One of the most interesting grammatical elements of Kiswahili, the most widely spoken African language in the world, is that you can always create the negative form of an infinitive verb. In English, to be grammatically correct, the opposite of a verb has to have some kind of meaning in the real world. For example, the opposite of “to live” is “to die”. But in Kiswahili, you can always have a logical opposite and a grammatical opposite thanks to a specific way in which verbs can be changed in the infinitive form. Thus, the opposite of to live – kuishi – is to die – kufa – but to “unlive” or to “not live” – kutoishi – is also grammatically correct, poetic and potent because it doesn’t mean death but the act of inverting actions necessary to living. And you can do this with any verb in the infinitive sense in Kiswahili, giving the impression that in Kiswahili cosmology, or sense of the world, what can be done can always be undone.
This element of Kiswahili grammar offers a powerful framework for thinking through the events in Kenya in June and July, a sequence of events that I call “ungoverning”. If governing is developing rules and using institutions in order to create a functional society, then Kenya is living through a period of ungoverning, in which institutions and rules are being undermined by the state itself, by extension undermining the society as a whole.
After the president and the legislature attempted to force through a finance bill in Parliament, Kenya entered an unprecedented wave of protest and an unprecedented violent wave of policing. While protesters insist that they are peaceful, particularly in the capital city of Nairobi, the police behave as if the very act of gathering is an affront to the executive that must be met with maximum force. Thus, protesters have been teargassed and shot at with live bullets. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has recorded at least 50 protest deaths – the highest number of protest-related deaths in the country’s independent history. Protesters have promised to continue to gather, no longer just rejecting the finance bill, but now demanding reparations for all the lives lost and for the president to step down for his failure to manage the situation peacefully.
I call this sequence of events “ungoverning” because these are not passive outcomes of an unavoidable situation but active decisions being taken by those who wield power in the country to misuse or undermine the political institutions of the country in order to strengthen the person of the executive – the president – against enemies of his own making. For context, after 40 years of one-party rule, Kenya went into an intense period of institution-building to avoid recreating an all-powerful presidency. A new constitution was delivered after 20 years of deliberation, protest and a hotly contested referendum in 2010 to get rid of the vestiges of coloniality in the supreme law of the land. It redistributed power between the three arms of government in order to compel them to keep each other accountable. The new constitution also introduced measures of accountability for other institutions like the police. Significantly, the Constitution of Kenya protects the right to protest, seeing it as part of a chain of democratic actions that people are allowed to undertake in order to keep the government honest.
The ungoverning in Kenya begins with the too-cosy relationship between the National Assembly and the executive, in which elected members of Parliament have said on camera that when passing the finance bill, their loyalty was to the president and not to the electorate. This obviously goes against the very concept of the legislature which, by definition, is supposed to scrutinise legislation independently before submitting it to the president for assent. William Ruto’s ruling coalition, the Kenya Kwanza coalition, since coming into power two and a half years ago has abdicated this responsibility completely and instead focused on rubber-stamping whatever agenda the executive presents.
It is important to note that many of the mechanisms that exist in Kenya’s constitution presume a legislature that wants to be independent of the president and not one that seeks to be their lapdog.
Kenya is severely hobbled by a toothless, sycophantic National Assembly. Under the authoritarian state, Parliament was systematically defanged and one of the most common tactics for killing legislation was the presidential veto, in which the president would simply refuse to assent to any bills that reduced his power. Thus Article 115 of the 2010 constitution has a provision that allows for the National Assembly to work around the president if they refuse to assent to or amend a bill that basically means that after a back-and-forth process, the bill can pass if two-thirds of both the Parliament and the Senate vote for it. Until it finally happened in late July, it was unclear whether or not Parliament would actually reject the finance bill or await further instructions from the executive.
In a similar vein, while the president did follow through on the protesters’ demand that he sack all his cabinet secretaries, he has submitted many of the same names to the Senate for confirmation. Last Wednesday, he nominated four prominent opposition figures – allies of political veteran Raila Odinga, whom Ruto defeated in elections in 2022 – to his new cabinet, but named members of the disbanded cabinet for the majority of the remaining 16 positions.
Given that these individuals were fired, they should prima facie be ineligble for public office because the president himself found them ineligible for public office. The much celebrated cabinet firing is so far simply moving unfit individuals around. Moreover, Musalia Mudavadi also continues to occupy the position of the Prime Cabinet Secretary – an unconstitutional office that has been challenged in court. Mudavadi lost elections in 2013, 2017 and 2022 – voters have been clear about how they feel about him – but the office was created for political expediency because he brought to the coalition a chunk of voters that made enough of a difference to cost the opposition the presidential election.
This proposed new cabinet is an act of ungoverning because it is the use of executive power to serve the political interests of the coalition rather than the national interest and it should be undone by creating a constitution – and indeed a National Assembly – that conforms to what was drafted.
But perhaps the clearest element of Kenya’s ungoverning is the refusal to allow people to protest, and the violent policing of unarmed protesters. Kenyans are being shot and killed merely for the act of gathering to express dissent. The 2010 constitution envisions protest as a democratic act that must be undertaken if the government fails to listen to people through elections or mechanisms of public participation. But the presidency is reading any act of dissent as a threat and responding with the aforementioned disproportionate use of force. The mere act of gathering is being criminalised, with people being abducted and disappeared for holding placards or for creating protest materials. Kenyans are not only being squeezed by austerity measures; they are also being punished for expressing their unhappiness about it.
As I argued elsewhere, this violent policing is in part a product of the president’s own insecurity based in part on the fragility of his coalition, and of his own inability to trust citizens in general. To be sure, there is already a significant part of his ruling coalition that is organising to run independently in 2027 – an ethnonationalist faction that if he allowed himself to think logically he would see cannot win an election because they simply do not have the numbers. But rationality has taken a backseat to fear and lately, the president’s speeches drip with concerns about external actors mobilising against him rather than listening to what the protesters are saying and taking accountability for the things he has done to himself and to the country. A secure government would have allowed protests to proceed peacefully, reading it as a signal that the process through which the finance bill came to his desk was flawed. A secure government would see protest as an expression of democratic health. Instead, the presidency chose to swat at a fly on their head with a hammer, creating a much bigger problem than he initially had.
Ungoverning is not a uniquely Kenyan experience. It is the United States Supreme Court’s campaign of undoing several hard-won protections in law and in the Conservative Party’s steady dismantling of the United Kingdom’s welfare state. It is the attempt to decriminalise female genital mutilation (FGM) in The Gambia and the draconian drug wars in Central America. Ungoverning is what populist administrations do because they have sharpened their ability to gain power but have no idea what to do with government once they control it. Ungoverning is watching a cartoon in rewind – it looks like governing because it has so many of the trappings of power but it’s all happening in reverse. And protest is the language of people who are frustrated with being deliberately unheard by political institutions that are solely focused on gaining power.
It is difficult to say what will happen next in Kenya because we are so deep in uncharted territory. The protesters’ demands are clearer than ever, shifting from “reject the finance bill” to “Ruto Must Go” in response to the devastating violence. Meanwhile, the president has increasingly suggested he would rather fight the apparitions that he thinks are doing this to him rather than what he has done to himself and to the country and needs to repair. Ideally, the short-term tasks include full and transparent accountability for police violence, the reinforcement of constitutional principles through the transparent use of existing mechanisms, and finality over the future of the finance bill through a much more democratic process of public participation. But this would only be the path taken by someone who was interested in governing and not ungoverning: the first short steps of moving from crisis towards resolution that drawing from what Kiswahili grammar teaches us – that anything that is done can always be undone.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.