karumba runs his own buses. What have you done for yourself? It might have been an angry outburst at the time, but the writing was on the wall. Was it not a description of the system itself?

Odinga wrote it down in 1967 in Not Yet Uhuru, warning of a new colonialism run by our own people, having already described Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 as African socialism in name and capitalism in practice. Both men were pushed out, but the class they warned about was assembled regardless, with its grandchildren now in charge to protect their “interests”.

This is not a morality tale of good and evil men, since Park Chung-hee took South Korea through a coup and jailed critics. His advantage was discipline, not virtue. Korean privilege carried a condition: that you produce something. Ours required only proximity to power, which is why their reforms created industrialists while ours created landlords.

Public debt crossed Sh12 trillion this year, reaching about 70 per cent of GDP against a ceiling of 55 per cent set — and ignored — by Parliament. Close to Sh70 out of every Sh100 we collect goes towards servicing it, leaving too little for a hospital in Kakamega, a Cabinet secretary’s convoy and a graduate’s first job.

Late cycles also produce populists because, when the gap grows wide enough, someone appears promising to close it. In 2022, the hustler against the dynasties was precisely that figure, though he faced the streets less than two years later. Then came June 2024, which we describe as a warning as though the real event were still ahead, when, in fact, it had already begun. Dalio writes that an order at this stage is either reset peacefully or violently, but it is always reset.

Nor did it end when the tear gas cleared. Some 8.8 million young voters were registered in 2022, and that bloc could reach 14 million by 2027, while campaigns such as Niko Kadi are turning anger into arithmetic. Nor are we alone, for young people have helped bring down governments in Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar.

Kenya has “reset” before — in 1992, 2002 and 2010 — each time watching the old order absorb the new within a decade, though those transitions were negotiated at the top and cheaply captured. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and the rhyme is not 2002 but 1963, when Odinga argued that uhuru meant dismantling the extraction machine rather than inheriting it — and lost.

Sixty years later, the same argument has been reopened by our generation. The terms of independence were written in London by men who had no intention of losing land taken from natives and signed by men who wanted to inherit the machine rather than overhaul it. Achebe borrowed his title from Yeats to describe an order breaking apart. And I borrow it today: the centre cannot hold; things have fallen apart. The only question left is how the reset will manifest.

The writer is a whistleblower and founder of uongozifellowship.com

Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.