Land, Food and Freedom (Ardhi, Chakula na Ukombozi)
Draft Minimum Programme of the Kenya Left Alliance
I: The State of our Motherland
Kenya is at a crossroads. Questions that are fundamental to the nation-building process – including questions around land and other historic injustices, remain unanswered within the political landscape. Recent political and economic events have further made an already high cost of living unbearable for the majority, a bleak situation that has been further exacerbated by a subversion of the Constitution of Kenya (2010) and continued disregard of fundamental human rights by a ruling elite that has no commitment to our national interests for it is enslaved by foreign interests.
We promulgated the Constitution in 2010 because we wanted social transformation. Our Constitution has many sites of social transformation that if implemented would enable us to move to the next level of interrogating its weaknesses. Kenya’s ruling elite however finds the Constitution inconvenient, subverts it at every turn, and disobeys court orders thereby overthrowing the Constitution itself.
Schools have today been rendered incapable of educating our children, the health system is in disarray, unemployment is a national cancer, the economy is in shambles, and our material interests are every-other-day violated, including through lack of food and the destruction of our indigenous seeds. Our state cannot guarantee our security as citizens and does not protect our fundamental rights. Corruption, wastage, and thievery by the ruling elite continues as the national debt grows in leaps and bounds thus endangering our national sovereignty. Our Motherland, Kenya is hurtling down a path that many failed-states have previously taken.
II: The Draft Minimum Programme of Kenya Left Alliance
Land, Food & Liberation lays out the draft minimum programme of the Kenya Left Alliance which various political parties, movements, organisations, and individuals are uniting and organising around. In the run-up to the 2027 elections, the Kenya Left Alliance will organise, consolidate forces and contest with the objective of achieving some immediate gains for our people.
This draft minimum programme comprises TEN key issues around which Kenyans are demanding an immediate and effective change:
1. Employment of the youth/Opportunities for all
Unemployment is a major cancer in Kenya. The overall unemployment rate in Kenya is around 12.7%, while the youth unemployment rate is currently at 67%. Over one million young people enter into the labour market annually without any skills some having either dropped out of school or completed school and not enrolled in any college. These levels of unemployment have created a lumpenised class of Kenyans who have nothing to look forward to, and fermented a mental health crisis. This combination puts future generations and the future of Kenya itself at great risk, both socially and politically. The political elite are comfortable to maintain this status quo as it creates a class of poor Kenyans who they can easily manipulate through handouts during electoral cycles and other political processes.
The KLA will strive to protect the informal sector and focus on skill-based education that continues to be on high demand across the country. We will further create an enabling environment for the informal sector, and small and micro-enterprises to thrive so they can contribute to solving the unemployment menace that we have as a country. We will additionally engage in a national and devolved process of industrialization capable of absorbing millions of unemployed youth into the work-force. In doing so, we will create a conducive environment for social, technological and industrial innovations that can contribute to further opening up opportunities across various sectors. We will work to strengthen workers’ unions to ensure that the employment opportunities created do not degenerate into avenues that exacerbate exploitative labour relations.
2. Debt, corruption and sovereignty
Kenyans have witnessed an unprecedented appetite for foreign debt by the national government over the past 12 years. This debt has unfortunately not been put to productive use for the majority, and a significant portion of it has been lost to corruption despite national assets such as the Port of Mombasa being used as collateral for the debt. The national economy and stock exchange are effectively in the hands of foreign corporations, while foreign military bases continue to mushroom across the country every other day. Kenya continues to be a neo-colonial state.
The KLA’s alternative political leadership commits to take effective control over strategic sectors of the economy and key industries – and to close all foreign military bases within the Kenyan borders. We will carry out a comprehensive debt review aimed at knowing which debts have gone to national development programmes, and which ones have been stolen. Those individuals and cabals that have stolen national resources and subjected Kenyans to unnecessary debt repayment will be subjected to public trial and made to pay back the proceeds of theft, or their illegal wealth repossessed in lieu. KLA will also challenge the legality of such debts as they are irrecoverable under both the Kenyan law and International law.
3. Universal Healthcare
The health sector in Kenya is an artificial mess. Hospitals are under-staffed, under-equipped and under-stocked with medicine. Kenyans continue to die from treatable diseases like malaria more than 60 years after independence. Sedentary lifestyles, meanwhile, have only helped to add fuel to the fire. We are facing a national crisis, a crisis that ironically benefits a few unscrupulous Kenyans who continue to manipulate and corrupt various processes in the health sector.
The KLA will carry out a comprehensive reform of the health sector and implement a Universal Healthcare system devoid of the shenanigans around the newly-created Social Health Insurance Fund(SHIF), which is structured as a revolving economic door for the perennial grabbers and looters of Kenya to further fill their pockets. We will ensure that all Kenyans receive free healthcare when ill, and put particular emphasis on preventive healthcare so as to save our country precious resources that can be redirected to construction of more health facilities, or better training and pay of healthcare professionals.
4. Land reform and redistribution
The land question in Kenya remains one of the oldest unresolved national questions. The alienation of land belonging to indigenous people and their communities by the colonial enterprise was unjust – and has been exacerbated by successive post-independence governments, both through their failure to address the initial dispossession and their own appetite for public land. Kenya’s most productive lands are today in the hands of a few land-owners while the majority wallow in informal settlements. The re-intensification of grabbing of public spaces, forests, and rangelands in recent years is additionally of particular concern to Kenyans today.
KLA will actualize a land reform programme. This will include a repossession programme to cover all parcels of public land that have been grabbed or public assets of strategic national importance that have been privatized, and place them back under public ownership. We shall implement the land provisions in the 2010 Constitution that decree the vesting of the grabbed lands specifically stated in the Ndung’u Report back to the people. We shall continuously vest land whose leases expire back to the people. We shall enforce compliance with Article 68 of the Constitution by legislating the maximum and minimum acreage of landholdings; while ensuring the community lands are not commodified and are for use by the intended communities. Our ultimate goal will be to have equitable access to land for use for all.
5. Food security
Food prices, and the attendant cost of living, keep soaring because of the lack of a comprehensive programme to support peasant farmers who produce over 80% of Kenya’s food. Our farmers have been betrayed by successive regimes that have collapsed the cooperative movement, killed agricultural extension services, and which are today introducing punitive laws to criminalise indigenous seeds that are protected under Article 11 of the Constitution, and dispossessing small-scale farmers.
We will outlaw GMOs. We will strengthen agricultural extension services, introduce necessary subsidies and other support mechanisms for small-scale farmers at the points of production, aggregation and distribution of their produce with the objectives of boosting production and ensuring that farmers are paid just and fair prices. We will additionally resuscitate irrigation schemes across the country to boost food production, and revive the once-vibrant cooperative movement under a strict ethos to avoid past abuses. Select foods shall be placed under price control regimes to ensure that majority Kenyans are able to afford food.
6. Quality Education for all
Kenya’s education system is currently structured to create subservient workers who can be exploited by the owners of capital, as opposed to innovators or independent thinkers. In addition to being watered down, education has further been commodified and made unaffordable for the majority poor through recent increases in the fees paid across various levels of the education system.
We will work to improve the existing curricula so as to take into account the needs of our country in the 21st Century, and impart skills that can push Kenya into a state-led industrialization phase that is anchored on equality and freedom. We will further make education freely accessible from ECD level to university level so as to accord all Kenyans dignified lives, and more importantly, the opportunity to contribute to the nation-building process to the best of their ability. In so doing, we will be making clear to foreign interests and their institutions that our sovereignty/constitution must be respected. We will seek the support of our people to resist neoliberalism in its exploitative, dominating, and oppressive pursuits.
7. Just and progressive taxation
The current tax regime in Kenya controverts Article 10 of the Constitution. It is neither equal nor equitable. Foreign interests and the rich in Kenya do not pay taxes. Unprecedented and inequitable levels of taxation have pushed the already-high cost of living beyond the reach of most Kenyans. Most low-income earners are paying a significantly higher proportion of their income as taxes while ultra-rich individuals and corporations are granted legal and financial loopholes to ensure they pay minimal tax or none at all.
KLA will review the current tax regime and implement a progressive tax policy that accords tax relief to low income-earners, the poor, and vulnerable – while holding the rich and corporations accountable so they can actually pay taxes and contribute to national development. Through our economic programme, we will ring-fence specific revenue streams and ear-mark them for human development through education, healthcare, agriculture, among other critical sectors.
8. Popular Housing/Housing for all
Unscrupulous maneuvers by the Kenya Kwanza regime have birthed the noble but badly thought-out idea of affordable housing. It is clear to Kenyans that there is nothing affordable about these houses apart from the name of the project (Affordable Housing Project), and that it only serves to further exacerbate the housing question as hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have been dispossessed to create room for construction of the new housing units.
The KLA will engage in a housing programme that seeks to provide shelter for the most vulnerable members of society and those who have historically been dispossessed, including slum-dwellers. In those areas where KLA is unable to construct houses, residents will be organised into communes, allocated land, and asked to put their collective skills towards the construction of their own houses using materials and tools provided by the state.
9. The Bill of Rights
Kenya is gradually sliding into the ranks of a failed state, with some security organs today weaponised to engage in abductions, enforced disappearances and killings of citizens who express dissent. The continuous abuse of fundamental rights guaranteed by the CoK (2010) has led to this prevailing culture of lawlessness in the operational procedures of key arms of the security services.
We will restructure the security organs to ensure that they are accountable to the people. We will further work with community organs and empower independent institutions and commissions to carry out their mandate of providing checks and balances to such abuses, both past and present, thus ensuring access to justice.
In addition to political and civil rights, Article 43 of the Constitution that decrees economic, cultural, and social rights will be implemented and enforced by the KLA.
10. Environmental Justice
Our planet is in the midst of an ecological crisis that manifests in many different ways. In Kenya, we are increasingly witnessing changing weather patterns, prolonged droughts, flooding, food shortages, loss of biodiversity. Instead of working towards mitigating this environmental crisis, the ruling class is allowing corporations and industries to pollute our environment and water bodies, encouraging destruction of our seeds, and every-other-day reducing Kenya’s forest cover – including through the recent targeting of Karura and Ngong’ Forests.
KLA will work to secure environmental justice for all. To this end, we will promote better models of conservation of our biodiversity that are rooted in both indigenous and modern methods, preserve and increase Kenya’s forest cover to enable the regeneration of our water towers, promote sustainable use of our environment and natural resources, implement pro-people climate adaptation measures, and prosecute those individuals and corporations that undermine the integrity of our environment.
11. Decolonisation
The colonial structure and post-independence governments have stifled our process of social development through the use of violence, ethnicity, political myth, and economic power. The econo-political structure in post-colonial Kenya has encouraged the emergence of key political figures who act as ethnic warlords as opposed to national politicians or statesmen/stateswomen. These political figures undermine the process of national development by using their positions in the furtherance of personal economic interests, or the interests of foreign corporations and governments. They work to uphold colonial patterns of economics which ensure that key sectors of the economy – including large-scale agriculture, the stock exchange, and mining, are largely in the hands of foreign interests that make astronomic profit by undermining labour rights and evading taxes.
The KLA will engage in a process of decolonisation that seeks to ‘re-africanise the African’ so that our people can not only learn to love themselves again, but also arrive at a better understanding of systems of oppression, elect progressive and ideologically grounded leadership, and collectively uproot various systems of oppression and colonial hangovers. To this end, we will engage in processes of political and popular education as we work towards creating new worlds – worlds of joy, love, laughter and dignity. At a broader level, we will decolonize our politics so that it is answerable to the sovereign, progressively work toward placing key sectors of the economy under local and collective stewardship, and center culture as a key aspect of the process of national liberation.
Conclusion
To enable the achievement of these goals and the creation of the new society that Kenyans desire, we will work with like-minded organisations and Kenyans of goodwill to organise, educate, and strengthen the Kenya Left Alliance using additional mechanisms as we collectively work towards our victory in its political, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions.
Throughout this process, the Kenya Left Alliance recognizes the people as the motive force of history. We therefore call on all like-minded Kenyans to join us in this loud and defiant march toward liberation, justice and dignity.
Ukombozi sasa! Mapambano Yaendelee!