BY LANJI OUKO
Author Tsitsi Dangarembga, in Nervous Conditions said, “It’s bad enough when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”
Colonisation is the process of control by a central system of power. Kenya became a British colony in the 19th century under British colonialism, and attained independence on 12th December 1963.
Unfortunately, today, Kenya continues to experience commercial colonialism, which is a form of neo-colonialism. It entails a first world country exerting economic pressure on a third world country.
A classic example of colonialism always entails a system of exploitation. The companies with commercial domination pitch their business plans and high profit projections to local investors with the promise of high returns. What attracts these investors to these third world countries?
The most recent facade of the rising African middle class continues to spread like bushfire. The multinationals belief in the African middle class led to the influx of International corporates flooding the African market. In few two years, the Kenyan market welcomed Western corporate brands including and not limiting to KFC, Dominos, Cold Stone Creamery and Pizza Hut among others that made the bold decision to enter the African market.
Indeed, a number of companies have expressed disappointment after overestimating the size of the middle-class market.
“We thought Africa was the new Asia, but we discovered that the middle class is extremely small and not growing,” Cornel Krummenacher, chief executive for Nestlé’s equatorial Africa region told the Financial Times. Other than Nestle, a number of other corporations seem to have been losing money including Diageo and most recently the British Bank, Barclays, which decided to sell it’s south African subsidiary, Absa.
The African Development Bank opened a can of worms in 2011 when they published a report stating 350 million Africans were members of the middle class, which ideally translated to 32 percent of the continent’s population. After a number of eyebrows were raised, another report was published. According to the Swiss Bank Credit Suisse, only 18 million Africans qualify as members of the middle class.
The sterile debate continues with economist columnists citing the spread of affluent restaurants and hotels, shopping malls and sleek imported cars as the signs to adhere to, in support of the notion of this growing middle class.
Opinions and research date on Kenya’s middle class are extremely divided. However, data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) show that in 2011, there were 2.1 million wage employees. Measured against a total labour force of nearly 17 million people. Income or wages being the primary source to gauge the middle class pandemic, the statistics clearly shows the middle class is growing at a slow rate, if at all.
Aside from the illusion of a generation of middle class Kenyans, globalization and the emergence of the Internet has led to a number of Kenyans being duped with the illusion that everything from the Western world is better than the locally produced goods. You can’t blame them; it is part of the process of neo-colonialism and in turn enables easier acceptance in the process of commercial colonialism.
Sadly enough, our minds have been programmed to value what is produced in the West over our own products. Commercial colonialism by the International firms has led to a number of issues in our economy. Indeed globalization has led to awareness of opportunities in far corners of the world however, it is a pity to watch international investors benefit at the expense of the local industries.
Foreign Direct Investment is important for economic development, modernization and income growth. However, it is gradually killing our local industries. Other than profit repatriation, exploitation of cheap labour and natural resources, the government should lay down policies on how much control these international firms can secure in order for citizens to develop the nation through local industry.
Which brings us back to the crux of the matter, what is the definition of “middle class”? We may have to ignore the Internationally acceptable definition and focus on the definitions Kenyans have conceptualized.
In the Kenyan context a middle class owns at least one car, a rented house, earning approximately 100,000 shillings a month and able to go on holiday at least once a year. Indeed, in other parts of the world this would constitute a member of the working class. Incidentally, the actual upper middle class Kenyans are worth much more than their counterparts in Europe.
The easiest way to conclude the heated debate is to establish that there exist two types of middle class groups in Kenya; the middle class and the pseudo-middle class with the latter being more of a mere facade, driven by impression and what catches the eye; flashy cars and big homes on mortgage. Commercial Colonialism only exists because of the booming growth of the pseudo middle class market.
