Loving each other won’t cure ‘negative ethnicity’

Following the violence of 2007/8, a host of initiatives purporting to address what is wrongfully termed “negative ethnicity” came into being.
Thus, parliament proceeded to pass the Ethnic and Race Relations Act, which established the National Cohesion and Integration Commission.

Parliament also established a new select committee on equality which was originally intended to address gender inequality but now also will address inequality in terms of ethnicity. The executive established a Ministry to address the long-standing underdevelopment of the north. And the Law Reform Commission of Kenya is sitting on another proposed piece of legislation, referred back to it by Cabinet, on equality and equal opportunities.

Citizens too have a host of initiatives of their own. One of the most interesting is Kikuyus for Change, which seeks both to understand why the rest of Kenya “hates” Gikuyus through inter-ethnic dialogues as well as why Gikuyus (or rather, the Gikuyu economic and political establishment) are so adamant about the need to hold onto power through intra-ethnic dialogue.

It joins a previous initiative of the Kenyan South Asian community, Awaaz, which seeks to do the same two things through the production of a magazine on Kenyan South Asians’ history in the country. Meanwhile, the groundbreaking statistical and analytical work done by the Society for International Development on gender, income and regional inequalities continues to be followed through by the Ministry of Planning.

All potentially useful and well meaning. All, however, failing to get to the heart of the problem.

What is missing, I think, is a clear understanding of what equality and non-discrimination actually mean — and how, from independence on, the equality provisions in our current Constitution have failed to be realised by both the public and the private sectors.

What all of these initiatives do, with the possible exceptions of those by Awaaz and SID, is address so-called negative ethnicity from the perspective of whether or not we like each other. Not that that does not need to be done. Prejudices and stereotypes abound here — Gikuyus are greedy. Asians treat Africans like dirt and are, like the Gikuyus, too dominant in the economy. Luos are uncircumcised and thus unfit to rule. Luhyas are, as one Luhya politician infamously put it, “cooks and watchmen.” Masaais (and all pastoralists) need to get with the modernisation agenda and settle down. Somalis are uncivilised and violent. Europeans are racist and treat their pets better than their workers. Etc, etc.

All these are, of course, untrue generalisations. And any initiatives that could begin to unravel just how they have evolved into common and strongly held belief systems about each other should be encouraged. Indeed, the Kenya Institute of Education should probably be ensuring this is done nationally through an expansion of the existing human-rights education component of the national curriculum.

But addressing prejudice and stereotypes will not resolve the problem — we simply cannot regulate how people feel about other people. What we can do is regulate whether and how those feelings translate into actions — into discrimination in the public and private sectors on the basis of those prejudices and stereotypes. And Kenyans discriminate as a matter of course — daily, routinely — in the public and private sectors. Although we, of course, don’t call preferential treatment of our families, our community members discrimination.

How do we advertise? Who do we hire—then train and promote? Who do we contract from? Who do we want living in our properties? Who do we “facilitate” when it comes to access to public services or performance of public functions? And so on. Whether consciously or not, that is discrimination. Whether we accept it or not, the long-term consequence of this is inequality — both in opportunities as well as results.

The problem is that this sort of discrimination is so absolutely normalised that it doesn’t even occur to most of those who experience it to challenge it and seek legal redress. And, even if they did, the legal remedies that exist are weak. Not for a lack of laws — apart from our Constitution’s equality rights section, we have a plethora of legislation dealing with different grounds on which discrimination can occur — from gender to HIV status — as well as the different areas in which it does — from education to employment. But because we’re either not aware of the laws or of how to invoke them in a manner that expeditiously resolves the immediate situation at hand.

What this means is two things. First, that our daily, routine experiences of discrimination become bitter, individual anecdotes, shared usually within our families and broader communities. And second, that as soon as we get the chance, we repeat the same behaviour — but this time in favour of our “own” —we are, after all, only informally remedying what we should have been able to remedy formally. Our expectation of being treated badly by others translates into our doing exactly the same thing. Whether we accept it or not, it is this — not whether we like one another or not — that has led to the tensions that exist within the country.

What we need, apart from the strengthened equality and non-discrimination provisions we expect in our new Constitution, is comprehensive legislation that doesn’t just harmonise what already exists but that goes far farther to establish a workable complaints body — with the powers to effect real remedies for aggrieved individuals and groups, including systemic remedies. Will the bill pending at the Law Reform Commission of Kenya do this for us? We need to make sure that it will.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission