Economic smoke and mirrors and buzzwords coined to confound the weak

Inescapably, Kenya has a rendezvous with a new form of voodoo economics that now mines the road to the August 9, 2022 General Election. Certainly, the “bottom(s) up economics” is no more than a buzzword that makes little sense in the science of economics.

In reality, both “bottom-up” and “top-down” are strategies in a wide spectrum of fields, including development. In practical terms, both signify styles of thinking or leadership with no moral strings attached.

But never before has a concept generated so much humour and laughter in the public sphere. Warped or irrational as the mantra is, it is testing, in a public and palpable way, the foundations of economic nationalism that have so far framed thinking on development in Kenya.

Recently, the credo has become a growth industry in the political landscape. As the campaign mantra of the unfolding “hustler rebellion” in Kenya’s ruling Jubilee Party, the credo draws a Manichean divide between “bottom-up” as good and “top-down” as bad.

It is opportunistically exploiting the economic burdens imposed on ordinary citizens by the Covid-19 pandemic, unemployment and declined incomes, while strategically riding on a genuine global cry for an inclusive and just social order where “no one is left behind in development”. 

In the age of populism, “bottom-up” is an “Us-versus-Them” configuration of social change. It is Kenya’s version of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters , a left-wing political party in South Africa.

Outside Africa, Kenya’s bottom-up populists have two distant ideological relatives. One is the Latin American concept of ‘solidarity economy’ (Economía Solidaria) proposed during the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2001 as a solution to deepening poverty and widening social gap.

The other relative is “economic populism” everywhere poisoning public discourse and which propelled Donald Trump to power in 2016. Economic populists are up in arms against income inequalities and globalisation, where the middle class is shrinking, jobs are disappearing overseas and all the politicians are in the pockets of billionaires.

Poverty and extremism 

Kenya’s economic populism has all the trappings and vagaries of “voodoo economics – a concept George H. W. Bush coined on April 10, 1980 to describe the unrealistic and ill-advised economic policies of Ronald Reagan, later his boss. 

In this sense, the aim of the bottom-up argument is to win elections, not to bring a superior development model to guide economic recovery. Typically, it is a classic smoke and mirrors economics with familiar echoes in the tools magicians use to confuse and confound the weak in elaborate stage illusions. It is a grand scheme of deception where truth is obscured and numbers do not add up. 

As fake economics in the age of populism, extremism and post-truth politics, economic populism heralds the return of authoritarianism and fascism. As in the economic hardships of the 1930s in Germany, which paved Adolf Hitler's path to power, economic crises are fanning the flames of fanaticism and thrusting smooth-talking cranks, crooks and charlatans to power. 

Like Fascism, ‘Hustlerism’ is offering an answer to many of the burdens Kenyans are facing, including poverty, huge public debt, inflation and unemployment. 

Hitler used this voodoo economics to destroy six million Jews. Today, Covid-19 has deepened the economic woes of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth who have been pushed deeper into poverty and extremism. 

Kenya is witnessing massive radicalisation of the Mt Kenya region in degrees way higher than the pre-Mau Mau days in the 1940s. The bottom-up populists totally obscure the country’s well-trodden development path, forcing a radical ideological departure from the economic nationalism that has defined its growth path.

The key proponents of economic nationalism or economic patriotism – Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga and Mwai Kibaki – prioritised the war against ignorance, poverty and disease. Their legacy is hoisted on at least three seminal blueprints as the economic Magna Cartas of our development.

Top-down or bottom-up

One is the ‘Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 on African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya’, which defined Kenya as a market economy tempered by social (Harambee) and state interventions.

Second is the ‘Kenya Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation 2003-2007’, the most enduring legacy of the Kisumu governor, Prof Peter Anyang Nyong’o, which propelled Kenya’s rise, like the phoenix from the ashes of negative economic growth in the lost decades (1980s and 1990s) to an average of 5 per cent growth in the ensuing decades. 

Third, the five-year plan gave rise to the Kenya Vision 2030 blueprint that seeks to propel Kenya into the pantheon of newly industrialising and middle-income countries. 

Kenya’s economic populists are obscuring the country’s devolution miracle as a top-down-bottom-up model of grassroots empowerment. The ideals of Kenya’s economic nationalism are immortalised in the 2010 Constitution, which entrenched a fine mix of “bottom-up” and “top-down” approach to grassroots empowerment. 

The top-down flow of resources under devolution is propelling “Kenya’s quiet revolution” at the bottom. As its serious down-side, bottom-up populism follows a diabolical and divisive “Us-versus-Them” logic that depicts poverty as a virtue and wealth as a vice. 

As currently configured, it extols five fallacies about development. It falsely assumes that one can help or empower the poor by destroying the rich; strengthen the weak by weakening the strong; bring about prosperity by criminalising wealth or discouraging thrift; lift up the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer; and further human solidarity by inciting class hatred.

In hustler economic thought, the poor and the rich appear on the battleground armour-plated for an apocalyptic clash that the poor must win and the rich must lose.

The feeble-minded fights wretchedly over direction, “top-down” or “bottom-up”. The wise focuses on what is “going up” or "coming down.” Beyond the rhetoric, beware that you might be going up in smoke or coming down in a mighty fall.

Prof Kagwanja is a former government adviser and CEO of Africa Policy Institute