Kenya’s need for informality

Informality in Kenya is big. The informal economy accounts for 25% of non-agricultural GDP, employs a whopping 70% of its non-agricultural labor force, and even has its own widely used local name – Jula Kali, meaning hot sun. Everything from car mechanics to coffin makers, vegetable sellers to metal workers, labor and do business under the hot sun, providing the economy with a wide variety of cost-effective goods and services.

The Jua Kali sector has its detractors. The sector is largely unregulated, so things like unfair labor practices or environmental pollution often take place unchecked. Jua Kali enterprises also set up shop on public land, spilling onto pavements and into green spaces. Many from the formal sector and the privileged public would like to see the Jua Kali sector’s activities curbed or increasingly formalized. For them, Kenya has more than enough informality.

However, in certain areas, Kenya is woefully short of informality. Its recent elections results show how little agreement there is in terms of how the country is to be governed, and whether it is truly a democracy.

The country has many of the formal trappings of a democracy: its electoral commission set up and ran a huge election infrastructure, people turned out in unprecedented numbers to cast their votes, and the press freely covered the process across the country. However, as it began to look like the incumbent government was not going to come back in, and that parliament was going to instead be filled with fresh, new faces, the presidential vote was at the last minute doctored. All of these formal trappings of a democracy came under instant attack: polling stations were closed to impartial observers; votes were delayed and dubious numbers announced; the electoral commission chairperson was pressured into announcing a winner despite strong personal misgivings as to the validity of the process; and then live broadcasting by the independent media was forbidden.

Kenya’s recent election debacle has made it glaringly apparent how veneer-thin Kenyan democracy is. The country has many of the formal institutions of a democracy, but ones that can be very easily subverted or plainly disregarded when they do not do not suit the purposes of those in power. Kenya has made a formal, institutional, commitment to democracy, but not an informal, personal commitment to democracy.

The country requires a genuine commitment to democracy, a commitment by all of Kenya’s 14 million voters (which includes its leaders). Building this will require extensive public outreach and civic education. It will require strengthening not just the formal institutions that are a face of democracy but grass-roots institutions that represent society in its many forms. These are the trade unions, parent-teacher associations, professional bodies of accountants, lawyers, and building contractors, sports clubs, reading groups, religious congregations, and so on. These institutions and their members must cultivate personal and unshakable commitment to the principles and practice of democracy, and hold their political representatives accountable to these principles regardless of whether the outcome is to their favor or not.

Kenya’s next five years must be dedicated to building informality and strengthening the vast array of institutions that represent society and its different interests. With a strong and informed civil society, governments will not be able to hijack elections or muzzle the media, because they will face a sudden and vast-reaching shut out by the very people that they claim to represent. However, hopefully at some point in the future, it will never even come to this, because the members of the government itself, with their individual commitment to the democratic system, would find such a subversion of democracy personally too abhorrent.