01/04/2005
THE PASSING OF BILDAD KAGGIA AND THE UNFINISHED SOCIALIST REVOLUTION IN
By Okoth Osewe
Bildad Kaggia,
a hero of the colonial revolution in Kenya, passed away on March 6th 2005 at
the age of 84. Immediately after his death, commentators
in the capitalist media eulogised Kaggia as a true freedom fighter, a patriot
and a principled man who refused to join in the looting and plunder of the
Kenyan economy soon after Kenya’s “independence” from British colonial rule in
1963.
The World War 2
veteran was correctly hailed as a courageous fighter who rejected the reckless
land grabbing that soon became a culture within the class of tribal collaborators who surrounded Kenyatta and who erected the first capitalist State machine
in
Out of numerous essays, eloquent speeches and glowing tributes that were paid to this fallen Comrade, little effort was made by contributors to link up Kaggia’s political struggle with his belief in Socialism. In fact, no contributor brought fourth the fact that the beliefs that Kaggia is said to have refused to betray and which saw him die “as a pauper” were Socialist in nature. While Kenyans were told of how Kaggia refused to accept a 300 acre piece of land from Kenyatta (whom, at one time, subjected him to a public rebuke for “not having acquired anything”), it needs to be pointed out that Kaggia’s position that land should be redistributed to the landless and not grabbed by greedy politicians is a basic ideological position of Socialists especially those struggling against Capitalism in the ex-colonial world like Kenya.
As a tribute to the late Comrade Kaggia, it is probably relevant to utilize his demise as an opportunity to expound on some of his basic Socialist beliefs which the Capitalist media and opportunists in the Liberal camp in Kenya could not touch on to avoid attracting attention or giving credibility to Socialism. Kaggia’s lacklustre attitude towards wealth together with his opposition to land grabbing was never associated with his Socialist thinking in the right wing media, a sad omission which needs to be filled by members of the Kenyan Left who are in a position of doing so.
Socialists and the
question of Land
A basic principle of Socialism teaches that land is a valuable natural resource whose overall ownership or control should not be left on private hands. This does not mean that individual citizens cannot own land under a Socialist government. What it means is that the State should be able to distribute land to citizens without charge and confiscate idle land at will. It is the responsibility of the government to guarantee that no citizen is landless or homeless.
What is happening in
Socialists hold that everybody is born without land and everybody dies and leaves land behind. If a group of crooks begin to grab vast pieces of land using their positions or connections to the ruling class, the inevitable consequence is the creation of millions of landless people and a few wealthy landlords. This is what is happening in Kenya. The fundamental driving force behind land grabbing and land selling is the profit motive encouraged by the system.
For this reason,
Socialists advocate for the nationalization of land (with or without
compensation) as the basis of land redistribution. The
problem with this alternative is that when it is raised in the midst of a
greedy capitalist class that has already grabbed vast pieces of land and that
is protecting the interests of thousands of Europeans who still own thousands
of acres of land under Neo-colonialism, this class of land grabbers begins to
feel threatened. It is for this
reason that Kaggia suffered systematic political
isolation throughout his life because the beliefs he held threatened the status
quo especially on the question of land.
Apart from redistributing land, the long term perspective of Socialists with the alternative of nationalization of land especially in a country where the backbone of the economy is agriculture is mechanization of agricultural production through the establishment of huge plantations especially in fertile areas that could be used to feed the nation. At the moment, vast pieces of fertile land in Kenya are either idle or being used to produce cash crops which generates revenues for the rich owners of plantations which are mainly foreign companies.
Kaggia’s Class politics the answer to tribalism
Those who could have lost out if the likes of Bildad Kaggia, Oginga Odinga, Pio Gama Pinto, Achieng Oneko, JM Kariuki and other Socialist-leaning Kenyans took control of a Party that could seize power on a Socialist platform could have been the millionaire Ministers around Kenyatta, wealth grabbers who had the conduits of looting the economy and, most importantly, Western imperialism which has vast economic interest in Kenya.
For this reason, Kaggia was isolated by Kenyatta before he resigned from active politics, Odinga was detained, put under house arrest during the better part of Kenyatta’s dictatorship and blocked from practising politics while both Pinto and JM Kariuki were expressly assassinated under Kenyatta’s leadership. After these tragic events that might have shocked the emergent generation of Kenyan Socialists soon after 1963, Odinga still did manage to reconstitute himself after the death of Kenyatta to try and set up the Kenya Socialist Alliance.
The move ended after Moi converted
The political link
between Bildad Kaggia and
the late Oginga Odinga, the
doyen of
Socialists struggle for
society and the working people
When Kaggia joined Odinga to form the Kenya People’s Union (KPU) after breaking away from KANU because of KANU’s links with British and American imperialism, the bottom line for KPU leaders was to try and set up a Socialist State in Kenya.
Pio Gama Pinto, the
Kenyan-Asian Socialist who was very active before and after the colonial
revolution, was assassinated by agents of imperialism because he emerged as one
of the most ideologically informed personalities who could help advance the
colonial revolution in
“The death of Pio was not of a lone Asian but the death of a great nationalist, a great freedom fighter and a true Socialist who did not hesitate to share with his friends whatever little he had”.
Despite his profile as
one of the “Kapenguria six” and despite huge possibilities
of using his radical background to try and reconstitute himself to fit into the
capitalist political framework of the day, Kaggia
refused to abandon his beliefs which are even more relevant today, given the
failure of capitalism to advance the Kenyan society forward.
A key feature of real Socialists is that they do not struggle for themselves or to amass wealth by taking advantage of State resources at their disposal or positions in government. They struggle for society and the working people. Socialists believe that
MPs should earn no
more than the wage of a skilled worker.
For a Socialist, Kaggia’s death in poverty did not lack explanations. His option in an atmosphere of political hostility and protracted anti-Socialist propaganda that was engineered by imperialism could have been to follow the route that could have seen him compromise with imperialism as a matter of political and economic survival. He had the opportunity of becoming a millionaire but he refused, not because he was “a good man” as the moralists in the capitalist media would like Kenyans to believe but because he was being guided by a strong ideology that was opposed to the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the working people and other oppressed layers in society.
Kaggia and others have played their part
Kaggia belongs to the group of Kenyan revolutionaries who had understood that with the raising of the national flag and the singing of the national anthem in 1963, opportunists who seized power in Kenya under Kenyatta had began to build the foundations of neo-colonialism in the country that would ensure the economic and mental slavery of Kenyans in the future. When Odinga wrote his book, “Not Yet Uhuru” (Not Yet independence”), it was to warn Kenyans and the world about the impending take-over of Kenya’s economy, politics and culture by western imperialism. Fortunately, Odinga and his group had fight-back plan.
They set up a Party
that sought to play politics along Leftist lines while Odinga
himself maintained strong links with former Stalinist countries in
The Odingas and the Kaggias were
trying to set up ideological opposition during the “cold war” and this situation
simply drove imperialism into a state of panic leading to imperialist
recommendation of
political assassinations and other adverse measures if that was
what was required to check any advance of Socialism in
It should be the task
of Kenyan Socialists active today to try and understand the limitations of Kaggia and other Comrades who did whatever was necessary to
try and raise the red flag in
Published by Kenya Socialist Democratic
Alliance (KSDA)
email: harakatips@hotmail.com