EDITORIAL BY PARSELELO KANTAI
CONTENTS
Project Kenya and the golden jubilee
3 EDITORIAL 4 SCENARIOS FOR 2030 Reimagining a nation 8 OPINION Martin Kimani on how Kenya is looking East
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10 MEMOIR
enya’s golden jubilee independence anniversary celebrations on 12 December this year will be unique in at least one respect. It will be the first time in the country’s history when Jamhuri Day is led by a president with no direct memory of colonialism. Born in 1961, President Uhuru Kenyatta was an infant when the Kenyan flag went up for the first time. His deputy, William Ruto, was not yet born. Of the millions who will mark the event, only slightly more than a million of them countrywide would have any memory of the first Jamhuri Day. There is much to celebrate. After decades of misrule, the promulgation of a new constitution in 2010 ushered in a new democratic dispensation. Similarly, the economic stagnation of the 1980s and 1990s gave way to a decade of sustained economic growth. The International Monetary Fund predicts that gross domestic product will increase by 6.2% in 2014. Regional trade and integration have deepened since the revival of the East African Community more than a decade ago. Kenyans now trade more with their regional counterparts than with anybody else. New oil and mining projects promise to raise the government’s revenue. Just as important, the demands for a more equitable sharing of national resources and for the dispersal of executive power is guaranteed under a new devolved county governance system. However, the nation turns 50 at a time when the very idea of nationhood is deeply threatened. Insecurity is rife and there are unprecedented levels of ethnic suspicion. After Kenyans overwhelmingly voted to end four decades of the Kenya African National Union’s autocratic
Celebrating 50 years of impunity by Rasna Warah 12 LITERATURE
Binyavanga Wainaina on Kenyan writers’ global reach
COVER CREDIT: ANTHONY ASAEL/ART IN ALL OF US/CORBIS
14 INTERVIEW Former prime minister Raila Amolo Odinga 16 OPINION Bitange Ndemo on Kenya’s crucible of technology and business 20 BUSINESS Building an East African commercial hub 26 LAST WORD Abdi Latif Dahir
S U P P L E M E N T TO T H E A F R I C A R E P O R T
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rule in 2002, two consecutive elections have sharply polarised the political elite and divided the nation along ethnic lines, as witnessed by the 2007-2008 post-election violence. Moreover, economic growth has failed to deliver on the promises made at independence. Kenya’s income disparities are high, and many regions have been marginalised in terms of infrastructure and service provision. For the generations that came of age in independent Kenya, there is a sense of two Kenyas – one of privileges and entitlements and the other of grinding poverty. But it is the problems facing the current leadership – the court cases at the International Criminal Court – that perhaps reveal more about the fundamental issue of elite impunity the country faces. At independence, ‘Project Kenya’ was a euphoric work in progress – a nation would be forged out of the shared history of colonial oppression. It was in many ways meant to be a transcendent project, transforming diverse ethnic groups into a single national unit. That dream was betrayed by a leadership intent on hogging power, patronage and resources. The nation, as the writer Binyavanga Wainaina has remarked, never imagined itself into being. At 50, these acts of the imagination are the ingredients of a hopeful future, but time is running out. Every missed opportunity to resolve deep-seated issues consigns the next generation to a Sisyphean struggle against itself. Having spent the first half-century of its existence avoiding the lessons of the past, the country’s leadership is in danger of repeating its own vexed history. ●
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