In this in-depth interview about Kenya’s rocky road towards a progressive constitution, the revolutionary socialist catches us up on Kenya’s latest political climate: the just-ended elections and a strengthened Communist Party of Kenya.

 

Kenya, being one of Africa’s top five economic powerhouses, is the undisputed financial giant in East Africa. The country, known for its wildlife, marathon runners and the most advanced internet coverage, is firmly a turbo-capitalist society. Under the last government, inequality and unemployment rose to almost 30%, while living standards have dropped by more than 30% in the previous ten years. This is despite the economy tripling in size and reporting positive GDP growth every year since 2001, except during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

 

After the right-wing Christian fundamentalist supported by Western evangelicals was declared the winner in the just-ended national election, the heightened class struggle is bound to take on a new level. Booker Ngesa Omole, the National Vice Chairperson and the National Organising Secretary of the Communist Party of Kenya update us on Kenya’s political history from the socialist lens. He takes us through his journey and that of the party, looking both in and outwards to paint a clear image of Kenya’s internal, regional and even global positions, struggles and relationships.

 

This background is essential for two reasons: the rich story of Kenya’s struggle must be told. Two, there is an air of anticipation building within Kenya’s progressive communities and the Communist Party of Kenya, in particular following the electoral win of William Ruto to become the next president. Ruto’s presidency, seen from the lens of his actions as the outgoing deputy president, is characterised by state corruption, oppression and collaboration with imperialism forces to further exploit Kenya. Many predict he will tighten the noose: the right-wing fundamentalist, whose political teeth were sharpened during the brutal YK92 under dictator Moi, is nothing if not aggressively faithful to his pursuits.

 

With the Kenyan youth and working class largely activated during the elections: most of it done by William Ruto, who used the bottoms-up rhetoric to drive a class-warfare campaign against his rival, history shows that there will be no closing that door. Furthermore, Kenya’s very progressive constitution backs up the demands for these desired changes, and those on the left will deploy it to fight oppression, brutality and corruption synonymous with William Ruto. The Communist Party is eager to provide a solid alternative to these forces. Furthermore, the influence of the Chinese people, through the development efforts, has diluted the US-Western allied propaganda forces and created an ample space for independent, alternative voices to paint a different image of socialism, communism and the issues facing Kenyans away from the anti-communist propaganda and lies from the western media.

Part I: Moism Perfected as Turbo-Capitalists and Imperialists Take Charge of The Country.

It has been sixty years since Kenya’s independence. What is your evaluation of the political changes that have taken place, and the stage of government, considering the country also held its elections in August?

To understand Kenya’s class struggle, one must look at the most dominant political system, the era of dictator Moi’s regime. It is also prudent to explore if there are any systemic problems that, together with the dictator’s regime, fuelled the crisis.

From the Communist party’s perspective, Kenya’s independence was sham in that it was independence in name only. We had a group of retrogressive nationalists led by our founding father, Jomo Kenyatta. He took the reigns of power and wielded those powers only to benefit a few people at the time. These were mainly the comprador and the national bourgeoisie, who entrenched neo-colonialism in the country’s structures, adopting the same oppressive and exploitative policies as the colonialists.

Jomo Kenyatta, a reactionary leader, died in 1978 and was by then one of the biggest landowners in this country. After his death, his vice president Daniel Moi took over power. Moi perfected the art of Jomo Kenyatta. He entrenched the neo-colonial state in all ways possible. He made concessions for the international capital from the IMF and World Bank. He also made concessions from the big business players in our country: welcoming big metropolises and multinationals to do business in our country. As a result, Kenyans modern-day slavery commenced – workers were exploited to work at almost zero pay, and our industries were destroyed as the country was reduced as a raw material exporter. That was the typical dictator Moi’s government.

 

Ironically, Moi was a darling of the West regarding issues of democracy. He followed the United States foreign policy, which was influencing their client states abroad to ban communism, and he killed communism as a political ideology in our country. Moi went further in the true dictator playbook when he passed certain acts that proclaimed communist literature to be seditious in our country.

 

For this reason, many progressives or communists in our country were forced to go underground or seek political refugee status in friendlier countries.

The climax of his policies was the 1982 government coup when the progressives and other people who could not tolerate dictatorship decided to organise a coup against the KANU one-party dictatorship. The failed coup made things worse, particularly for the poor, because it led to a crackdown on progressives, which sent leftist organisations underground as the regime conducted mass arrests and harassment of families. With no visible opposition in place, Moi could hold his political power firm.

However, the underground movements and others rose, exerting the second round of pressure during what we called the reintroduction of the multi-party system through an act of parliament. Unfortunately, the political multipartism in Kenya was flawed. This is because it was a Eurocentric and American-driven agenda in our country that, even if it was called a multi-party system, only the capitalist parties were allowed to participate; it was a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

 

Even then, the people realised Moi had to be kicked out and conducted mass organisations with the support of progressive trade unions and religious institutions. This movement led to the 2002 election when one of the long-time leaders of the opposition, Mwai Kibaki, was elected as president and finally threw Moi out of power.

Unfortunately, the aspects of Moism and even the aspect of KANUISM have stayed with us. Moi’s children are now dominating Kenyans because the money he took from the public is still circulating among the minority. Since Mwai Kibaki left, the entire political landscape has been dominated by his appointees. For example, his handpicked successor is the outgoing president Mr Kenyatta, who entered the political scene as the KANU candidate, Moi’s successor. If the name sounds familiar, he is also Jomo Kenyatta’s son.

This is the effect of Moism perfected many times over, and the current election cycle was worse. On the one hand, we had Raila Amollo Odinga, who was appointed as one of the leaders in the KANU government towards the tail end of Moi’s government, contesting under the Azimio la Umoja coalition - backed by outgoing Uhuru Kenyatta. On the other hand, we have one of the top members of the KANU youth, infamously known as the YK92 for their brutality, William Samoei Ruto, who is now in the realm after being declared the president-elect!

 

Looking at Kenya from the perspective of its ruling elite, it appears as if we have turned back the clock, and it is 1992 once again.

Fortunately, in 2002, people realised that the problem was not only Moi. It was clear there was also an issue of the entrenched political system dominated by a minority. They also understood that the political system was neo-colonial because it was outward-looking and could not sort out our internal problems. That birthed the struggle for the constitution review. That struggle was the most horrendous because many poor people lost their lives. The poor people sacrificed themselves and were martyred in the streets of Nairobi, Kisumu, and Mombasa, among others, to ensure that the constitution review would take place. Intellectuals like Dr Odhiambo Mbai were murdered in cold blood by the regime. In 2010, after many lost lives and bloodshed, the 2010 constitution was born. It is a highly progressive constitution, the class interpretation by the bourgeoisie state notwithstanding. No wonder Mr Odinga and his accomplices hatched an illegal plan under the unpopular Building Bridges Initiative to dilute it.

 

The CPK has just participated in the presidential elections that were held on 9th August this year. What were your main proposals to the Kenyan population as a party?

First, the Communist Party of Kenya does not see the bourgeois election as a way to liberate the Kenyan people, the poor, and the Kenyan workers.

While we consciously decided to participate in the bourgeois election based on certain premises, we published a document to guide the masses and to guide the cadres on the reasons why we ought to participate in the bourgeois election. That document can be read from our website. It is called, ‘On the 2022 elections, Kenyans think outside the box!’ One of the primary reasons why the Communist Party of Kenya took part in this election was because if we don’t participate when the masses are activated politically, then we’ll be abandoning the poor workers to only the reactionary ideas of the ruling elite.

 

Have we done our work in terms of spreading our ideas in Kenya? I think the Communist Party of Kenya is a significant force for us. We can say that the Communist Party of Kenya is known at a national and international level, so we have sufficiently done so.

 

The second thing we did was to expose the contradiction within the neo-colonial turbo-capitalist Kenya. In our analysis of the recent elections, we saw how the two factions; being the Raila Odinga-led faction and the William Samoei Ruto-led coalition. These two pretended to be protagonists, but their differences were only in form, not content. The critical similarity is that they both belong to the propertied class, and their attitude towards the oppressed strata of Kenyan society remained unchanged.

 

For example, we saw William Samoei Ruto, a corrupt person leading an attack on Raila Amolo Odinga, a known imperialist stooge. Ruto is a Christian fundamentalist supported by evangelicals from the West. He is a kleptocrat who has framed ashes to glory story, claiming he rose from being a chicken farmer to a rich person to lead a right-wing ‘success’ story in Kenya. The rich in our country are ashamed to say they accumulated riches through theft, so they manufacture stories in their head about how hard they have worked to be billionaires. This is the most disgusting anti-people capitalist propaganda.

 

On the other hand, we have Raila Odinga, one of Africa’s imperialists’ beacons. You only need to look at his roles in the continent to read through him. For example, when it came to Ivory Coast, he supported the French-led offensive there, he was the darling of the French stooge called Alassane Ouattara, and he has always taken a position against Palestine by supporting Israel mainly to receive alms. And if you look at Raila Odinga’s position on the liberation of Western Sahara people, he has consistently sided with the Morocco king.

This is why their rivalry is a pretence: we have, on the one hand, an outright imperialist stooge, and on the other, we have an ethnic and tribal bigot in the name of William Samoei Ruto who hides under the umbrella of Christianity to whip emotions of the poor people because he realised that he could use it to lie to the people to arise to a political position.

Despite all this, there has been a significant improvement in Kenyan politics. Growing up, there was always a raw ethnic mobilisation setting the Luo nation against the Kikuyu nation, the Kalenjin nation against the Kikuyu and so on. Things have changed. This time, we have exerted a lot of pressure from below. Through their respective Arms of government, mass actions and demonstrations, the Kenyan people have rejected the Politics of ethnic mobilisation.

 

That is why this election was dominated by particular rhetoric around economic models. Ruto’s infamous bottoms-up approach was sold out as a way to save the poor people from the dynasty - the elites - but it only ended in rhetoric because we have not seen any policy issues. If Ruto, who comes from the oppressing, wealthy minority class in this country, means well to the poor people, then he has to commit class suicide and surrender all the wealth and the land that he has accumulated on the back of the poor people.

On the other side, we saw Raila’s offensive talking about state welfarism, about giving USD 60 to the poor people. He failed to tell us how he would get the USD 60 to provide for the poor because Raila was unwilling to expropriate the expropriators. Like Ruto, he is in the class of those who have been expropriating the working class. As I explained earlier, they stopped short of fully exposing themselves during their post-election homage to the United States Embassy and the Western allies.

 

Under the pretext of defending themselves, we witnessed the managers of this country showing their bellies to the imperialist interests. Imagine paying homage to the people who continue slaughtering the poor and getting each blood from the poor people in this country. How can they be for the people when they are more eager to prostitute themselves to the parasites who continue to suck Kenya dry?

 

The US and the West are users. They use us to consume low substandard materials manufactured in their countries. They use us as a source of cheap labour. That is the clear convergence that marks both Raila and Ruto as agents of imperialism. For them, the validity of their leadership and political victory could only be measured through the capitalist United States and their Western allies. These are the alpha and omega. Not the people of Kenya.

 

Part II: A Take on the Progressive Movement and Class Struggle in Kenya.

 

The party is relatively young: having formed in 1992. What social elements made up the Social Democratic Party at that time, and how did the organisation evolve until it became the current Communist Party of Kenya we know today?

 

The Social Democratic Party registered in 1992 was never a Communist Party but a Social Democratic Party both in form and material. This is not a negative criticism of the party’s roots, but just how things had to be. As I highlighted under Kenya’s political struggle, the people who were organising under the umbrella of communism were organising under what was loosely an underground movement. Some of the more famous organised underground movements, like the Mwakenya movement or the December Twelve Movement (DTM), were mainly student-driven movements. Some were led by lecturers of the University of Nairobi and Union leaders. These organisations operated covertly because organising any communist movement would have earned you a lengthy jail term or gotten you murdered by the Moi government.

 

At the time, Social Democratic Party, SDP, was an overt natural home of revolutionaries. That was the party that was agitating for reforms and trying to say that the poor and the rich people could live together in harmony without having to threaten the existence of one another. The party was purely a social democratic party. Just another reformist party.

It was not until later years, starting sometime in 2007, that a few revolutionaries within the party began the process to drive the party to the left. However, that move failed, as the revolutionaries who were mainly in the party’s youth wing were unsuccessful, and the party fell back into the hands of the reactionaries. This was only a temporary defeat.

I was among the young people involved in the fight to take the party over; those of us who started the process to rescue the party from the kleptocracy that had entered the party: driving the party towards the right. Facing off against some prominent names like the current minister for health Mr Mutahi Kagwe and Njeri Ndwiga, who were part of the offensive, the political party’s youth wing came out and redeemed the dignity of the party and restored its lost glory. That’s how the debates about the left ideology started in the SDP.

 

It has to be known that the Communist Party of Kenya is a product of the struggle. No single individual can claim ownership of the party, non-whatsoever. The party has many heroes; those sons and daughters that continue to martyr in the streets to expand this civic and political space are our true heroes. We will never forsake them because their names are written in our hearts with blood. In our confrontation with the brutal state, they inspire and give us morale to fight, always willing to donate our life to the struggle. We are a product of activism, and no amount of bourgeoisie legality can limit our activities; no state repression can thaw our spirit. We are the party of the future and have the whole world to win.

 

The new constitution in 2010 paved the way for a registrable communist party under capitalist legality. We, therefore, made an Amendment to the documents of the SDP and filed by the registrar of political parties to declare it a Marxist-Leninist party that follows a clear scientific line for the proletariat revolution. For practical reasons, the party’s leadership opted to retain the SDP name during the 2013 elections because SDP was already known among the masses. There was a debate in the party that the name could help us perform well in the 2013 election process. Unfortunately, that hysteria of the SDP name did not even help us to get seats in parliament. We performed very dismally and were only able to get a few members of County assembly positions.

 

With that peg kicked down, the process to change the name from the Social Democratic Party of Kenya to the Communist Party of Kenya started. It was easier because we were already calling ourselves communists, and as communists, we belonged to the Communist Party of Kenya and not the Social Democratic Party of Kenya. So, the discussion that started in will then evolve to birth a new Communist Party that is registrable under bourgeois legality and can participate in bourgeois electoral processes in 2019.

 

Since 2010, Kenya has had a new constitution which replaced the 1963 constitution. Do you think this text allowed the country’s situation to improve?

 

Kenyans have always defied the so-called Manchester constitution’s colonial and neo-colonial forms. Both placed the power in the hands of the few, and democracy was controlled among the few elites who entrenched the system’s managers on behalf of the bourgeoisie or the rich people in our country.

2010 was a very momentous moment for the working class. First, it was emotional because it was a day to remember our fallen brothers and sisters who died fighting in the streets demanding constitutional change; it was a day to give dignity to those martyrs.

 

Secondly, the 2010 constitution is one of the most progressive, particularly in Africa. For example, we are dealing with the evangelical or the Christian fundamentalist issue, but the 2010 constitution clearly shows that Kenya is not a theocracy. There shall never be any state religion. That, to me, is a very progressive start.

Third, the 2010 constitution is a break from the past. For example, the Kenyan Constitution 2010 puts it in an obvious way that all power is bestowed on the people of Kenya and at every given time, they can exercise power indirectly through their elected leaders or directly through demonstrations, strikes and mass actions. Any single individual that uses its prerogative mandate against the people’s collective interest declares war with the Kenyan people. Other examples can be found in the clauses that deal with human rights, social rights, governance, issues to do with oversight, and even foreign policies.

 

If a responsible government is interested in entrenching pro-people policies and ideas, it can do so reliably using the 2010 constitution. They just need to clarify some ambiguity introduced by the ruling elite and then interpret it on the side of the working class. Because a constitution is a tool of the state, each person or class in power interprets the constitution in the frame of that class.

 

For example, when it comes to the issue of land, the 2010 constitution defines the three types of land as private land, public land and community land. But when it comes to interpretation, the rulers, who all come from one class, have chosen to interpret the constitution in favour of the rich. In practice, the private land takes precedence over the community and public land. This cascades across the entire system, where the judiciary, the executive and the parliament will interpret the 2010 Constitution in a way that only favours a minority, the ruling elite.

If the Communist Party of Kenya wins political power through electoral processes, we will start from the firm foundation of the 2010 constitution to entrench progressive reforms. These are reforms to provide social and human rights and expand access to essential services like healthcare, decent housing, and a job with dignity. And in that way, we will start a process towards building socialism, which is what the 2010 Constitution is all about.

 

This will only be in the transition stage since we are revolutionaries, and we have to go beyond mere reforms; we have to destroy the bourgeoisie state to atoms and, in its place, start the construction of a proletariat state. Remember that communism’s end goal is to defeat all authorities. Therefore, even though we can use the constitution to bring reforms, such as to give services to the poor and the working-class people, the end game is the end of constitutionalism. That means constitutions are only a transition, the workers’ state is only a transition and even all authorities that are bestowed in the communist movement is only a transition to no authority because our end game is to seek man and woman that is advanced: a moral man and woman ready for his continental and intercontinental duties that do not need any authority to impose their will upon anyone.

For example, we now see that the 2010 constitution has been interpreted for a super minority to impose the will of the minority against the majority’s will. When in power, we will reinterpret it to impose the workers’ will against those who oppress them. In the final analysis, we say that the 2010 constitution was a leap in the struggle which we can use to advance the struggle for the working class in this country.

 

What is the CPK’s analysis of the current situation in Kenya? The economy has grown in recent years, but it seems that this has not necessarily improved the condition of the population.

 

What determines the development of a country is the stages in which the productive forces are at. We can say that since independence or even pre-independence and post-independence, the productive forces of Kenya have grown. Still, the workers’ benefits have been robbed by the factory owners, and the benefits of the farmers have been robbed by either the brokers or big landowners.

 

The answer to why Kenya or even Africa is so rich while most African people are poor is simple: we are poor because we are being robbed by a minority class in Africa which falls under the comprador bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. They rob us of our labour at the farm. They rob us of our labour in the factory. After that, they turn us to shopkeepers or supermarket owners who are brokers, for they do not create anything. Then they surrender us to the landlords to continue to suck more blood from the poor people in this country.

So, the wealth that has been generated in the last several decades in this country is concentrated in a super minority in our country, and it is upon the majority of the population to organise themselves politically, led by the Communist Party of Kenya, which is the workers’ party to now wrest the political power.

 

How can that situation be resolved? We can only solve that contradiction within the neo-colonial Kenyan society or turbo Capitalist Society by taking the political power from those who are board of directors of the minority and bringing it under the able leadership of the workers through their political party. When we finally do that, then the first thing we will do, of course, is to expropriate the expropriators: To take the wealth from the robbers and bring it back to the workers, to take the wealth from the brokers and bring it to the workers, to take the wealth from the landlord and bring it to the tenants, to take the wealth from the big multinational firms and bring it back to the people who produced the wealth.

 

So, the contradiction between inequality and the so-called development is when, in our position, we see that the development in our country is only geared towards external beneficiaries. For example, suppose you look at the plantation’s businesses. In that case, you realise that the people involved in the plantation business are mainly local people who are underpaid; they are malnourished and are killing themselves in a very slow way by using dangerous chemicals while at work in those extensive plantations. They are being subjected to hard labour, and sometimes even the people who employ them do not respect the rule of law regarding the minimum wage. CPK holds an honest opinion that all undignified work should be mechanised.

That is why we see that, despite the riches in our country, we still have people who die of hunger. We have people who die of curable diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, and we have children that are malnourished and suffering from marasmus and kwashiorkor. This is all happening in a country where political leaders suffer from obesity because they have stolen so much that they have almost eight meals daily. Their days are spent eating: when they wake up, they have breakfast, and by ten o’clock, they have heavy tea. They have even adapted the coloniser’s language to normalise their greedy appetites.

 

At one o’clock, they settle for a three-stage meal; before it is fully digested, they have high tea at four before they can retire for dinner. The diners transition to drinks for the rest of the night. What a hopeless life! Life of consumerism is the animalist life of food, reproduction and zero creativity. In the affluent neighbourhoods in Nairobi, human beings live like in warzones, with no running water and polythene bags as shelters and flying toilets dominate. Amid all that, churches and non-government organisations mushroom selling false hope to the wretched of the earth, to put it in Frantz Fanon’s words.

Therefore, while it is clear that Kenya is rich, the rich in Kenya have robbed Kenyans, and the country is under the firm control of a few people from a few families.

 

 

 

Part III: African Affairs

 

Kenya is part of several regional blocs such as the East African Community, the African Economy Community or the African Union. What is your opinion of the role of these organisations?

 

As they stand, these unions are a slow start for us. Whether you call it the African Union or the East African block, or the central block, as long as they see capitalism as the only way to organise the society, then those unions, we can say, are a dead start.

Secondly, it has become clear that the African Union is only an organisation to lobby for the benefits of African seating presidents and dictators. The African Union members are always defending the presidency of each other, but they’re not for the people’s development, which is very disappointing for us. For example, when Uhuru Kenyatta and now William Samoei Ruto were under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC), they rallied a pan-Africanist movement to lobby for their freedom and protection by the other president. The idea of Pan-Africanism to them was a camouflage that has since been debunked.

 

The Communist Party of Kenya is a Pan-Africanist organisation. The Communist Party of Kenya holds a very radical view that a free, united, liberated Africa is only possible under scientific socialism. In this scenario, Pan-Africanism is the objective, and the software that takes us to that objectivity is scientific socialism. Certain debates have taken place before around the issue of Pan-Africanism.

 

For example, there was a debate between Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere, the founding father of Tanzania, asking: Do we need to unite piecemeal, for example, the Central and the Southern and Eastern blocs or do we need a continental unity at once? I think that the debate has already been finished. Communists agree that any unity that advances a pro-people, united, free Africa from capitalism and imperialism is welcomed, whether piecemeal or universal.

The second debate on pan-Africanism is on what is possible: do we have African socialism or a socialist Africa? I think such arguments have already been debunked by the intellectuals on the left, like Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu, in his book African socialism or socialist Africa. The Communist Party of Kenya is convinced that only under scientific socialism we can see a liberated Africa. Once everything has been declared a science, it becomes universal. Then, we don’t have to name it, whether it is African socialism or Western socialism. Still, we have to look at what we call the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, which is our principle guide and our light that continues to illuminate our paths towards the total victory of the continent.

 

The country sent troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight against Al-Shabaab. What do you think of this type of military mission?

 

The overall policy is that we do not allow or accept imperialist forces in our country. As far as that goes, our leaders have let us down because they have opened our air and naval spaces to the US and British military, equipment and personnel. The Communist Party has remained hostile to such moves by imperialist forces who seek to interfere with our internal affairs.

Regarding the issue of Somalia, we had a different policy. That is because there were continuous terrorist attacks from Somalia, which made it appear as if the Kenyan government was helpless to control the terrorists killing in our country. That is why, for a moment, we supported the military offensive against Al-Shabab organisations in Somalia. We applauded Mr Kenyatta’s administration for taking the bold step to secure our borders, especially after the unfortunate massacre of students in Garissa. And for sure, everyone can agree that after we had the Kenyan intervention in Somalia, there have been very minimal cases of terrorism.

 

However, we must also unveil the hypocrisy within Mr Kenyatta’s administration. Because the Kenyan military went under AMISON, it was like we were using our soldiers only to earn profits from them. That is why you find that the money from AMISON was taken up by the political elite in our country, who are robbing the people who are putting their lives on the frontlines: to protect the Kenyan borders and to make us safe.

However, we disagree with the Kenyan government - AMISON arrangement and the plight of the personnel fighting on the war front to make us safe. If we think in terms of foreign policy, it was a good thing to go to Somalia to try to stop terrorism at its roots.

Part IV:  Kenya, Africa and the rest of the world.

Recently, there have been a series of military coups in African countries such as Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Mali, among others, adding to the civil war in Ethiopia. What, in your opinion, could be causing these negative eruptions?

Africa is under attack. African governments are being destabilised by the United States and their western allies like the French government in West Africa, who have been busy interfering with the internal affairs of those governments. The fall of the Ivory Coast government and, now, the recent statement by the Malian government are clear examples of this blatant interference. Mali, in their account, reported that the French government had floated their rules by sending planes into their air space to deliver lethal weaponry to the extreme right-wing and Islamic extremists in Mali that are a threat to the Malian government.

 

Another unfortunate case is what happened in Sudan. After the revolution started, we had the Ryadh government in Saudi Arabia and the United States as their allies, together with Israel going into full mode to facilitate an installation of a military regime in Khartoum. What for? Only to enable theft.

Because Africa as a continent is wealthy, there are only two ways to exploit Africa. The most obvious one is what the United States and their allies in the West have been doing: using their so-called democracy plan to install a puppet government. This is what they did in Ivory Coast, where they established the neoliberal kleptocrat Alassane Ouattara after the electoral coup against Laurent Gbagbo. It also happened in the Central Africa Republic, and it continues to occur in our elections in Kenya.

 

The other day in Kenya, Mr Odinga’s and Mr Ruto’s sides paid homage to the United States government in Nairobi. The embassy declared themselves very privileged and posted photos of their discussions on how to entrench the (US) democratic tendencies in Kenya. This unfortunate pandering was just humiliating because the United States embassy in Nairobi is nothing but a CIA spy agency. Their primary role in our country is interfering with our internal democracy and processes.

 

The other way that Africa is under attack is due to continued robbery: Africa is poor because it is being robbed. Everyone aware of the geopolitics of imperialism knows what is happening to the biggest country in the continent to understand how well this robbery has worked. Congo has enough resources that can feed Africa, but the imperialist and multinational forces in Congo will never allow peace to take place in Congo. They want to divide that country; they want to make it vulnerable. They want to loot gold and other mineral resources and cause war in Congo.

 

This is the tactic the US and her Western allies use when they fail to install puppet governments to do their bidding: they finance the reactionary elements to cause chaos in those countries. If they cannot manage to do it as the British did in Kenya, where they divided us through ethnic lines, they will use other things like different religious groupings. For example, they set the Islamic community against the Christian community, which divides the country: giving them a fertile ground to loot.

 

By and large, the wars in Africa are mainly imperialist, and we should continue to educate the continent’s people on the roots of such wars. We also must continue organising to dent capitalism in readiness for its inevitable fall. Only CPK, with the support of the workers, will be able to neutralise the Western dogs littering Africa.

 

Kenya is one of the main recipients of Chinese credits in Africa, including a millionaire investment in the “standard gauge railway” project between Nairobi and Mombasa. What is your opinion of what some voices denounce as an abusive manoeuvre by China towards developing countries with these credits?

 

China is the future of the planet. African people have a lot of similarities with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We also have a shared history as China was colonised by the most brutal imperialist forces that were the Japanese at that time, and Kenya was colonised by the British.

 

In Africa, the British have continued to dominate these countries by giving loans and putting unnecessary bureaucracy stamps on our development. By remaining the permanent ally of the British and the United States, Kenya experienced a lot of under-development. It was not until the arrival of China, which disrupted predatory relationships they had nurtured, that the United States financial and capital organisations like IMF and World Bank became jealous. Even then, it did not change things: further proving their agenda.

 

In contrast, look at the effect of the Chinese presence in Africa: China has accelerated development in terms of infrastructure. It removed bureaucracies and even reviewed the loan arrangement between African countries. For example, they have substantially reduced Angola’s poverty index. Therefore, the supremacy of the management of the Chinese community under the Communist Party of China has proven to bring progressive development. For many Kenyans and Africans, China is a country to admire. And if any flaws are in the Chinese socialist experiment, it would be very irresponsible for us to criticise those flaws based on racist bigotry and advance racism by profiling the Chinese people in our country. You know that is what the West would like us to do, using Africans as pawns.

 

We see a lot of possibilities with the Chinese capital in Africa, we know a lot of cultural similarities with the Chinese people, and the Communist Party of Kenya has no hostility towards China. We will want to perfect our relationship with the Chinese people. We want to share our experiences, and we have gained a lot of knowledge from the leader of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, our chairman Mao, as we call him, in the party.

 

There can be excesses in terms of the access given to Chinese companies working in Kenya. But those excesses must be treated on their merit. The problem we face when it comes to this is that there is a lot of Western-sponsored anti-Chinese propaganda in our country. The big media house in Kenya and the international media stations in the country like BBC and CNN are here to parrot against China and the Chinese’s socialist experiment.

 

It is not just the media propaganda that muddies the water. We also have a big challenge with the attacks sponsored by Western non-governmental organisations that set the African people against the Chinese.

 

However, as the Communist Party of Kenya, we are happy that they have been losing, and China has proven to be a genuine friend. For example, when facing an electoral process in our country, we did not see the Chinese Secretary-General or leadership trying to interfere. After all, the Chinese people have an extraordinary policy towards Africa: the policy of non-interference. The Communist Party of Kenya will not mind a CPC interfering or doing an intervention in Kenyan politics so long as they can advance our struggle politically. However, we still take it in peace that their policy of non-interference in Africa has contributed enormously in terms of people-to-people love between the two great heroic nations.

We would look forward to learning from our brothers and sisters in China. We want to learn from their mistakes and continue to build our socialist experiment here on the continent. While we may not want to import the Chinese Cultural Revolution, we will build our revolution here in Kenya and build alliances with other left-wing organisations in Africa. In that way, we can have a United African continent based on a clear pro-people, scientific, socialist policy, which is the objective of the Communist Party of Kenya.

 

I must mention that the Communist Party of Kenya is not just not a Pan-Africanist or a national organisation: we are also an internationalist organisation. That means we are in solidarity with all the oppressed people. We are anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists, and we support the struggle of all the world’s oppressed people. We strongly support the creation of alternative centres of power, whether those powers are, for example, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, or South Africa. In the words of Hugo Chavez, “the world is much safer if we have a multipolar world.” Not the big boys who have declared themselves the planet’s prefects like in the United States case. That evil empire will inevitably fall; who knew the Spanish empire, among others, would fall, but they did; that is what the science of history reveals to us. The empire is in its last days. Those warmongers in Washington want to prefect us; they want to determine what we eat and how we relate even to our African people. That is why I want to reiterate that the Communist Party of Kenya supports the multipolar world, and we are totally against any imperialist war.

 

Of course, the only war we are willing to sacrifice it all for is a class war, so that’s what brings our internationalist nature. We are in solidarity with the great people of Palestine struggling against the Zionist regime under apartheid Israel. We are in solidarity with our brothers and sisters from Western Sahara that are fighting against the Moroccan King for stealing their freedom and denying their children and women their dignity. We are in solidarity with all the oppressed people of the world. We support international socialist globalisation based on solidarity and true friendship of a people! We are hostile to neoliberal globalisation’s current arrangement!

 

Long live Internationalism!

Long live socialism!

Death to capitalism!