Liquidity Politics

 

Writing the Political Wrongs in Kenya: Liquidity Politics and the Failure of Democratic Development

Kenya stands at a crossroads that demands honest reckoning rather than comfortable platitudes. The nation's political economy operates on a logic fundamentally incompatible with sustained development, where liquidity politics trumps strategic planning, electoral cycles override institutional continuity, and the speed of money circulation matters more than the structure of value creation. Until Kenya confronts this reality and redesigns the incentives governing its political and economic systems, constitutional democracy will remain an elaborate mechanism for legitimizing extraction rather than fostering transformation.

What drives Kenya's economy is not development but quick money. This reality manifests across every major sector and becomes most visible in public finance management. Government prioritizes sectors generating instant liquidity through import duties, telecommunications taxes, and fuel levies over long-term industrial investments that carry costs today and deliver benefits years later. The national budget reflects this immediacy bias, with recurrent expenditure, particularly public sector wages and allowances, consuming the lion's share of resources while development allocations remain chronically underfunded and poorly executed.

County governments, established through devolution to bring resources closer to citizens, have instead become liquidity machines optimized for rapid fund disbursement rather than strategic investment. Governors prioritize visible, quick-turnaround projects like bursaries, road grading, and public rallies that generate immediate political credit over complex, multi-year initiatives such as irrigation systems, industrial parks, or technical training institutions that would transform local economies. This is not administrative incompetence but rational behavior within a system where political survival depends on maintaining coalition loyalty through continuous resource distribution.

The dynamics are equally visible in national economic policy. Kenya adjusts tariffs not to protect nascent industries but to fill immediate revenue gaps. Infrastructure projects are shaped by short-term fiscal needs and donor availability rather than long-term strategic planning. The railway to nowhere, highways that terminate abruptly, and special economic zones that remain empty shells testify to decision-making driven by liquidity imperatives, by the need to move money, claim credit, and satisfy political constituencies, rather than developmental logic. This creates an economy where consumption grows faster than production, where imports surge while manufacturing stagnates, and where each administration launches new initiatives without consolidating previous ones.

Long-term investments in research institutions, agricultural extension systems, energy infrastructure, and skills development require institutional patience and protected budgets across political cycles. But fragmented administrations operating under liquidity politics cannot sustain such commitments. Every five years, new teams arrive with new priorities, and continuity becomes the exception rather than the norm. To pursue development, you need strategy, you need to sequence, and you need institutional patience. But liquidity politics rewards actors who can release funds quickly, distribute opportunities immediately, and convert resources into political credit without delay.

This system did not emerge accidentally. Colonial administration embedded extraction into Kenya's institutional design, creating economies structured around what could be quickly monetized and exported, coffee, tea, and sisal, rather than what could transform productive capacity. The post-independence state inherited this extractive architecture but lacked the coercive capacity or technocratic insulation that enabled developmental authoritarianism elsewhere in Asia. Instead, Kenya's early leaders adapted colonial structures to build ethnic patronage networks, using state resources to maintain political coalitions rather than pursue coordinated industrial policy.

Jomo Kenyatta's regime, while authoritarian and ethnically skewed, maintained enough inherited colonial state capacity to achieve modest developmental gains. Infant mortality declined, literacy rates improved, and infrastructure expanded, particularly in Central Province. This was development without representation, authoritarian and ultimately unsustainable, but development nonetheless. The state retained sufficient functionality to plan and execute, and Kenyatta's personal authority, while concentrated, created the stability necessary for economic coordination. Corruption existed but remained relatively contained, constrained by limited state size and personal networks.

Daniel Arap Moi's twenty-four-year presidency transformed this system into systematic kleptocracy while simultaneously weakening state institutions to prevent challenges to his authority. The civil service was hollowed out through ethnic purges and the appointment of loyalists over competent administrators. Parastatals were looted, with the Goldenberg scandal alone siphoning billions from the treasury. Moi's state became simultaneously more repressive and less capable, unleashing security forces against dissent while failing to deliver basic services. The 1990s saw infrastructure decay, economic stagnation, and the entrenchment of grand corruption as state policy.

The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s deepened this dysfunction by systematically dismantling the institutional capabilities required for strategic economic management. Agricultural marketing boards were dissolved, industrial licensing abolished, state enterprises privatized, and national planning marginalized, all in the name of liberalization. While markets opened, the state's capacity to shape value chains, coordinate investments, and enforce industrial policy collapsed. Kenya integrated into the global economy not as a strategic actor with protected infant industries and sequenced liberalization, but as a passive recipient of whatever investments found the country convenient and whatever terms donors imposed.

The result is an economy perpetually shaped by external value chains rather than shaping them. Kenya supplies raw materials, tea leaves, coffee beans, and cut flowers, that are processed elsewhere into higher-value products. It assembles imported components rather than manufacturing locally. Its service sector excels at tourism and mobile money transfer, both important but neither sufficient for structural transformation, while industrial capacity atrophies. This is not because Kenyans lack entrepreneurial spirit or technical capability, but because the institutional environment rewards quick returns on trade and services over the patient capital accumulation required for industrialization. Discourse about the need for Kenya to integrate the global economy remains pointless as long as integration is approached without the institutional capabilities and industrial visions required to shape value chains rather than be shaped by them.

Constitutional democracy, rather than constraining this logic, has perfected it. The 2010 Constitution, celebrated for its progressive provisions, inadvertently turbo-charged liquidity politics by dramatically expanding the number of elected positions and devolved resources without corresponding mechanisms to enforce developmental accountability. Kenya now supports a president, deputy president, forty-seven governors, forty-seven deputy governors, forty-seven women representatives, two hundred ninety members of parliament, one thousand four hundred fifty members of county assemblies, and sixty-seven senators, all drawing substantial salaries and controlling significant budgets, all facing election cycles that prioritize immediate coalition maintenance over long-term planning.

This hyper-representational system operates on universal suffrage that is simultaneously expansive and inconsequential. Voter turnout hovers around sixty-five to seventy-five percent in presidential elections, suppressed not primarily through overt coercion but through systemic disillusionment, strategic misinformation, and the manipulation of ethnic narratives that reduce electoral choice to identity mathematics. Voters are dissuaded from meaningful political engagement through media campaigns that obscure policy differences, disinformation that floods information spaces with noise, and the calculated deployment of ethnic appeals that transform elections into censuses rather than contests over developmental visions.

The 2022 presidential election exemplified this dynamic. Despite constitutional provisions for issue-based campaigns, the contest devolved into ethnic coalition-building exercises. Policy manifestos were published but barely discussed. Debates occurred but focused on personal attacks rather than implementation strategies. The eventual result reflected not a choice between competing developmental models but the relative success of ethnic mobilization and last-minute coalition adjustments. Voters participated, the Supreme Court adjudicated, power transferred peacefully, all democratic achievements, yet the underlying economic model remained unchanged.

This is the paradox of inconsequential suffrage. Citizens vote, but their votes do not determine whether the state pursues industrialization or remains import-dependent, whether budgets prioritize capital expenditure or recurrent costs, whether institutions gain capacity or remain captured. These fundamental questions are decided by the liquidity imperatives that govern elite behavior regardless of electoral outcomes. Democracy becomes a mechanism for rotating access to state resources among competing coalitions rather than a means of imposing developmental discipline on governing elites. The empty ritual, this performance of democracy, manufactures collective credulity and crowns it as truth. Its only success is the registration of a coterie who eventually joins the choir claiming their time to eat, never occasioning development but excelling in theatrical speechifying capable of enticing the gullible majority.

Kenya's trajectory becomes starker when compared with developmental success stories. South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore achieved transformation not through democracy but through authoritarian regimes that insulated technocratic decision-making from short-term political pressures. These states enforced savings rates, directed credit to strategic industries, protected infant manufacturers while imposing export discipline, and maintained policy continuity across decades. They pursued development rather than liquidity, accumulation rather than distribution, strategic patience rather than immediate gratification.

Rwanda under Paul Kagame has achieved significant developmental gains through a model that severely restricts political competition while maintaining extraordinary policy coherence and implementation discipline. Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi posted double-digit growth rates by pursuing state-led industrialization through a de facto one-party system that could sequence investments and protect long-term projects from political interference. These examples do not validate authoritarianism morally, but they demonstrate empirically that representation without institutional capacity produces inferior outcomes to capacity without representation.

Kenya, conversely, has achieved neither robust representation nor developmental capacity. Its democracy is procedurally sophisticated but substantively hollow, offering citizens the right to choose between coalitions that differ in ethnic composition and personnel but not in economic logic. Its institutions are numerous but weak, unable to constrain executive predation or enforce implementation discipline. The result is the worst of both worlds, the legitimacy costs of authoritarianism without its decisiveness, the fragmenting effects of democratic competition without its accountability benefits.

Kenya does not lack resources, human capital, or ambition. What it lacks is an institutional environment that rewards durability over immediacy, coordination over fragmentation, and strategic accumulation over the perpetual search for short-term liquidity. Writing these political wrongs requires not merely administrative reforms or anti-corruption campaigns, though both are necessary, but fundamental redesign of the incentives governing political and economic behavior.

Kenya cannot afford its current democratic architecture. A nation of fifty-five million people does not need nearly two thousand elected representatives consuming thirty percent of revenue. Constitutional amendments should drastically reduce the number of elected positions, merge redundant institutions, and cap public sector compensation at multiples of median wages. This is not about limiting representation but about making it sustainable. Smaller, better-compensated legislative bodies operating with enhanced research support would produce better policy than the current bloated structure optimized for patronage distribution.

Kenya needs protected agencies with multi-year budgets, technocratic leadership, and clear mandates that survive electoral transitions. The success of the Kenya Revenue Authority, imperfect but functional, demonstrates that autonomous institutions can work. Similar models should govern industrial policy, infrastructure planning, agricultural research, and skills development. These agencies must report to parliament but operate independently from ministerial interference, with leadership appointed through competitive processes rather than political loyalty.

Kenya's current first-past-the-post system encourages ethnic mobilization and winner-take-all competition. Moving toward proportional representation with thresholds would force coalition-building around policy platforms rather than ethnic arithmetic. Simultaneously, campaign finance reforms must cap spending, enforce transparency, and eliminate the arms race that makes political office an investment requiring recoupment through corruption. Elections should select competent managers, not enrich successful ethnic brokers.

Governors and members of parliament should face performance metrics linked to measurable improvements in constituent welfare, literacy rates, healthcare access, infrastructure quality, and business registrations, with automatic consequences for failure. This requires strengthening audit institutions, protecting whistle-blowers, and creating mechanisms where citizens can directly recall non-performing representatives. Democratic accountability means more than voting every five years. It requires continuous pressure tied to results.

Kenya needs a competent civil service insulated from political manipulation, with competitive recruitment, merit-based promotion, and protected tenure. It needs planning institutions capable of identifying strategic sectors, sequencing investments, and coordinating across ministries. It needs industrial policy tools, directed credit, strategic tariffs, and export incentives, currently forbidden by trade agreements that serve donor interests rather than Kenyan development. Sovereignty means the right to shape one's economic trajectory, not merely to vote for who manages donor-approved policies.

Kenya's media landscape, dominated by politically connected owners and advertising-dependent business models, systematically fails to provide citizens with the information needed for meaningful political engagement. Public investment in independent journalism, fact-checking infrastructure, and civic education can partially counter this. More fundamentally, electoral reforms must include strict penalties for disinformation, equal media access provisions, and mandated policy debates focusing on implementation rather than rhetoric.

Kenya's challenge is neither to abandon democracy nor to embrace authoritarianism, but to stop pretending that procedural democracy alone can overcome structural barriers to development. Universal suffrage without institutional capacity produces only the legitimization of extraction. Constitutional provisions without enforcement mechanisms remain paper promises. Devolution without fiscal discipline multiplies sites of predation rather than enhances accountability.

The uncomfortable truth is that Kenya's current political economy is functioning exactly as designed. It efficiently converts public resources into private wealth, maintains elite coalitions through continuous distribution, and legitimizes this extraction through regular elections. The system is not broken. It is optimized for liquidity politics. Writing these political wrongs requires not repair but redesign, fundamental restructuring of the incentives that govern political behavior and economic decision-making.

This transformation demands confronting sacred cows. Democracy is valuable, but not all democratic architectures produce development. Representation matters, but nearly two thousand elected officials do not represent better than four hundred focused on policy rather than patronage. Elections are important, but contests that reduce to ethnic mobilization produce rotation without transformation. Until Kenya's political class and citizenry embrace these uncomfortable realities, the nation will continue perfecting the performance of democracy while experiencing its failure to deliver the only outcome that ultimately matters, improving the material conditions of ordinary people who vote, hope, and wait for change that never arrives.