Kenya requires strong institutions to break the chain of inequality since Independence

Youths who turned up during the recruitment of police officers in Eldoret on July 14, 2014: People from well-off families have better chances of landing a job in Kenya. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA 

By Tony Watima

Milton Friedman wrote in his book Free to Choose that life is not fair, attempting to believe that the government can correct the effects.

 

John Rawls, the late American philosopher, answered Libertarian laissez faire economists like Friedman that although life is unfair, we have to get over it and find ways of maximising the benefits that flow from it.

He said: “The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust nor are the persons born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.”

What we must then confront is what kind of principles we would choose to govern social and economic inequalities to guard against the risk of finding ourselves in crushing poverty and is the subject that David Ndii, an economist, tackled in a recent article in the Saturday Nation.

Rawls says that at first thought we might try and favour equal distribution of income and wealth, but it would occur to us that we could do better for those at the bottom.

The analogy he gives is the case of doctors offered a higher pay than bus drivers; we could be improving the situation of those who have the least — by increasing access to health care for the poor.

Rawls calls for permissible inequality, more so equity, as the principle of addressing moral desert and entitlement to legitimate expectations.

So if we were to ask Rawls about President Uhuru Kenyatta’s issuing title deeds to the landless, what would be his response knowing that an estimated 75 per cent of Kenya’s population is directly dependent on land yet land distribution is skewed?

Natural facts

That 17.2 per cent of Kenya’s total landmass of 587,900 square kilometres carries 80 per cent of the population while the remaining carries only 20 per cent of the total population, which is mainly made up of pastoralists. About 13 per cent of the population has no land at all.  

Rawls’s answer would probably be that natural distribution (talent, endowments) is neither just nor unjust, nor is someone born in a serfdom or marginalised group, but how our institutions address these natural facts (marginalisation, inequality, deprivations) is what defines what’s just and unjust.

Rawls’s theory is not meant to assess fairness; it is concerned with the basic structure of society, and the way it allocates rights and duties, income and wealth, power and opportunities. 

On whether we have ever made a leap from our social and economic position, let’s look back to Independence days and compare with the current situation.

If we did, there is no reason to say we are winding back. We have been making baby steps moving forward only to back-pedal looking for the horizon.   

There has always been systematic marginalisation, discrimination and deprivation, national disparities and poverty levels.