By Kinuthia Ndung’u
A day has passed since Sabasaba, precisely Sunday at 12:30 am. July is typically very cold, but today is different. It is warm here. I began writing this from a cell at Central Police Station, accompanied by 26 other comrades. Our offence is organizing and participating in demonstrations against the unbearable high cost of living and the neoliberal anti-people Finance Act, which will increase taxes, directly impacting the majority of Kenyans. This act is a direct result of the policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The US ambassador to Kenya has even expressed support for the additional levies. My fellow comrades may appear to be sleeping peacefully on this cold floor, but they are emotionally troubled. The status quo in the country is driving them insane. They are exhausted, having not slept since our arrest on Friday. Throughout, they have been discussing the country's situation and singing songs of struggle. There is a lot of comradely warmth and love in here, but I know it's colder outside this room. The majority of poor Kenyans are suffering from severe economic hypothermia due to institutionalized extreme economic hardship.
For over 60 years, a large section of our people has lived under the most deplorable conditions. Behind the facade of skyscrapers, mansions, and the expressway lies the bitter reality of the majority of poor Kenyans condemned to live in horrific and miserable conditions of poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, and ignorance. Successive regimes have resorted to police terrorism to silence any progressive voices advocating for change in this country.
The neoliberal darling Ruto and his outspoken deputy have already demonstrated a willingness to follow in the footsteps of their political mentor, the corrupt and now-deceased dictator Moi. Ruto has been expressing anti-IMF and World Bank (WB) sentiments on international platforms while zealously pursuing neoliberal policies at home. On the other side, the opposition, led by the poster boy for big business, Raila Odinga, has taken advantage of the genuine concerns of Kenyans occasioned by the anti-poor IMF and WB programs to lead an intra-elite power struggle, sacrificing the poor as collateral. Over 30 poor people, including our dear comrade Harris, a member of the youth league of the party, were brutally killed by police bullets in last week's demonstrations. In his usual style, Raila will use these spontaneous actions to negotiate personal interests with the government. Once Raila gets what he wants, he will forget about these poor people like baby Pendo, comrade Hillary, and others who have paid the ultimate price. Their families will be left suffering in poverty compounded by a very high cost of living. Mr. Raila, like his younger brother Ruto, lacks the ideas needed to salvage our economy. They both support the neoliberal ideology of individualism, the central promise of a capitalist society.
Things are so bad that Kenyans, especially the older generation, claim to miss the dictator from Kabarak-Moi. They reminisce about the old days under his rule with nostalgic memories. A time when the Kenya Bus Service (KBS) was a shining example of functioning public transportation; before government corporations were privatized; before the massive layoffs in the public sector, and just before agricultural cooperatives collapsed. The cost of living back then was affordable. They have chosen to forgive him for presiding over one of the most corrupt and brutal dictatorships in Africa. They have forgotten his responsibility in entrenching politics and a culture of negative ethnicity in the country.
The dominant ideas have systematically conditioned us into uncritical ways of thinking. The powers behind the capitalist system and its sick child, the neoliberal enterprise, have remained largely unknown. Neoliberal thinking has created a new normalcy. Comrade Karl Marx had a way of simplifying this, stating that “the dominant ideology of every society is the ideology of the dominant class.”
This work seeks to grasp the policy of privatization and its role in our current crisis in Kenya. It will historically analyse the neoliberal insurgency in the country to understand the power and ideology behind it. This will offer an understanding of the full implications of the neoliberal policy of privatization we have witnessed over the next few decades. It will then advance the alternative presented by CPK to neoliberal privatization policies.
It is important to view and understand the neoliberal insurgency as part and parcel of a hegemonic project. It has its historical roots in capitalism and marks a return to the liberal capitalism of the 18th century. Professor David Harvey, in his work A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), states that neoliberalism can be interpreted as a "utopian" project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism.
The Kenyan people heroically fought to remove colonial domination and replace it with a more just and humane system of governance but were betrayed by the Kenyatta regime. Rodney captured this well when he said that no one shouted “African, African, I’m an African” more than people like Jomo Kenyatta and others, who were at the same time ruthlessly exploiting the African people. Under the guise of African Socialism, his regime preached socialism and implemented capitalism. They silenced and marginalized dissenting voices like Pio Gama Pinto, Makhan Singh, and Bildad Kaggia, even declaring the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) an illegal organization. The notorious CIA document, Sessional Paper No. 10 on African Socialism (Republic of Kenya 1965) by the Minister of Economic Planning and Development, Tom Mboya, laid out a plan on how to entrench capitalism in the country. The regime implemented policies and projects that ensured huge profits for Western governments and corporations. The National Project was abandoned, and the country was entrenched as a neo-colonial capitalist state.
Then entered President Moi with his ideology of Nyayo. An assurance that he would follow like sheep in the neo-colonial footsteps of his predecessor. He inherited and exacerbated all the leadership ills of Kenyatta's regime. The country is yet to recover from his legacy. His regime oversaw the reshaping of our economy according to the principles of privatization, free trade, and market-driven development. Under his leadership, our country entered into a deep economic crisis in the 80s. Internal factors like tribal politics, land grabbing, and rampant corruption led to the mismanagement of the economy. The 1974 and 1980 famines also greatly devastated the agricultural industry. These factors were exacerbated by external factors such as the increase in oil prices in 1973 and further in 1980. The already high unemployment and inflation were made worse by the 1981 recession occasioned by the Iranian Revolution, which saw an increase in oil prices. The WB and IMF blamed these financial strains on bad governance and state intervention in the economy and provision of social services. They prescribed the poison of neoliberal reforms as the cure for our ailing nation. Kenya, like many other countries, had to adopt the subsequent Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) by the IMF and WB to acquire loans that supposedly were to salvage their economies. Kenya was among the first African countries to get a World Bank loan in 1980 and another IMF loan in 1982. The lending policy came with neoliberal reforms as conditionalities. The reforms, among other things, aimed at privatizing the economy and mainly targeted cooperatives and state parastatals.
Privatization is the sale of publicly owned assets to private persons, either entirely or partially, and the transfer of public services to the private sector under state protection. The argument for privatization is that it would reduce government spending on the industry, increase efficiency through skilled management, raise funds for investments, and earn taxes for the government. As a result, our economy was deregulated, industries were privatized, and the welfare state was rolled back. According to this new arrangement, the role of the state was to protect and create an enabling environment for private capital to flourish. The former director of the Vision 2030 secretariat, Mugo Kibati, once affirmed this abnormality on television when he said that “Whatever the political positions of the day, business sense will prevail and will take the day.”
Kenya has undertaken privatization through different frameworks, including the pursuit of private investment in public enterprises. Here, we have seen an ever-increasing dependence on the private sector to provide basic public services like electricity, water, and infrastructure projects like the Expressway. The sale of assets in government enterprises and government shares in state-owned and private enterprises is another method. For example, the takeover of the National Bank of Kenya by Kenya Commercial Bank and the sale of government shares in Safaricom. This way, public goods have been alienated from the control of the collective and the state.
Currently, there is a proposed amendment to the privatization bill of 2005. It seeks to remove the consent of people's representatives in parliament during the privatization of state assets. The neoliberal policies of privatization adopted and embraced by successive regimes have worsened the conditions of the wretched of this country. Structural unemployment, poverty, and inequality have increased, condemning Kenyans to misery and great suffering. Kenya has been turned into a neoliberal laboratory. The state can no longer guarantee accessible, quality, and affordable access to basic essential services.
The implementation of neoliberal policies in healthcare is one of the unspoken genocides on the majority of poor people by the state. It is one of the major causes of depression, hopelessness, and poverty in many families. The unscientific management of COVID-19 showed us how failed the public healthcare system was. Today, our people have been forced into the arms of rogue pastors for healing in this age of great advancement in medical science. In many informal settlements, healthcare is a charitable act offered either free or at subsidized rates by donor-funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Philanthrocapitalism leads to the depoliticization of the masses, removing them from the necessity of collective social need and therefore collective action.
Our Constitution, a product of struggle, guarantees Kenyans the right to the highest attainable standard of health, which entails the right to the highest quality healthcare services. However, it remains a privilege only available to those with money. Healthcare is seen as a business rather than a human right. Even the largest public hospital in the country, Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), has a private wing where those with money can get proper medical attention while the rest wait for their fate in the under-equipped and understaffed public wing. This is how we lost our comrade, 21-year-old Alphones Ngeng'a, a community organizer with the Young Communist League. He was involved in an accident and suffered a broken limb and post-traumatic head injuries. He was rushed to KNH where there was no doctor to attend to him during the entire 10 hours he was in the emergency. The few doctors available were overwhelmed by the patients in line. His broken limb remained unattended, and he passed away the next day. He would have lived to build the party he loved so much if there was money to get him admitted to the private wing of KNH. Was he not killed by the retreating state? How do we talk of a shortage of doctors in public hospitals when private clinics are overflowing with doctors, a good number of doctors are still unemployed, and our country ranks among the leading countries supplying the West with qualified nurses and doctors?
Most public hospitals lack essential equipment, and patients have to purchase medicine from private pharmaceuticals and get services like X-ray scans and laboratory tests from private clinics and laboratories.
The rise of many private clinics to fill the gap left by the retreating state has also contributed to the theft of limited drugs and equipment from public hospitals to support private clinics. These private clinics exploit the sick and their families for profit, driving families into abject poverty to pay medical bills. We've also seen an influx of private medical insurance companies capitalizing on the government's inability to guarantee quality healthcare. Their classist schemes seek to rob patients while excluding the poor from accessing this right.
Regarding education, its importance as a tool for liberation cannot be overstated. Education is supposed to produce an all-round complete social being capable of contributing to the national project. However, in the neoliberal era, education is primarily seen as a path to employment, aimed at producing instruments of labour for exploitation by capital, effectively creating individuals who don't question the status quo.
With the rise of neoliberalism, the government systematically reduced public expenditure on education. Many in informal urban settlements depended on donor-funded scholarships and schools to complete their primary and secondary school education because the quality of education in public schools was very low. These schools not only lacked basic facilities like desks but also had a high student-to-teacher ratio. Private schools that mushroomed were either too expensive for working-class parents or just inadequate. The high fees in both public and private institutions, especially those of higher learning, have bankrupted many families. The government is now seeking to replace grants for public institutions of higher learning with loans, designed to keep students in economic chains. A direct consequence of this privatized education has been a decrease in access to education for the children of the poor.
Liberalizing education has led to the proliferation of substandard private campuses competing to offer "marketable" courses, prioritizing profits over the well-being of students and workers in the sector. Workers in this field have insecure contracts and work long hours under great pressure for relatively low pay. Most institutions prioritize maximizing profits over the workers.
A recent attempt by Trade Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria to put our universities into intensive care units (ICU) involved proposing the privatization of several public universities at the beginning of the year. He argued that they owed debts worth billions of shillings and needed financial infusion from the private sector to stabilize them. The CS wants to convert our public universities into businesses focused on maximizing profits. This is not new; in 2020, the government announced plans to shut down the Kenya Utalii College to allow them to develop a profitable operational plan, even though the college was established to train qualified workers in the hospitality industry, not to generate profits.
Another offensive was made through a notice dated 2022, where The National Lands Commission and the County Government of Nairobi notified the public that Kimathi Primary School, a public school established in 1975, was to be demolished to pave the way for the construction of a mall. This represents the outright theft of public property and an assault on children's right to access education for the benefit of private capital.
Those who have dared to organize resistance to these inhumane education policies have paid the ultimate price. Evans Njoroge, a student leader at Meru University of Science and Technology, was brutally murdered by the police as he led his fellow students to protest against high tuition fees, poor university management, and a police state. Students have continued to face brutal police violence and disciplinary measures by the corrupt university's administration for merely taking part in rightful student movements. The universities have turned into zones of police repression where the rights of students and their lecturers are routinely violated. The neoliberal model has commodified education and turned it into a privilege rather than a basic human right.
No one is safe under imperialism. In 2005, Bolivians in El Alto took to the streets to protest the privatization of El Alto water services, which resulted in exorbitant bills and deteriorating service quality. This privatization had been a condition imposed as part of a 1997 World Bank loan. Five years prior, Bolivians in Cochabamba also protested against high water bills, a direct consequence of the World Bank and IMF's insistence on water privatization as a prerequisite for financial aid to Bolivia. Consequently, the Bechtel Corporation gained control of water resources, including rainwater. Legislation was enacted that not only prevented people from collecting rainwater but also allowed the corporation to repossess homes over unpaid water bills.
Under the rallying cry "Water is ours, damn it!" protestors blamed the private corporation for attempting to "lease the rain." These protests escalated into a deadly riot, with the government declaring martial law and using violence to protect foreign private capital. Many were arrested, some left permanently disabled, and a seventeen-year-old boy was fatally shot. Pressure from these two riots ultimately led to the return of water provision to public hands. However, the police officer responsible for the extrajudicial killing was acquitted of all responsibility and even promoted to the rank of major. Despite regaining control of their water resources, it remains questionable whether this truly brought liberation to the majority of Bolivians, as the threats of globalization still loom large.
Back home in Kenya, the impoverished residents of slums like Kibera, Mukuru, Kiambiu, and many other working-class settlements have fallen victim to not only cholera and typhoid outbreaks but also the predatory practices of the "clean water" cartels that own water trucks and vending points. Water in slums like Githogoro costs up to 30 times more than piped water in the adjacent Runda estate. In rural areas such as Matimbei village in Kiambu County, community-owned water projects have been taken from farmers and entrusted to private companies for management. Farmers have been burdened with high water bills, irregular supply, shut-offs for households unable to pay, and even the loss of the right to use water for agricultural purposes.
The 2002 Water Act introduced water sector reforms, establishing autonomous water and sanitation (or sewerage) companies known as WASCOs, which were meant to be managed on commercial principles, treating water as a commercial commodity. The conditions have only worsened under the current regime, with the Kenya Kwanza Alliance's manifesto prioritizing the privatization of key sectors in their economic strategy. Mr. Ruto, in his address to the 13th Parliament, expressed intentions to adopt a Public Private Partnerships (PPP) framework, which would allow private firms to build dams and trade water as a commodity.
Past attempts at liberalizing the water sector were met with resistance. In 2007, the Kenya Local Government Union issued a strike notice, claiming that there was a memorandum of understanding dated June 2, 2017, between Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company (NWSC) and the France-based company Suez for the sale of the water company. This is the same corporation whose activities triggered the water riots in El Alto, Bolivia.
Workers continue to resist these policies to this day. In July 2023, employees of the Nairobi Water & Sewerage Company (NWSCo) took to the streets, led by the Kenya Union of Water and Sewerage Employees (KUWSE), to protest a new bill tabled in the County Assembly that seeks to privatize water provision. The bill proposes the establishment of the Nairobi Water & Sewerage Corporation, headed by a board appointed by the County Governor.
Party members and the Social Justice Movement have been organizing in working-class neighbourhoods to confront the water cartels and demand the right to access clean and adequate water supplies. During these demonstrations, the government responds with violence, using water cannons, arresting comrades, and charging them with illegal demonstrations. This highlights that neoliberalism is not solely about reducing the size of the state but also about utilizing state apparatus to protect the interests of the wealthy elite.
In the realm of electricity, we continue to grapple with long-term power purchasing agreements with Independent Power Producing Companies owned by foreigners and local comprador class members with ties to those in power. These private producers sell the power they generate to the Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) at significantly higher costs than those charged by the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen). Consequently, Kenya continues to struggle with prohibitively high electricity prices. The World Bank has been pushing for private firms to accelerate plans to build electricity transmission grids in a PPP model. It doesn't require prophetic powers to foresee the results.
We've also witnessed a privatization onslaught on our sugar companies in the Western region, with successive governments advocating for the privatization of these mills to the private sector. In the realm of transportation, the management of the Standard Gauge Railway was handed over to private entities, with the terms of the contract shrouded in secrecy. The Nairobi Express Way is another development that prioritizes the wealthy, connecting the affluent neighbourhood of Westlands to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), with numerous toll stations to use the road.
Despite the glaring evidence of the World Bank and IMF's disastrous privatization plans and their negative consequences on our social, economic, and political conditions, they continue to attribute policy failures to poor implementation. These failing initiatives have been rebranded as "Poverty Reduction Strategies" and "Participatory Frameworks." In reality, IMF and World Bank policies primarily serve to increase earnings for private-sector shareholders while inflicting misery on the majority, providing evidence of the failure of the capitalist system.
The Communist Party of Kenya (CPK) has been at the forefront of exposing the hypocrisy of the IMF and World Bank. We have consistently opposed ongoing and planned privatizations, not only through propaganda and political education but also through direct action in numerous street protests. We have consistently advocated for the nationalization of previously privatized enterprises and the full participation of the government in providing public goods. After all, Kenyans pay taxes in exchange for public services, so why should they continue to pay those taxes if these services are to be provided by the private sector? The very existence of the government is questioned when it merely deprives people of their dignity.
In the face of these challenges, Kenyan youth, who constitute the majority in this country, find themselves at the forefront of this battle. The theft of their education and healthcare is a direct assault on their future. The capitalist system seeks to exploit their labour and keep them in perpetual poverty. Neoliberalism ensures that young people have limited access to quality education and decent employment opportunities. This is why Kenyan youth must continue to resist and fight for a brighter and more just future.
The struggle against neoliberalism is a long and arduous one. It requires the unity of workers, peasants, and all marginalized groups. It demands the organization and mobilization of the masses to resist the usurpation of public goods and services by private interests. The fight against neoliberalism is a battle for economic justice, social equality, and the dignity of all Kenyans.
The neoliberal policies of privatization have had devastating effects on the majority of Kenyans. They have led to the theft of public goods and services, the widening of inequality, and the suffering of the poor. The Communist Party of Kenya is committed to the struggle against neoliberalism and the fight for a society where public goods and services are guaranteed to all. The struggle continues, and the people of Kenya will not be silenced in their quest for justice and equality.
The alternative to neoliberal policies advocated by the Communist Party of Kenya is premised on the understanding that Kenya is not short of resources, but the wealth of our country is concentrated in the hands of a few who do not pay taxes. The government's main source of revenue has been direct taxes on the poor. The government should take over the key sectors of the economy and invest in the building of infrastructure, agriculture, industries, and services for the welfare of the people. We also advocate for universal healthcare and free quality education. It is the private sector that should be tasked with servicing the loans instead of the public. We need progressive taxation that targets the rich. The struggle should be against the neoliberal policies of the government and the theft of our education and healthcare.
In conclusion, the capitalist system and its neoliberal policies have failed the people of Kenya. It is clear that the idea of privatization is theft and capitalism is organized crime. Our struggle is not just against the neoliberal policies of the government but also against capitalism. This ideology does not serve the interests of the majority of Kenyans. It is essential for the working-class people of Kenya to rise against this economic system that is rigged against them. We need to organize and fight for an alternative system that guarantees healthcare and education as fundamental human rights, not privileges for the few. Our future as a nation depends on it.
All power to the Working Class!
The Answer is Socialism!
Long live the Communist Party of Kenya!
Written from Central Police Station, Nairobi
Kinuthia Ndung’u