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Report: Why
Kenya is a failed state
Story by MWANGI GITHAHU
NATION, Nairobi
Publication Date: 10/2/2005
Despite all appearances to the
contrary, a report by a US research organisation has classed Kenya
as being among the world's failed states.
In its July/August edition, the
magazine, Foreign Policy, in conjunction with the Fund for
Peace, published what they called the first failed states index.
Foreign Policy is a
bimonthly magazine published by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington DC.
Its areas of focus include global
politics, economics, integration and ideas, and targets a
non-specialised audience and claims a readership of 10 million in
90 countries.
But to many people living in Kenya,
the country's condemnation might be an exaggeration. They might
argue that while the political, economic and social situations
could in no way be described as ideal, it would be unfair to call
the country a failure.
Reached for comment, Foreign
Affairs assistant minister Moses Wetang'ula, told the Sunday
Nation that the report is "balderdash and ridiculous in
the extreme."
Kenya is the exact opposite of a
failed state, he said, and cited the fact that it is the only
developing country hosting the headquarters of a UN agency.
Basket cases
"Kenya is a regional and
continental powerhouse that makes a critical contribution to
peace-keeping missions around the world and is respected across
the board," he added.
The term, "failed states,"
was popularised, if not actually invented, by Canadian author
Michael Ignatieff in his book, The Warriors Honour.
In the book, he cites warlords,
militias and other irregular armies operating in parts of Africa,
the Balkans, the former Soviet Union as proof of states which
quite rightly fit the bill.
To most people, failed states are
basket cases such as Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan,
Iraq, parts of former Soviet Union and, not so long ago, parts of
former Yugoslavia.
According to a report that ran
alongside the index, "about 2 billion people live in
countries that are in danger of collapse."
While admitting that identifying
the signs of state failure is easier than crafting solutions, the
report claims that pinpointing where the state collapse is likely
is a necessary first step.
In an attempt to categorise the
failed states in the index, the report claims that the World Bank
has identified about 30 "low-income countries under
stress," whereas Britain’s Department for International
Development has named 46 "fragile" nations of concern.
The report claims also that another
commissioned by America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has
put the number of failing states at about 20. The 76 countries
surveyed are ranked from those at the greatest risk – Cote
d'Ivoire at No. 1– to the least – India at 76.
All are, however, worryingly
described as "countries about to go over the brink."
Kenya is ranked 25th from the
bottom, worse off, apparently, than neighbours Uganda at 27 and
Tanzania at 34.
The foreign policy report explains
that a failed state is "a government that has lost control of
its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force
and has thus earned the label."
However, it expands this definition
to: "There can be more subtle attributes of failure. Some
regimes, for example, lack the authority to make collective
decisions or the capacity to deliver public services."
Casting the net for failed states
even wider, the report says that "in other countries, the
populace may rely entirely on the black market, fail to pay taxes
or engage in large-scale civil disobedience. Outside intervention
can be both a symptom of and a trigger for state collapse."
Finally, "a failed state may
be subject to involuntary restrictions of its sovereignty, such as
political or economic sanctions, the presence of foreign military
forces on its soil, or other military constraints, such as a
no-fly zone".
The report says that the 10 most
at-risk countries in the index have shown clear signs of state
failure. It says Cote d'Ivoire is "a country cut in half by
civil war" and calls it the most vulnerable to disintegration.
The report suggests that the country would probably collapse
completely if the UN peace-keeping forces pulled out.
The West African nation is followed
by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia,
Sierra Leone, Chad, Yemen, Liberia and Haiti. All of these are
easily identifiable as failed states, it says.
However, the index includes
countries in which it claims instability is less widely
acknowledged, including Bangladesh (17 from the bottom), Kenya
(25), Guatemala (31), Egypt (38), Saudi Arabia (45) and Russia
(59).
Vulnerability to violence
In the Fund for Peace survey, 12
social, economic, political and military indicators were used to
rank the countries in order of their vulnerability to violent
internal conflict "using software that analysed data from
tens of thousands of international and local media sources from
the last half of 2004."
Countries in the top 10 – those
most at risk of "going over the brink" – include the
DRC, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Yemen and Liberia.
The next 10 include Afghanistan, Rwanda, North Korea, Zimbabwe,
Bangladesh and the Dominican Republic.
The four so-called failed states
listed before Kenya are Venezuela, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma
and Uzbekistan.
Least failed are countries such as
India, China and Malaysia which are at 76, 75 and 74, respectively.
Then there are nations such as
Algeria, the Gambia and Russia at 61, 60 and 59, respectively. The
report say failed states have made "a remarkable odyssey from
the periphery to the very centre of global politics." It
claims that during the Cold War, "state failure was seen
through the prism of superpower conflict and was rarely addressed
as a danger in its own right."
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