Resist the status quo bias

In Kenya and Africa at large, politics is a filter through which many, if not all, things are perceived. However, when COVID-19 took over our lives in March, politicians who claim to have all the answers, momentarily went suspiciously quiet while the media fumbled to get enough news items. At that point, COVID-19 was beyond political maneuver and beyond anybody’s control – evidence that politics is not everything. Given the magnitude of uncertainty or the looming impact of the pandemic, one would imagine that we would be rational enough to suspend selfish interests and focus on minimizing the ensuing devastation of the pandemic. Strengthening our health systems, critically working through economic recovery, revamping people’s welfare, and reducing debt, as we help flood victims, among other crises, should be the natural order of things. Instead, we are back to the politics – of reviewing the Constitution, fostering tribal unity, or ousting those threatening political party interests, etc. Just as quickly as we forgot about the locusts, we have pretty much moved on from the issue of the Coronavirus to amplify non-issues.

Kenyans must internalize one thing – that the political agenda has nothing to do with resolving critical life issues. Instead, it has everything to do with maintaining the privileges of the powerful and their beneficiaries. For that to happen, the systems of power, like the Constitution and the electoral system, have to continuously be recreated to align with these interests. The dominators also have to legitimize the process by crafting a generalized acceptance. By framing these trivial political issues (in comparison to the unaddressed issues) as urgent and life-threatening to the dominated group, they work at building a narrative that suspends logic to achieve consensus. That is why for example, the so-called ‘Luhya leaders’ have no problem defying the COVID rules or spending so much money flying across the country to meet and claim tribal solidarity (which by the way could easily have been done through zoom). The narrative portrayed is that a lack of urgent tribal harmony will lead to political decimation faster than a COVID related decimation. The narrative is crafted to make the community believe that the urgency applies to them, while all this time if the peasants truly mattered to the politicians, the resources would have been consolidated to help flood victims. The same applies to the proposal to review the Constitution in the middle of the current crisis – it is crafted to literary imply change. However, it has nothing to do with changing the fate of poor Kenyans, most of whom are economically desperate at this point. It is about entrenching political dynasties and maintaining the status quo. 

What Kenyans must understand is that the constant messaging through imagery and metaphors translates the trivial agenda into urgent beliefs and priorities for the dominated group, hence reinforcing the abnormal values, ideas, and practices as the norm. Before long, we are all (including the so-called elite) sucked into this endless but redundant game of analyzing and reanalyzing the logic of their political agenda, which is further amplified by the media. We do not realize that our engagement only gives politicians the social consensus they need to keep dominating and continuously taking us for a ride. Stephen R. Covey said, “most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” Kenyans have to collectively decide what important and endeavor to change the priorities.

Dr. Katindi Sivi

African futurist 

How COVID-19 has destroyed the false narratives we tell ourselves

All African countries, including Kenya, latched onto the ‘Africa rising’ narrative peddled in the early 2000s after a series of labels and terminologies like the hopeless continent, basket case, or lagging. The reason for the Africa rising narrative was the economic growth of between 2.5% and 5% experienced by several countries, and which was higher than what was experienced even in developed countries. Unfortunately, economic growth, measured in gross domestic product (GDP), is an accounting system that calculates the value of production (of both goods and services) in a given period while GDP per capita divides that value by the total population. GDP, therefore, does not really indicate the sustainability of the sectors driving the economy or the wellbeing of the population, and that is why two countries with the same GDP can have different poverty and inequality levels. 

The Africa rising narrative has been good for many African politicians because it made their regimes look good, as they ranked higher in various global indicators. Many countries, including Kenya, went as far as rebasing their GDP in 2013, in an attempt ‘to capture a more accurate estimate of the size of the economy.’ As a result of the rebasing exercise, Kenya increased its per capita income from $994 to $1,246, which indicated an improved economic performance, often mistaken to mean higher standards of living. The implication of this ‘growth’ was that Kenya was no longer categorized as a low income but as a low middle-income country way before the projected timeframe stipulated in Vision 2030. By rebasing, Kenya became one of the largest economies (fourth) on the continent. The Africa rising narrative also promoted the idea that the continent had a growing middle class. This group is associated with more affluent lifestyles of increased consumerism of luxury goods, and it was projected to rise to 42% of the population by 2060.

All these ‘look good’ efforts did not change the fact that the growth was largely based on the export of primary commodities that are vulnerable to global shocks and foreign direct investments whose profits are largely repatriated to the home countries of the companies. It did not change the fact that only one-third of the population had wage employment or the fact that the so-called middle class in Africa (defined as those earning between USD 2 to 20 per day, and which constitutes the poor in other countries of the world) is only one salary away from poverty. 

COVID-19 has destroyed this false sense of privilege among urban households and exposed the blatant lie of Africa’s socio-economic demarcations, particularly those categorized as non-poor. It has exposed the precarious nature of their jobs vis-a-vis consumer behavior, which does not coincide with perceptions of a middle class that should sustain domestic consumption and growth in the future (even when out of an income for some time). The fact that this crisis is driven by the loss of income (projected to affect 75% of the population in Kenya) rather than rising food prices that have characterized previous global crises buttresses the vulnerability of urban households. As such, the resilience of rural households will be much higher compared to their urban counterparts because of expenditure patterns. 

What is my point? The stories we tell ourselves matter. By choosing these singular narratives of entire hopelessness or escalation of a continent’s economies, we legitimize false realities and build our future on falsified hopelessness or faulty hope – what Chimamanda refers to as the danger of a single story. This calls us to train ourselves to see things beyond the surface, to question interests and the assumptions that we make about the narratives we observe, read or hear about, and creatively make linkages. 

Dr. Katindi Sivi

African futurist