Burundi and South Sudan.
The World Bank classification list Kenya
as a middle income country together with
India and Indonesia and this is where the
reality on the ground starts to get murky
as it is really difficult to have an objective
comparison as the simple use of the per
capita income as a base metric hides many
underlying issues.
But it is on this global backdrop that
we need to start to have a national
conversation to determine whether we
actually got the independence that we
fought and even died for and why a major
player in that fight would within a few
years of independence write the book
‘Not yet Uhuru’.
Political independence means self-
determination, the ability of the citizens
of a particular nation to be able to
exercise their general will in choosing a
representative system of government and
for that government to be able to exercise
its full range of powers as defined by
international law.
However, economic independence is the
ability of the majority of citizens to access,
exploit and control the wealth of a nation.
Economic independence is a necessary
precondition for political independence
in a country.
An analogy to explain this would be the
historical fact that slavery was abolished
in the United States in 1865, but as the
sad Black spiritual lyrics state: ‘At last
I am free but I can hardly see in front
of me’ painting a picture of despair not
exhilaration.
What the freed slaves discovered was that
freedom was more painful than servitude
because they owned nothing in America.
They were forced to go back and ask
for the same work that they had done
as slaves only this time as paid workers,
nothing had changed.
That is why for over a century and a half
the Blacks in America are still fighting
the slavery legacy. Independence means
you can do whatever you like but it
does not mean you have the resources
to sustain your independence; economic
independence is inextricably connected to
political independence.
Therefor
the
true
52 MAL30/19 ISSUE
meaning
of
Economic independence is the ability
of the majority of citizens to access,
exploit and control the wealth of a na-
tion. Economic independence is a nec-
essary precondition for political inde-
pendence in a country.
independence is self-reliance; it means
that if a country is independent it has the
resource capacity and ability to sustain
itself. It means it has the basic productive
capacity and the skills needed to cater for
its populace.
We need to remember that the spread
of colonialism or what historians like
to call the scramble for Africa was not
merely jingoism on the part of European
countries but a well thought out economic
adventure in search of resources.
The model that they used was to allow
private enterprise to move into an area
of interest and they would back the
economic pioneers by providing the
necessary infrastructure, protection and
administrative structures to exploit an
area.
To avoid military clashes in foreign
lands as their citizens sought new areas
to economically exploit, the colonial
governments sat down and drew up
spheres of influence which determined
which areas their citizens could work in.
These spheres of influence were the
precursors of the present nation states
and since they were not interested in the
people on the ground except as a supply of
cheap labor, the demarcations were drawn
at a whim to encompass economically
exploitable entities.
So at independence we inherited artificial
geographical boundaries that had been
drawn arbitrarily to define spheres of
European economic influence and that
were kept together by force and that had
owed allegiance to foreign masters.
Let us contrast this type of independence
to what happened in Australia and
Canada. When the British went into
these two regions they systematically
wiped out the local populations and
installed satellite states of Britain.
The focus was economic exploitation
and they recognized the potential of the
territories and they encouraged massive
emigration to the new worlds to have
enough of their citizens settle on the
ground to lay claim to the land.
It is instructive that when these countries
got independence they opted to remain
within the dominion of the former
authority and even retained the kings and
queens of the United Kingdom as their
sovereign head.
This state of affairs happened because in
reality the two countries were actually
foreign branches of Britain. They were
ruled by Britons who had now assumed
local authority but were tied to the mother
country on an economic, social and
political front.
These are countries that would in all
fairness be held accountable in the
International Court of Justice for genocide
in that they annihilated local populations
to achieve economic ends. Locals that
survived still agitate for independence in
independent countries.
In Kenya we were bequeathed a
geographical boundary that encompassed
a variety of tribes that did not have logical
relationship to one another and to them
independence meant they could go back to
life as it was before the oppression of the
colonist.
They were surprised to realize that even
with independence they were still subject
to a new governor who occupied the same
residence as the former one and the only
difference was that they were now African
but the control machinery was the same.
They could not understand why their
relatives and neighbors who were within