BY PHILIP OCHIENG
If free debate is desirable and possible in a one-party state, is it not easier to allow many parties to spring up instead because, in that way, this same free debate that’s so dear to our hearts would be facilitated even more? It might be, and this was the gist of what the advocates of the multi-party system were saying in the 1980s and 1990s.
For them, as for our Western gurus, the Western political ideas and institutions into which these have solidified can simply be removed – lock, stock and Blair – and grafted onto any non-Western social situation without any problem. It is all a subjective question of willingness to do so.
This characteristically ahistorical way of looking at the problem simply assumes that political systems can just fall into the lap of society like manna from heaven. It assumes that it is the political machinery that stabilises society in its fundament, and not the other way round.
It forgets that society must first be stable in its economy, technique, culture and intellect before it can sit down to write a constitution with which to give a politico-juridical rationale to this material stability. We know from Western history itself that capitalism – the Western econo-social basis and the intellectual activities to which it gives rise and which have always been concomitant with it – had first to develop deep roots for centuries before its leading lights could attempt to snatch political power from the tottering feudal aristocracy.
That, in summary, is the story of England (1688), America (l776), France (1789) and Italy and Germany (l870). It was only after these events – which historians call capitalist or liberal or bourgeois political revolutions – that the Western intelligentsia felt strong enough to write the present constitutions to establish the great Western democracies.
What does it show? Surely this: that it was the econo-techno-intellectual maturity and depth and the consequent homogenisation of the nation out of disparate ethnic clusters – thanks to the complete mobility of labour any and everywhere – that made possible the political stability which characterises Western Europe and North America.
It can never go the other way round. And yet the same West, brandishing familiar ideological shibboleths, thinks that countries whose material fundaments were thoroughly ravaged by the same Westerners for upwards of five centuries can be quite stable in their political house when their economies, technologies and intellect remain so abysmal and shaky.
All they need, we hear, are many parties, and then democracy will be as full of vitality as a whale. The Western intelligentsia thinks that African and other Third World countries, whose cultural cohesion has been so messed up by the colonialists and neo-colonialists themselves, can enjoy the luxury of playing at competitive democracy without plunging into a socio-economic imbroglio.
African and other Third World countries are called “nations” only in a manner of speaking. Before colonialism, most African societies existed only as ethnic or gentile entities. Kinship was the most important nexus between individuals. To be sure, the introduction of capitalism from Europe has made serious inroads into this form of social consciousness and must eventually condemn it to full death.
Cash payment has rapidly taken over from kinship and ethnic feelings as the most important bond between individuals. But it will take an agonisingly long time. And today, the fact remains that in Kenya, for example, most people think of themselves first as Luo, Luhya, Kamba, Kisii, Kikuyu, Somali, etc., and only then as Kenyans.
This lumping together by European states of Africa’s formerly independent but greatly disparate ethnic entities into single colonial commonwealths, whose subsequent independence we may refer to as nations-in-the-making – this is thus what is responsible for the negative aspects of tribalism which always threaten to tear asunder those commonwealths colonially created by foreigners.
That is why, in such an already highly volatile situation, it would be folly and suicidal to sanctify differing as the most important aspect of democracy, especially since our differing has absolutely nothing to do with ideologies but revolves around personalities who predicate the realisation of their ambitions on exploiting the lowest and most primitive sentiments of their tribes.
Even among the most outspoken critics of our society – including, in Kenya, even a subversive clandestine movement called Mwakenya which thrived in the 1980s – I have not seen any ideological proposal fundamentally different from that of Kanu, the erstwhile ruling party. I have seen only a string of liberal dogmas and epithets.
Like Shakespeare’s character, I have “seen” only “a noise”. Where there are genuine ideological differences, a free expression of them should be allowed to take place, but this should not necessarily make differing ideologically compulsive.
Feudal political monoliths – especially since they were erected from faraway England – were what misled James Madison and other editors of the Federal Papers into the illusion that differing is the most desirable attribute of a human society. Similarly, the extreme intolerance of Moi’s one-party rule inevitably, when the conditions were ripe, led to a powerful campaign for multi-partyism.
Yet when both America’s founding fathers and Kenya’s multi-partyists triumphed, they soon proved that, both again the Moi regime and within their own selves, there was only fake differing. What the liberal class still claims to be manifestations of “pluralism” are only multitudinous ways in which to express the same liberal monolith.
As in the West, “freedom” of the individual to pursue his “happiness” is its nub and core. Such a “freedom” can only succeed in accumulating material “happiness” – wealth and intellectual possessions – at the apex of society, leaving the mass of society “free” only to cast a ballot rigidly rigged by the very hopelessly lopsided structure of wealth and power.
When our multi-partyists finally took power from Kanu in 2003, they showed that they differed from one another only on how to share power between themselves as individuals. They showed only that, in this, there was absolutely no difference between them collectively and Moi’s Kanu. The tribe remained the most important dividing line.
Members of the central power clique showed an unmistakable leaning towards the same intolerance and Big-Brotherism of the Moi years. Differing existed, to be sure, but only in a form completely destructive to a group of tribes with disparate fortunes desperately trying to develop into a nation.
Both the liberal West and the illiberal Africa on whom the West is trying to impose its liberalism cannot tolerate any real – that is to say, fundamental and socially useful – differing. As we have seen again and again, the ideology of liberalism remains completely intolerant to any ideology which may challenge it to the roots – the old aristocratic conservatism of Edmund Burke, on the right, and the new proletarian revolutionism, on the left.
The latter is now in retreat but it looks certain to see a more powerful resurgence sooner than later. The point I am driving at, however, is the falsity, in the domain of practice, of differing. Its exponents simply refuse to conceive of a time or circumstance when society may enjoy universal consensus.
Yet this was the condition of all human societies before the rise of civilisation and, with it, private property and the state. Precisely because of the social meaninglessness of their differing – those same exponents of differing – are the ones who, when in power, most desperately grasp at the straw of “national unity”, especially when challenged by conservative or revolutionary parties.
What it shows is that differing should not be confused with freedom of expression or – which are but forms of expression – freedoms of association and the vote. Freedom to express the myriad of forms of the liberal ideology is good. But it does not amount to differing. Freedom to differ – let me remind those who make a fetish of it – includes freedom to organise to overthrow the present regime by every means at the disposal of those exercising that freedom.
Yet the liberal class will be the first to condemn this as a “revolution”, forgetting that the liberal regime itself came to power only by means of extremely violent revolutions (1688, 1776, 1789, 1870, etc.). I believe in democracy, but I do not believe that ours should or can be a facsimile of the Western model.
I believe that every country which tries shall find its own form of democracy, homespun and stemming from its own experience in the econo-techno-intellectual domain. Our experience tells us that, at the moment, the multi-party system must, inexorably, develop into parochial ethnic movements because, at the level of organisation, ethnic consciousness is what continues to impel most of us forward.
It is likely to be extremely noisy and to divert our people’s attention from their daily struggle to keep death at bay by producing their own wherewithal of survival.
Our experience may suggest that the single-party system is what can guarantee us maximum efforts in the vital field of production so that we can build a stable material base from which to erect a stable political house. The single party can ensure this stability simply because it binds members to a general way of doing things.
It enjoins them to observe a system of discipline and constant consideration for others in everything that we do, criticising not to destroy but to edify the spirits of those criticised. But – I reiterate – it can thus work for us only if it is, at the same time, as democratic as possible within its general confines.
Otherwise it would stymie itself and prove as unavailing as the crumbled one-party system in Eastern Europe and post-colonial Africa. That is why those who would fetter the freedom of criticism in Africa pose such a grave danger to us. It seemed contradictory.
But I don’t see why, at least in theory, it is impossible to erect a system which is both highly disciplined and yet, at the same time, freely self-critical. It guarantees the freedom to differ and guarantees that all differing is injected into a policy but outlaws all potentially destructive forms of expressing them.
That was my idea of single-party democracy by which many African countries – including Kenya – began their lives as independent states. I have nothing intractable or permanent against a multiplicity of parties. There is only one reason I consider my proposal superior to multi-partyism: It is that, in societies that remain basically tribal – especially in Africa – political parties automatically follow tribal lines and, therefore, completely thwart that national unity of effort at the greatly more important task of material production.
Only when Africa has developed a deep and independent enough root of its own in production and a corresponding superstructure of intellect can it set up a multi-party system that is beneficial to production all round.
I reiterate that it can never happen the other way round, as the Western intelligentsia preaches to us. It is not the political system that hastens, deepens and stabilises a society’s econo-intellectual basis. On the contrary – as the liberal West has amply shown in practice – only on an already deep and stable material base can the class which has built that base erect a politico-constitutional house that endures.
Notwithstanding the completely false historiography by its present intelligentsia, the West has shown that it usually takes a revolution to bring about a new political thought-system into line with the econo-intellectual base that has given rise to that new thought. All the important liberal regimes in the West took power through revolutions, some of them extraordinarily violent and destructive.
A political party which allows itself to be criticised through its own medium clearly shows that it is conscious of its strength and maturity. Unluckily for Kenya’s ruling party, this strength was vitiated beyond redemption by the party’s own contumacious refusal to oil its other joints.
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