PART ONE of a TWO PART Essay
2Nd Draft(EDITED)
1.0. Bye Bye Idle Drive By Trashy Browsers, Karibu Serious Wasomaji!
From the get-go I would like to drive away some people who just arrived here.
Please potea if you were quote, just looking.
Buzz off if you passed by here to look for material for your next trashy anti-Oloo thread.
Get lost if you got lost coming here.
Vamoose if you are a Mahabusu obsessed with the present writer.
I have a special message for those people who like posting empty headed responses to my essays which such memorable captions as:
Quote YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWN!
Quote BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRINNNNNNNGG!!!
Here is my one line memo to you:
ONYANGO OLOO is NOT an ENTERTAINER, OK!
Oloo is NOT a
OO is not a
Juggler
Clown
Fire Eater !
Limbo Dancer
Snake Charmer
Ventriloquist
Contortionist
Or a Male Stripper for that matter.
Go ELSEWHERE for your ENTERTAINMENT needs.
Try for instance XBOX dot Com to check out their Halo 2 gizmos.
Or their competitors:
Playstation and their glamorization and romanticization of wizi of magari.
Visit
Rotten Tomatoes dot Com to find out all about the latest movies
Check out!
Hand Bag Dot! Come if you are ADDICTED to celebrity gossip.
If you are an incorrigible bhangi smoker then, naturally,
Marijuana Dot Com is the place for you.
If you are an older woman dating a younger man, this
OTHER site is the place you should be hanging out, not the KDP blog for goodness sake!
FINALLY, if you are an aspiring GROUPIE, please send your sleazy confessions and obsessions to
this outlet instead of constantly harassing, stalking, slobbering over and fantasizing about Onyango Oloo around bleeping clock!
2.0. There ARE Some Good Capitalists Out There Believe It Or Not!
Some neo-conservative secret admirers and Oloo fan c! lub life members may actually die of absolute shock to discover, to their utmost consternation that communists are quite capable of looking at a good old bepari in the eye and say with a straight face with serious sincerity:
Mr or Ms. Corporate Exploiter, you are, come to think of it, capable of isolated acts of human kindness.
Keep up the good work because we do not know how long it will last!
And that is EXACTLY what I want to do right about now.
Has anyone heard of the Change Masters?
How about the second annual Social Capitalists Award?
Who reads the magazine Fast Company?
It has been around for ten years already.
And it is to this magazine we turn if we want to learn more about some genuine bourgeois do-gooders.
Not EVERYONE is like Ken Lay or those villains at Big Tobacc! o and Big Pharma you see.
So without further ado! , let th is communist scribe proudly present some living and breathing CAPITALISTS who possess an actual human soul!
Click
here to read more about the 2005 Social Capitalists Awards.
Go
here to gaze adoring at a slide show showcasing these sincere liberal to left leaning bourgeois bleeding hearts.
3.0. What Are 10 Sexiest Capitalist Trends for 2005?
The shelves of my home office are full of box files which are in turn full of magazines. 96.7% of those rags have titles like Red Herring, Upside, Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0. Inc. Barron's, Worth, Canadian Business and African Business. If you do not believ! e me send me a private email and I will fax, mail or email you a scad of scans as documentary evidence. The love affair between capitalists and communists has been ongoing since 1848 when Marx and Engels penned their famous Communist Manifesto. True capitalist ideologues the world over, spend hours poring over Marxist tracts. And most of the enduring Marxist texts have been largely based on a very careful and exhaustive study of capitalism using bourgeois sources as primary sources of information.
It is partly for this reason I make a point of buying at least two mainstream capitalist magazines every month- in addition to browsing sites like Bloomberg’s, FT.Com,Motley Fool, Nazdaq.Com and Economist.Com every single day.
So that is why the other day I walked into a magazine store in this wonderful city of ours and happily paid for the latest issues of Fast Company, Fortune and Business 2.0. < br />
Apart from Fast Company that I have already referred to, the latter two publications have some very interesting stories that I will touch on very briefly.
Fortune's cover story is titled, 10 Tech Trends to Watch in 2005.
Guess what Trend No. 1 is according to Fortune magazine:
Let me quote it verbatim:
Trend No. 1 Why YOU Can’t Ignore BLOGGERS…Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product- or destroy it. Either way, theyève become a force business can’t afford to ignore...
You wanna know about the other NINE trends?
Well, let me put it this way:
Find out the same way I did, how about that?
Not to be left out of the loop, Business 2.0. romps home w! ith How To Succeed in Business, featuring 14 leaders including Bill Gates, Meg Whitman, Peter Drucker and Jeff Bezos.
Here is the piece by the Amazon head honcho giving tidbits on how to think competitively.
4.0. Why Are Murungaru, Murungi and Kibaki So Paranoid About The Latest Standard Exposes?
With deep, bitter and angry amusement I have been watching open mouthed, with a silent salala on my lips,from the shadows where I lurk, the undignified, furious backpedaling and abject and shameless groveling from the yellow bellied overlords of the Standard apologizing for“inaccuracies” in the
Mr Money Bags story.
It is pathetic really, the kind of poor show from some people at the Standard.
I suspect that t! hey are all invertebrates in humanoid form.
What ! are they afraid of, these suckers?
Losing advertising revenue?
Do they really think that their neo-colonial comprador brothers will cart them off to Kamiti?
Do they really think their publication is in danger of being banned?
Kwa nini hawa matumbo kubwa wa Standard wanayumba yumba bila msimamo?
Nauliza, kwani, hawa mababi waoga wa Standard wanahara hara wakihaha haha kwa sababu gani?
Kwani wamesikia kwamba Murungaru ata wachapa viboko ama vipi?
Is it not RIDICULOUS that a time when Kenyan public opinion is solidly in solidarity with Makhokha and his fellow scribes;
At a time when Makhokha and his besieged colleagues including even Tom Mshindi are demonstrating remarkable courage in fighting back;
At a time when Kenyan journalists are standing shoulder to shoulder with their Standard colleagues;
At a time when international media watch dogs are rallying to the defence of the Standard journalists;
At a time when our freshly crowned Nobel Peace Prize laureate and
the LDP caucus has broken with their NAK cabinet colleagues to condemn the harassment of journalists;
At a time when the Western donors are blasting the Kibaki regime for intimidating journalists;
Is this the time that a section of the Standard CHOOSES to WAFFLE, whirling like Dervish dancers, giving credence to the despicable BULLYING TACTICS of Murungaru, Kiraitu and his fellow ruling clique THUGS?
Is this the TIME for a fraction of the Standard hi! erarchy to viciously stab its own besieged and beleagured journalists sharply in the heart?
Is this really the OCCASSION for some members of the Standard team to be giving a long and affectionate TUG,LICK and SUCK on the MBOROS of Murungaru, Kiraitu and Company?
I hope they do not agree to bend over and agree to the other action ending in UCK.
Simply unbelievable.
Politically motivated blow jobs should be criminalized in Kenya.
If you look closely at the Mr Money Bags story, you can clearly see why Kibaki’s back room boys are shitting in their pants.
It is not about the truth or accuracy of the actual story itself.
It speaks to the escalating exposes like this one about Mwiraria and his special favours that can be found in the January 16th edition of the Sunday Standard that have been tracking the trajectory of NAK̵! 7;s morphing into their KANU predecessors.
If I was Kiraitu Murungi, I too, would want to cover up any story which shows that all my yada yada yada yak yak about fighting corruption was all a pile of mavi ya ndovu
If I was Chris Murungaru I too, would want to suppress a story which implied that I was no different from Biwott, Kulei and the other Money Bags of the Nyayo Kleptocracy.
If I was David Mwiraria, I too, would be worried sick that sooner or later, my shady involvement will come a cropper...
If I was Mwai Kibaki I too, would be extremely uncomfortable to open the Standard in morning(when I am not totally medicated out of my poor skull) to see references that indicate that I learned my lessons well from Professor of Politics himself.
Are these the same NAK jokers who have been bragging about how free the Kenyan media is?
Are these the same Mount Kenya Mafia characters who posed with the Ny! ayo House survivors locking arms as they marched solemnly agai! nst the atrocities of the Opiyos, Mjombas and Miritis?
Are these the same ati UNBWOGABLE team members who promised to move decisively to deepen democratic spaces in Kenya after the demise of the Nyayo dictatorship?
What a sadistic and surreal hoax!
What a cruel and ironic travesty!
GADO- aka Godfrey Mwampembwa, was born in Dar es Salaam in 1969. Besides cartooning for the Daily Nation GADO has also participated in animation workshops in Italy and Canada. His editorial cartoons have appeared in books and newspapers around the world.)The Daily Nation’s brilliant, politically conscious cartoonist has captured this venal degeneration of this disastrous, cacophonous dysfunctional caricature of a so called coalition government quite vividly:
I happen to believe Uhuru Kenyatta when he charges that NARC(more properly NAK) is
in complete cahoots with KANU era Mr Money Bags Nicholas Biwott to block UK's formal ascendancy to the apex of the moribund ex ruling party. NOT coincidentally, The Total Man is de! servedly notorious for handing stuffed brown envelopes to corr! upt jour nalists- when he was not suing the honest ones who fingered his shady shenanigans. We all know that NAK hopes that Biwott becomes the span style="font-style:italic;">lukuru of KANU to knock out the Gikuyu threat to a Kibaki reprise and also to try and create a Kalenjin beach head for the increasingly unpopular NAK gang.
The whole kerfuffle over the Standard exposes is to my mind but the latest salvo of the NAK hoodlums to finally silence the Standard for its alleged muck racking. The ironic thing about all this is that the Standard is very much a mainstream paper that identifies almost totally with the class interests of the Kenyan neo-colonial comprador bourgeoisie. Those of us who write from radical, anti-imperialist and socialist vantage points know only too well that the Standard, just like th! e Nation will rarely touch pieces written by the likes of Adongo Ogony, Onyango Oloo and the others deemed to be "Too Far Left" for their esteemed pages.
Even in the current standoff, the Standard's staunchest allies are NOT the militant activists at home and abroad, but rather, the Western DONORS, the very same people who prop up the NARC regime with their financial injections.
I have not seen any appeals by the Standard scribes to the Kenyan human rights community to rally behind their cause. Yet it is the social justice activists and members of the progressive Kenyan civil society sector who will stay with this story long after the donors have worked a deal with the Kibaki regime because they do need this regime to follow through with the West's even more odious, anti-people IMF driven neo-conservative agenda of privatization, cost cutting and opening up our economy! to international finance capital.
What will prob! ably hap pen will be a deal where the NAK attack dogs lower the decibel level of their barking when the Standard's owners agree to rein in the "rebellious" editors like Kwamchetsi Makokha. Do not be surprised if further down the line Makokha, Makali and even Mshindi are turfed out to be replaced by some opportunistic empty suits more amenable to the status quo. The Standard is a business entity- not too long ago it was part of the Lonrho stable and for the longest period its ownership has oscillated between foreign and local owners linked to the Kenyatta and Moi families. I will NOT be astounded if a director with close ties to the money bags around Kibaki and Co.
As a Marxist I do not romanticize the freedom of the press, especially under capitalism and neo-colonialism. From the embedded journalists of the US television networks to the sycophants at the Nation editorial offices who think it is better to attack the ministers standing shoulder to shoulder with the hawk! ers rather than those breathing down the backs of Kenyan journalists; the media under capitalism and neocolonialism is quite beholden to the whims of the powers that be whether directly or indirectly.
My favourite quote about the freedom of the press is the following one by AJ Liebling:
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
It certainly provides a very sobering reality check on this other famous quote from Eric Blair who was better known as George Orwell:
"Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."
5.0. The Politics of Economics, the Economics of Politics
Some people may be PUZZLED as to what a rant about media freedom has to do with a supposed treatise on the economic problems Kenya is facing and ho! w we as a nation can solve those problems.
Let me! explain . It is very simple.
Why is Murungaru and his buddies so pissed at the Standard? Because the Standard has dared to suggest that the parvenu NAK upstarts are just as degenerate in their slothful avarice as their predecessors. Yaani, Kenyans are still being screwed over by the Wabenzi. Nothing has changed.
If yesterday it was Kenyatta and his family and cronies followed by Moi and his family and his crones who were at the centre of the looting spree and plunder orgy that plunged Kenya from a Third World country to a Fifth World country, then the present NAK gang has also onjad the same succulent asali of utawali and they want even more.
The implications are obvious:
If the Kibaki clique is consolidating power so that they can continue the compradorial pillage of the Kenyan economy, then it follows that no sane Kenyan can factor in the PRESENT Kenyan government in any serious attempt to solve our country's myriad eco! nomic ailments.
The NARC government is part of the PROBLEM, not the solution. How can we have agrarian reforms in Kenya for instance when the Kibakis and their ilk remain major landowners in the country and powerful barons in the economy.
What "development" means to a mainstream Kenyan mwanasiasa- be they in LDP, Ford-People, Ford-K, DP, KANU or what have you is the "development" of their own tumbos and bank accounts locally and abroad. That is precisely there is a confluence of interests that brought Nyachae, Kones and Ntimama into the Kibaki-Murungaru-Kiraitu cabinet. It is also the same reason why at the wedding of Raila Odinga's daughter it was possible to spy former president Daniel arap Moi rubbing shoulders with Mwa Kibaki and a whole bunch of Kenyan comrador bourgeois fat cats who presumably do not see eye to eye in parliament or wherever.
Once we grasp this fundamental class related political fact, can we stop WHINING ABO! UT how NARC has "betrayed" its voters?
NARC did n! ot "betr ay" anyone.
It was quite LOYAL to its collective class interests.
Remember their first act was to raise their salaries and renew their prostitution contracts with the forces of imperialism.
It is for this reason why my subequent discussion about solving Kenya's economic problems PRESUPPOSES a different regime that has different priorities, has a fresh popular mandate and is government by a ratified democratic constitution.
My discussion on solving Kenya's economic problems presupposes a radical dispensation and discourse that puts the wananchi at the centre of the sustainable maendeleo agenda.
It is a world completely devoid of NARC Mps still planning their second or third homecoming bashes.
It is not just Kibaki and NAK that must go. LDP must go to, along with KANU, Ford-People, FORD-Kenya and ALL the mainstream parties.
It is time for some new blood that is not afraid of reg! ional autonomy and community control over land;
It is time for some new blood that is not afraid to guarantee Kenyan women the right to own and inherit property;
It is time for some new blood that is not afraid to put Kenyan workers at the centre of the national economic renewal project;
It is time for some new blood that is not afraid to involve Kenyan youth in future national planning exercises;
It is time for some new blood that is not afraid to valorize and bolster South/South and local regional horizontal integration rather than these unequal, dependent top down grafts that links our underdeveloped neocolonial economy to the peripheries of world monopoly capitalism.
Put quite simply, what follows below is IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT a National Democratic REVOLUTION.
The colonial and neocolonial Kenyan mainstream deadwood must be piled up to make a neat bonfire which should BURN until only the ashe! s remain.
Enuff Sed. Next section.
6.0. A Snapshot of Kenya's Parlous and Perilous Economic Nightmare
I will try not to rehash anything in this section.
In any case, in the last few months, Onyango Oloo has written quite extensively on the state of the Kenyan economy .
Here are a few samples.
In defence of a political approach to economics, (a rejoinder to Robert Shaw)
On foreign domestic investment
On the Kenyan Workers' Charter
On the unfinished struggles over land in Kenya
On agrarian reforms in Kenya
On the corporate exploitation of exploitation of Lake Bogoria
On poverty in
Poverty in Nyanza
On Kibaki's cynical attempt to cover up the Rich/Poor Class Divide in Kenya
On the consolidation of the Kenyan comprador bourgeoisie
On the pettiness of the of the Kenyan petit-bourgeoisie
On a Gendered Perspective on Public Appointments in the NARC regime
On fighting or not fighting Grand Corruption in Kibaki's Kenya
On the dog fights between Kibaki's Puppies and Moi's Puppies
The Kenyan economy and the attendant living conditions for the wananchi has been studied and documented by dozens, if not hundreds of organizations, social scientists and others.
For instance here is the UNDP's Millenium Development Goals progress report on Kenya progress report on Kenya which came out in 2003
Followed by the Human Development Report for Kenya for 2004
More recently, a very far reaching study titled Pulling Apart: Facts and Figures on Inequality in Kenya was published joined by NARC's own National Planning ministry in conjunction with Society for International Development.
7.0. Lorenz, Gini, Phelps Brown and Amartya Sen: Negotiating Curves, Coefficients and Indices
The last cited report on inequality in Kenya is awash with statistics.
There are detailed facts and figures about a very wide variety of factors that help to detail inequality in Kenya. You must handcuff yourself to your chair to stop yourself from spinning into the ozone layer due to all those dizzying array of factoids and raw data.
This report forms one of the MOST USEFUL bases for carrying out serious political, social and economic analysis about national development in Kenya. I applaud the authors of the report and its sponsors- the NARC national planning ministry a! nd the Society for International Development.
Ne! verthele ss, I have a very MAJOR QUIBBLE with the whole BASIS of the study.
So what is my big beef?
Four Words:
Lorenz Curve;
Gini Coefficient.
So, I hear the multi-lettered post-doctoral fellows of traditional bourgeois and even development economics growl at me, WHAT COULD I POSSIBLY HAVE AGAINST SUCH allegedly "objective" yardsticks as the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient?
As it turns out, a WHOLE LOT, OK?
Let me draw you a graph- oops, just kidding.
To begin at the beginning.
This is a brief description of the
Lorenz Curve.
And here is the 411 on the
Gini Coefficient.
Here are some other measures and indices of inequality.
Many economists measuring poverty and inequality treat the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient in much the same way Christians reverently recite John 3:16.
On the other hand, there are other critical social scientists who have expressed their disquiet with the Gini Coefficient as an accurate barometer of social inequality within and across societies.
For instance Gordon Marshall and Adam Swift are sociologists at Nuffield College and Balliol College respectively at Oxford University in the UK. In 1999 they published a joint article titled On the Meaning and Measurement of Social Inequality that appeared in Acta Sociologica, the journal of the Scandinavian Sociological Association. Without getting too bogged down with that 10 page piece that offered a defence of th! e so called "Nuffield School of Class Analysis" and responded! to a cr itique of their methodology by Ottar Hellevik and Stein Ringen, let us swiftly marshall our energy and focus on the part where they say the following about the limitations of the Gini Coefficient:
...the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient have well-known technical limitations...The curve and its derived coefficient is only one of several measures of inequality(others include the coefficient of variation and inter-decile ratio) which tend to give conflicting answers when asked to determine whether any particular distribution is 'more unequal' than the another. Some of these statistics are more sensitive than are others to a scatter of high or low outcomes, and different measures tend to attach different weights to different weights to different forms of inequality(A good account of the limiting properties of the various indices will be found in Phelps Brown 1988). More importantly, each measure reduces an unequal disposition ! of outcomes or goods to a single summary statistic, offering only a global picture of a distribution across society as a whole...
(Marshall and Swift, 1999)
On the 14th of October 1998, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that they were awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics to
Professor Amartya Sen.
In their citation, the Swedish Academy had the following words to say about Prof. Sen's work around poverty indices with particular reference to the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient:
"In order to compare distributions of welfare in different countries, or to study changes in the distribution within a given country, some kind of index is requir! ed that measures differences in welfare or income. The constru! ction of such indexes is an important application of the theory of social choice, in the sense that inequality indexes are closely linked to welfare functions representing the values of society. Serge Kolm, Anthony Atkinson and - somewhat later - Amartya Sen were the first to derive substantial results in this area. Around 1970, they clarified the relation between the so-called Lorentz curve (that describes the income distribution), the so-called Gini coefficient (that measures the degree of income inequality), and society's ordering of different income distributions. Sen has later made valuable contributions by defining poverty indexes and other welfare indicators. A common measure of poverty in a society is the share of the population, H , with incomes below a certain, predetermined, poverty line. But the theoretical foundation for this kind of measure was unclear. It also ignored the degree of poverty among the poor; even a significant boost in the income of the poorest groups in! society does not affect H as long as their incomes do not cross the poverty line. To remedy these deficiencies, Sen postulated five reasonable axioms from which he derived a poverty index: P = H · [I + (1 - I) · G]. Here, G is the Gini coefficient, and I is a measure (between 0 and 1) of the distribution of income, both computed only for the individuals below the poverty line. Relying on his earlier analysis of information about the welfare of single individuals, Sen clarified when the index can and should be applied; comparisons can, for example, be made even when data are problematic, which is often the case in poor countries where poverty indexes have their most intrinsic application. Sen's poverty index has subsequently been applied extensively by others. Three of the axioms he postulated have been used by those researchers, who have proposed alternative indexes....
One can thus see that even in the sphere of MAINSTREAM economic theory, t! he Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient have put on the rati! li and f ound wanting.
UNDP's Human Development Index is one of the world's most comprehensive, but even they state this disclaimer:
"Although the HDI is a useful starting point, it is important to remember that the concept of human development is much broader and more complex than any summary measure can capture, even when supplemented by other indices. The HDI is not a comprehensive measure. It does not include important aspects of human development, notably the ability to participate in the decisions that affect one?s life and to enjoy the respect of others in the community. It is also important to note that the HDI is constructed using data from international sources. Sometimes more up-to-date data are available nationally, and sometimes there are slight differences in definitions between international and national data. For these and other reasons, discrepancies with national sources may occur."
8.0. The Ideological COWARDICE of the Pulling Apart Report
In the preceding section I was at pains to show the technical and theoretical limitations of the Pulling Apart report arising from its over reliance on the Gini Coefficient as a methodological prop.
These theoretical and technical limitations in turn disguise a more fundamental malaise:
Uwoga wa Kiitikadi or translated into the Queen's Inglis:
IDEOLOGICAL COWARDICE.
What is Oloo talking about?
The shiftiness of the most mainstream bourgeois academics when it comes to socio-economic and political analysis.
First and foremost is the compartmentalization of bourgeois disciplines in academia. For instance, you have sociology, economics, political science, social anthropolgy all having the status of "autonomous" fields of inquiry and research.
Yet to most of u! s Marxists, these divisions seldom make sense. We not proceed ! from the polytechnic approach in education, but we further see the organic interconnections of things in the social and natural world. For instance if you look at society you see the connections between politics and economics, history and geography, physics and chemistry, philosophy and psychology. Instead of compartmentalizing all these fields, Marxist embrace the unifying grand narrative of dialectical and historical materialism. That is why you hear Marxists talk about "political economy" rather than simple "economics" and that is why when you are reading from a GROUNDED Marxist-Leninist you cannot really tell whether they are a geologist, political scientist, sociologist, economist., historian, geographer, novelist, poet etc because you not only find traces of all the above in their work, but you see them move seamlessly between and across these disparate disciplines.
There are one or two people who often wonder how come Onyango Oloo can move from discussi! ng long distance relationships in the afternoon to pharmaceutical corporations in the afternoon before gabbing about the politics in occupied Palestine in evening before dozing off after yakking about linguistics and the exploitation of a lake in the Rift Valley.
For me it is so obvious that I often wonder what the big deal is.
My Marxist training has given me the tools to analyse issues in a complex and integrated fashion because I do not recognize those false disciplinary borders.
Back to the point.
If you re-read the Pulling Apart study you will notice it peppered with vague euphemisms like the "rich" and the "poor".
Who are the Kenyan rich and who are the Kenyan poor?
Yes, we get indicators based on income, but Marxists have long recognized that this can be very superficial.
We communists believe that someone's social class is NOT det! ermined by the AMOUNT of their wealth, but rather by its SOUR! CE.
Therefore we do not such a high premium on income.
For example, here in Canada, a unionised autoworker in Oshawa, Ontario may have a HIGHER income than a convenience store owner in Korea town in the Bloor/Christie neighbourhood of Toronto, but the dukawallah is STILL a petit-bourgeois and the autoworker still belongs to the proletariat because of their relationship to the means of production.
It is not a question of hair splitting.
These class positions in turn help form social and political opinions and stances and that is why for instance it is much easier to organize thousands of unionised autoworkers to travel in a convoy all the way from Windsor, Ontario(across the water from Detroit, you Americans) to Ottawa to demonstrate against the presence in Canada of that election thief, George Bush than it is for 15 convenience store owners to mount a rally to denounce the arrival in their neighbourhood of another huge! grocery chain that will wipe out their means of making a living.
Here is how Vladimir Lenin defined classes:
"Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated by law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and their mode of acquiring it". (Vladimir I. Lenin: 'A Great Beginning: Heroism of the Workers in the Rear: 'Communist Subbotniks' in: 'Collected Works', Volume 29; Moscow; 1965; p. 421).
Go back to the report a third time.
Is there any real mention of classes apart from the NEBULOUS phrases of Kenyan "rich" and Kenyan "poor"?
Do we see class distincitions within and across regions?
!
Are we told how the "rich" in Kenya make their wealth? !
What is the SOURCE of their income?
How many of them are land grabbers?
How many of them are grand thieves?
How many of them are recipients of good old fashioned tribal, nepotistic and crony based palm greasing?
How many of them are drug dealers at night when they are not cabinet ministers by day?
Who are the Kenyan poor?
How many of them are ahoi squatters and who stole their land?
How many of them are impoverished sugar cane farmers and who forced them to abandon food crop production?
How many of them are young school leavers and who denied them employment opportunities?
How many of them are former civil servants and when did they use up their paltry golden hand shakes?
How many of them are single parents and who left them pregnant after violently abusing them?
How many of ! them are pastoralists and why did they have to play second fiddle to warthogs, rhinos and baboons?
How many of them are peasant farmers being relocated to make way for cynical Canadian strip miners?
Who is rich and who is poor in Kenya?
Do they have names?
Names like Kenyatta?
Moi?
Kibaki?
Odinga?
Awori?
Biwott?
Merali?
Bayusuf?
Sajjad?
Maalim Mohamed?
Kalonzo Musyoka?
Harun Mwau?
Simeon Nyachae?
Eliud Mwamunga?
Basil Criticos?
Njenga Karume?
Is Murungaru rich? How come?
Is Kiraitu rich? Since When?
Was Karisa Maitha a millionaire? Where did he get it?
How can the head of the CID and the head of Security Intelligence accumulate vast fortunes on their government salaries? !
How did Kamlesh Pattni make it?
How ! about He zekiah Oyugi?
Was Bildad Kaggia stupid not participate in the orgy of early sixties looting and plunder?
Were the Ndegwas smart to make their Central Bank governorships work for them?
Is Mullei doing the same thing?
What happened to Robert Matano economically after he fell out with Moi in the mid 1980s?
Why is Kamau Kuria's bank account growing with his own increasing girth?
How many HONEST Kenyan MILLIONAIRES can you pack into the back seat of a matatu?
More than that, how come the report says nothing of the real SUPER RICH who actually control the Kenyan economy?
I am not talking about ANY of the above individuals.
I am talking of the forces of world monopoly capital.
9.0. To Get the Right Answers, You Must Ask the Right Questions
We cannot solve Kenya's economic problems without knowing i! ts root causes.
How do we begin to do that?
That is a very, very good question.
That I will answer in part Two of this brief essay.
To Be Continued....
Onyango Oloo
Montreal
solved examples on radicals
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