Following on from my post last week on Kenya’s bolt from the blue, which quoted Richard Dowden extensively, here’s a link to an excellent piece he had in yesterday’s Observer. A taster:
Anyone who expressed shock at the recent violence in such a ‘stable’ country clearly knows nothing about Kenya. The British government was caught completely by surprise, but immediately deployed the language of a former colonial power. Gordon Brown said: ‘What I want to see is…’ His advice was wise but his tone set teeth on edge. Would he have used that language when another former British colony, the USA, had a hung election in 2000?
And Britain does not speak with credibility in Kenya. In every previous election in Kenya, British diplomats turned a blind eye to fraud, intimidation and rigging with bland words such as ‘the result broadly reflected the will of the Kenyan people’. They claimed the margin of victory was so great that the cheating did not affect the result. Maybe, but this time the margin was close and the cheating did matter. Britain did little between elections to push for a fully independent electoral commission. It couldn’t – Britain’s own elections are run by the Home Office. Instead, it poured aid into Kenya, even after members of the Moi and Kibaki governments were seen stealing hundreds of millions of pounds in broad daylight.
Ever since it bought into the aid agency view of Africa – ‘all Africa needs is aid’ – the British government has carefully reduced its capacity for understanding the continent. You do not, it seems, need to understand the poor in order to save them. In 2005, the ‘Year of Africa’, it closed three embassies on the continent and abolished Foreign Office country desk officers who built the institutional memory of specific countries. Unless you understand Africa and how it works, you cannot help it.
