Story by RASNA WARAH
Publication Date: 8/27/2007

IN RECENT DAYS, I HAVE BEEN inundated with E-mail messages from all corners of the globe responding to my assertion that Kenyans are a greedy lot. Some of the e-mails were quite supportive of my assertion, while others were angry that I had painted Kenyans with a tainted brush and was blind to all the positive developments taking place.

What amazes me about these e-mails is not that Kenyans both at home and abroad bother to write to me at all but that they share such a deep concern about the state of the nation.

Why should a Kenyan sitting in Washington DC, I often wonder, care about what happens to our Constitution or to taxpayers’ money? And why should a Kenyan working in Oslo start a blog to keep fellow Kenyans informed of the goings-on in the country?

I have come to the conclusion that Kenyans – regardless of where they are physically located – love their country deeply and want to be engaged in its affairs. And because we love our country, we remain its biggest critics. We are hard on ourselves because we have set higher standards for ourselves. So we are constantly disappointed when those standards are not met.

This fact was brought home to me by my Tanzanian friend (who I shall call Babu to protect him from himself, and no, I will not reveal his true identity even if you take me to court).

Babu is what you might call a Kenya-phile. When I first met him, he confessed to me that one of his life-long ambitions was to settle in Kenya.

This admission surprised me somewhat, not because I do not believe that people from across the border should not be allowed to live in this country, but because I always believed that Tanzanians generally looked down upon Kenyans, that they saw us as uncouth capitalists out to make a quick buck, and intellectually their inferior.

Babu made an observation that I think rings true for most Kenyans. He told me that the reason he was attracted to Kenya was because there are few Kenyans he has met who do not believe that they can do whatever they set their minds to.

This self-confidence, this in-your-face ambition, is what attracts him most to this country. People here want to excel, even if what they want to excel in is something as crass as making more money.

Over a drink of mojito at a Nairobi pub, Babu admitted that the thing he loved most about Kenyans was that they do not see themselves as victims of their fate, but as drivers of their own destiny.

His sentiments are shared by the Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey, who in his book, Africa Unchained, is all praise for young Kenyan professionals who, he claims, “can see things with acute clarity” and “are not polluted with anti-colonial rhetoric and garbage”.

HE ADDS: “THEY (KENYAN professionals) are not into the blame game. Blaming colonialists and imperialists does not cut it with them. These young Africans do not just sit there, expecting Western colonialists to come and fix Africa’s problems. Nor do they wait for the government to do everything for them.”

Kenyans have learned that if the government fails, you just get on with the business of surviving by finding ways around the system. This explains why even when Kenya was a pariah state and shunned by donors, the country did not descend into a Zimbabwe-like situation.

We survived despite our government. How? Well, by building our own social capital – networks of friends, relatives, colleagues and other contacts – that enabled us to survive. Kenyans abroad sent money home; those at home helped each other out in times of emotional or financial crises.

Many sociologists and anthropologists have found that social capital plays an even more important role than financial capital in the survival of communities. Some studies have also found that communities with high social capital (where trust, sharing and co-operation are dominant values) also have a higher sense of dignity, freedom, responsibility, prosperity and security.

One might argue that in a highly-competitive and individualistic society such as Kenya, social networks and concepts of solidarity cannot work because they smack of socialism.

But as author David Korten has noted, social capital is essential even in market-based economies as “the market itself depends on the bonds of well-developed social capital to maintain the ethical structure, social stability and personal security essential to its function” and that “social bonding without competition leads to stagnation and lack of innovation.”

What I am trying to say is simply this: Kenyans are an enormously resourceful and resilient bunch who are also ambitious and hard-working, and they take an extraordinary interest in how their country is governed.

If the Government could help nurture – rather than destroy – the energy and resourcefulness of the average Kenyan, this country will definitely be on its way to joining the ranks of the Asian Tiger economies that it is trying so hard to emulate.