Introduction

With policies of forced expulsion and repatriation, Danish authorities introduce a “limbo-status” for refugees who already suffer from diverse forms of displacements and persecutions (Gade, 2022). For the Danish government, refugees are not legitimate asylum seekers, and they deserve repatriation to their countries—that Danish authorities assume are becoming more stable and will accept them back. In this regard, the government signs informal (not often public) agreements with ruling regimes in some African countries.

In contrast, communities and their networks consider refugees legitimate asylum seekers qualifying for protection. These are people who argue that they flee from ongoing conflicts and civil wars. Forced repatriation will, therefore, insist, lead to additional suffering from violence, if not worse. While the first proclamations and activities take place within the state-society policy framework, the latter occur within the dynamics of transnational and global civil society. Even the refugees themselves, though struggling under a stressful limbo, remain part of these formal and informal global encounters, networking, and connections. To verify such tendencies and structural formations, Saskia Sassen contended the following:

Similarly, Wright Mills argues that what we often consider as specific micro personal or group problems might well represent general macro-society challenges (Mills, 2010). For instance, the suffering of displaced and powerless asylum seekers and refugees following society and state exclusion might, in the short term, provide certain voter popularity and electability to certain political parties, both in the host and homeland states. However, in the long term, expanding restrictions through negligible populism might negatively affect societies negatively (Petersen, 2005). The challenge is that refugees suffer not because they themselves did something wrong, but because there is a societal and structural process that forces refugees to flee and seek protection from wherever they could get.

Introduction

In 2020, three presidential families in Kenya—the Kenyattas, Mois, and Kibakis—ranked among the richest 20 families in the country. This reality, according to Alexia Rij (2021), is a product of the country's entrenched neo-patrimonial regime that dates back to colonialism. The characteristic feature of this type of regime is the conflict of public and private interests, with the latter taking precedence over the former, resulting in the elite accumulating wealth through various corrupt practices: “Although the features and forms of corruption have changed over time, the underlying logic persists while becoming more complex” (Rij 2021: 9). In an inadvertent acknowledgment of the entrenched nature of corruption in Kenya, President Uhuru Kenyatta asserted, in January 2021, that KES 2 billion is stolen daily from national coffers (Muriuki 2021). The fact that corruption in Kenya has reached epidemic proportions is beyond question. In the 1960s and 1970s, bureaucratic corruption manifested itself in bureaucrats’ demands for kickbacks valued at around 10 percent of the total cost of a public tender, development project, or whatever goods or services were under procurement. By the 1980s and 1990s, the rates had escalated to around 40 percent. Under the Uhuru–Ruto dispensation in Kenya (2013–22), the rates maxed out to 100 percent! (Nasong’o 2020). This is the situation where, for instance, a development project is conjured up, it is costed, awarded, and paid for, but nothing is done. The exemplification of this is the Kimwarer and Arror dams project scandal in which billions were paid out for nothing (Some 2019; Standard Digital Team 2019). Alternatively, public funds are simply withdrawn from bank accounts and directly pocketed by public officers, a most brazen form of corruption that was amplified by the investigative report in 2020 on the financial shenanigans at Maasai Mara University (Muia 2020). In view of the epidemic levels corruption had reached in Kenya, a national conference on corruption was convened in January 2019 at the Bomas of Kenya. At the conference, President Uhuru Kenyatta asserted that the government would relentlessly pursue high-profile cases already in the courts and launch a crackdown to ensure all corrupt persons are held accountable.

Introduction

In modern societies, including democracies, a substantial gap exists between the public and civic-private spheres (Bird, 2016). In a much more aggravated form, such cleavages remain integral to the daily lives of transnational communities (ethnic groups with persistent transnational ties) (Schiller, 2018). These communities are often excluded from their position of influence, particularly in public institutions. In addition, they often endure recurring discursive public assaults, leading to internal and external social and political enclosures with disempowering tendencies. At the same time, they are formally subordinate to distant bureaucratic public institutions (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010).

Paradoxically, although such binary relationships prevail, the dynamics within and around authority-community encounters and connections generate a dialectical relationship in which involved actors separately and collectively contribute to the formation of alternative social and political understandings and even collaborations.

Recent media debates and interactions, in connection with a controversial COVID-19 prevention case in the Danish city of Aarhus, illustrate the potentiality of reevaluating the often-static, pregiven conceptions of the relationship between public authorities and transnational communities.

From the currently competing global public debates, two main ideas on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to persist, particularly in relation to the explanations of the origin and spread of the virus. The first is the optimistic view that the virus is an all-encompassing natural and biological phenomenon. This reflection suggests that, with sincere effort and patience, humans will eventually and collectively overcome the latest trial. The second pessimistic turn connects the virus to societies and ethnicities (Verghese and John, 2020). This argument revolves around the point at which such societies not only represent the core source of the origin of the virus but also constitute its main spreading factor. This proposition encourages the increased control and discipline of such states, societies, and groups. However, evidence shows that the current pandemic remains unpredictable and impacts all societies regardless of background and status (Hepburn, 2020). This is close to what Jeffrey Alexander once suggested as “collective social trauma, which could unleash multiple conflicting social and political frames, claims, and contestations” (Alexander, 2013). In addition, the pandemic and ensuing debates remind us, as concerned inhabitants within this world, of the persistence of human vulnerabilities and diversities, as well as the prevailing universality—often forgotten or denied in the public discourse.

Introduction

In recent years, certain Danish politicians, comprising populists, liberals, and even social democrats, amplified by their voter constituencies, portrayed inhabitants as refugees and migrants as an alien group of people whose preoccupation with the construction of identity-based parallel societies might undermine Danish society culturally as well as its identity of national homogeneity. Populists have added that such migrant subversive societies emphasize their own specific culture and ethnicity, thereby establishing their own specific traditions and norms. In return, increasingly, it is not just segregating and isolating diverse ethnic communities from mainstream Danish society. Some even suggest that reluctant migrant societies could evolve into positions in which they could pose a national cultural threat to the well-being of society.

Similar cases from studies on Dutch politicians and how they portray migrants in demanding top-down cultural assimilation, Suvarierol (2012) identifies a relational process in which a kind of “nation-freezing” emerges:

Although societies have debated the dynamics of cultural belonging or not belonging for centuries, in recent times, following Huntington's well-known thesis of cultural and civilization clash following the end of the Cold War, diverse forms of political identity assertions, formations, and struggles have emerged. In relation to the specific debates on ethnic cultural formation and consolidation—particularly where and with whom migrants belong—the concept of cultural belonging and related images have since attained greater significance and priority in mainstream discourse, including in society.

Unlike other postwar interpretations, the Post Keynesian approach starts with a “mon¬etary” theory of production. Keynes introduced this terminology to emphasize the fact that money was not a “veil,” but a “real” factor determining production decisions in a modern economy. Not only was this approach innovative in its treatment of money, it built on Keynes’ original formulations of a number of basic propositions in the theory of finance. In addition to the well-known “finance motive,” Keynes employed his original theory of interest rate parity and carried out his analysis in terms of forward, futures, and options contracts. Economists working in the Keynesian tradition have usually cho¬sen to ignore these aspects of Keynes’ work, while finance theorists have incorporated them into their basic theory and instead concentrate on Keynes’ approach to probabil¬ity, dismissing it as based on a “subjective” approach.

This essay calls attention to Keynes’ contributions to the modern theory of finance that might serve in the development of a Post Keynesian approach to finance. Three areas are highlighted. The first is the treatment of expectations, and inevitably, the relationship between risk and uncertainty. The second is the importance of this diverse approach to expectations for the determination of prices, in particular of financial assets. The third is the reciprocal of the theory of asset price formation as found in the theory of interest, and in particular the explanation of the yield curve.

The theory of monetary production: the influence of changing views about the future

The characteristic feature is that “changing ideas about the future” have a determi¬nant influence on present decisions. The first requirement for a theory of monetary production is thus specification of the way the “changing ideas about the future” are formulated.

Introduction

In African fables and folktales, people depict the lion as an undeniable king and as the most dominant and intimidating creature in nature. The lion asserts a fierce hierarchy imposed upon less powerful creatures. Such unequal relationships often ensure that the lion has access to and monopolizes the highest and most invaluable spaces and resources. However, other smaller, smart creatures often bypass and resist outright submissions to domination. Though remaining anxious and fearful of a reckless confrontation with the superordinate by not willingly trespassing the lion's demarcations, certain creatures, individually or collectively, mobilize resources for perseverance. Occasionally, the lion demands not only an unbalanced share of bounties but also additional requirements for sustaining the imbalance, hereunder the caring of domination entitlements. In one occasional encounter, a lion got sick and was called homage by other creatures. Among other things, the fox refrained from complying with this disposition. When the lion inquired about sidestepping, the fox responded, “I would have come straight away, if I did not see a lot of tracks going in but none coming out.” Though the powerful might often designate and accumulate a “lion's share” of collective resources, actual unintended processes intervene within a complex dialectical relationship—including potential reluctance and scrutiny from often subordinate constituents.

The application of an animal analogy illustrating existing struggles and perseverance under imbalanced power relationships might seem superficial and exaggerated in comparison to the realities of the lives of transnational communities. However, all living creatures exist in situations of inequalities and subordination, resting on differences in power, unfair distributions, and the potential scarcity of resources. According to Aristotle and other classics, humans are thinking political animals (Willingham and Riener, 2019). For Arendt and other modern political theorists, the social animal conception fits the human condition better (Arendt, 2013). Others have modified such propositions by portraying humans as linguistic animals (Steiner, 2008). More recently, postmodern critical scholars profiled humans not just as thinking, social, political, and linguistic creatures but also probably as a city and urbanized sociopolitical agents (Derrida, 2008). It is certain that humans combine and balance the natural side of their beings with the ethical and moral dimensions of their existence. On the one hand, within such complexities, desires, unguided energetic impulses, and sometimes aggressions might sustain the human quest for power and prestige.

Introduction

According to Kenya's Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) (2012), historical injustice means those harms and wrongs committed by individuals, groups, and institutions, including rulers and regime elite, against other individuals and groups who may be dead but whose descendants are alive. The descendants could be individuals or groups of all kinds deserving of recognition or acknowledgment for their suffering and should as such be compensated. The CRA goes further to state that the historical injustice narrative speaks of a society's deviation from or distortion of the normal living of a people. The idea of recognition of the suffering of victims of historical injustices is important in the process of redressing the wrongs. The recognition of the minority and marginalized in Kenya's Constitution is significant because it underscores the basic humanity and subjectivity of the victims denied by the perpetuation of inhumanity against them. Recognition is, of course, built into the act of restoring or compensating someone for the harm suffered (CRA 2012). This chapter focuses on this question of historical injustices with particular emphasis on the land question, which is perhaps the most controversial and most emotive issue in the country given how skewed land is distributed and considering its significance to the livelihoods of the majority of Kenyans and to the national political economy, from precolonial to contemporary times.

The notion of historical injustices in Kenya is rooted in the country's experience with colonialism and imperialism but extends into postcolonial governments. Different communities in Kenya had varied encounters with Arab imperialism and colonial occupation. At the Coast, for instance, Arabs alienated the Indigenous people from their land. For its part, the colonial government equally dispossessed Kenyans of their land in the process of creating the “White Highlands” as detailed in Chapter 2. During the colonial period, expropriation of land was achieved through various laws, ordinances, and promulgations, including the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 on land ownership and the Native Trust Bill of 1926 restricting Africans to Native Reserves (see Chapter 2). These realities raised the profile of land ownership and inequalities of the same. Historical injustices related to land continue to linger and continue to be a source of conflict.

Irving Fisher is frequently credited, in the General Theory, in articles written immediately after its publication, and in private correspondence, by Keynes as having been an important influence on his work. These influences refer to two points: Keynes’ treatment of money as a real factor in the determination of economic equilibrium and Keynes’ concept of the marginal efficiency of capital.

For example in “Alternative theories of the rate of interest”, one of a number of articles published in 1937 to distinguish his position, Keynes indicates the authors who most influenced his work: “I regard Mr Hawtrey as my grandparent and Mr Robertson as my parent […] I might also adopt […] Wicksell as my great-grandparent, […] I find, looking back, that it was Professor Fisher who was the great-grandparent who first influenced me strongly towards regarding money as a “real” factor” (JMK: XIV, pp. 202–3, n. 2). In “The Theory of the Rate of Interest”, published in a Festschrift for Fisher, Keynes writes: “I have thought it suitable to offer a short note on this subject in honour of Irving Fisher, since his earliest and latest contributions have been concerned with it, and since during the whole thirty years that I have been studying economics he has been the outstanding authority on this problem” (JMK: XIV, p. 101, n. 1). Indeed, it is in this same article that Keynes set out the difference between his own approach and that of traditional theory in terms of money being a “real” variable in his own theory: “Put shortly, the orthodox theory maintains that the forces which determine the com¬mon value of the marginal efficiency of various assets are independent of money […] My theory, on the other hand, maintains that this is a special case and that […] almost the opposite is true …” (Ibid., p. 103).

The second area of Fisher's influence appears in the following footnote in the same article; Keynes reconfirms an affirmation originally made in the General Theory, credit¬ing Fisher with “The […] “marginal efficiency of capital” […] first introduced by Irving Fisher in his Theory of Interest (1930¬¬ ), under the designation “the rate of return over cost”. This conception of his is, I think, the most important and fruitful of his recent sugges¬tions” (Ibid.).

Introduction

After a long period of single-party authoritarianism, first de facto between 1969 and 1982, then de jure between 1982 and 1992, Kenya returned to multiparty politics in 1992. This was a consequence of concerted efforts for political reform that facilitated the 1991 repeal of Section 2(A) of the Kenyan Constitution, introduced in 1982 to make the country a single-party state by law. It took a further two decades of activism before a new more progressive constitution was adopted in 2010, further advancing the cause of democracy in the country. Within the context of the new multiparty political dispensation, elections have been held regularly after every five years——the first in 1992 then, in 1997, 2002, 2007, 2013, 2017, and 2022. The timing of the 2013 elections (which should have been held in 2012) was affected by the implementation of the 2010 constitution that ushered in the country's second republic, which provided for a system of 47 devolved county governments, each with its own executive and legislative institutions.

This chapter examines these multiparty elections as democratic processes, with particular focus on presidential and parliamentary elections. It argues that of all these elections, only the 2002 election can be adjudged to have been free and fair. The rest of the elections were so replete with political corruption and all manner of electoral shenani-gans as to make them a mockery of any sense of fairness and credibility. The worst of them all was the 2007 election whose blatant rigging occasioned so much violence that pushed the country to the brink of collapse, only saved by external intervention given the country's strategic importance in great power geopolitics. Similarly, blatant manipulation of the 2017 presidential election saw it nullified by Kenya's Supreme Court, necessitating a rerun that was boycotted by the opposition presidential candidate, Raila Odinga. This rendered the legitimacy of President Uhuru Kenyatta's second term tenuous at most, nonexistent at worst.

Democracy, Political Parties, and Elections: A Conceptualization

The idea of democracy can be conceptualized at three levels—the abstract, the practical, and the concrete levels. At the abstract level, democracy is an intellectual creation, a mentally visualized reality postulated as a model of the possible and desirable in matters of social coexistence and the governance of society (Gitonga 1987).

The scientific study on migration can be dated back at least to Ernst Georg Ravenstein's studies in the 1880s. From these early steps, the understanding of migration was somewhat linear. Basically it was assumed that people moved from one place to another. End of story. Over the decades, different explanatory models were developed showing how economic structures were decisive for people's decisions to move. First through quite simplistic push-pull models, later through household economics and choices. Despite the change of analytical unit, the understanding of migration as such remained the same. The last decades have given us more nuanced or sophisticated perspectives, such as attempts to understand the transnational dimensions of migration (compared to understanding international migration solely as the movement from one nation-state to another). The transnational perspective calls for a new perspective on migration and settlement, which argues that the traditional approaches social scientists use to understand individuals who move and settle abroad no longer are suitable for understanding moving populations in an increasingly complex world. The transitional turn implies that sociocultural groups can no longer be seen as territorially defined but rather are defined through migrations. At the same time, it opens for a new global ethnography. The German sociologist Thomas Faist makes a bridge between globalization studies and migration studies when he developed the notion of transnational social spaces. The present book by Abdulkadir Osman Farah stands on the shoulders of this long line of work. Coning the notion Aarhusomali exactly carves out the contours of a transnational social space. Farah writes about this space with an emic insight. Belonging not only to the Somali community in Aarhus but also as an academic and community organizer, he blends knowledge and participation to provide a rich account of transnational encounters and connections as they play out, are formed, and are reshaped in the context of Aarhus, Denmark. His account of this particular transnational community addresses different scales and governance levels. He investigates how the Somali community mobilizes access to public opportunities, and how civic mobilization is shaped in relation to sociopolitical conditions within both Aarhus, Denmark, and Somalia.

Har Gobind Khorana did not know when he was born. “The correct date of my birth is not known,” he wrote in 1968, continuing: “that [the date] shown on documents is January 9, 1922.” We do not know where that date came from. Though the family owned some ancestral land, his parents were poor, and Indians of that era and from that economic background rarely kept exact records of births or other such events. Not unexpectedly, no childhood photograph of Khorana is known to exist, and the few stories that are known about his childhood may well be apocryphal rather than a record of facts.

Khorana was born in Raipur, then a village of about a hundred people near the ancient city of Multan in Punjab in what is now Pakistan. The village was near what is now Kabirwala; otherwise, it has disappeared from maps though there are people still living in the area. None of Khorana's family remains there today. During the time of India's Partition in 1947 and the violent chaos that followed, they had all migrated to India, initially mainly to Delhi. Other than being Khorana's birthplace, nothing of significance has been recorded of Raipur.

According to his grandnephew, Alok Khorana: “family lore speaks of a mischievous child who liked to steal sugarcane from the sugarcane fields. Gobind described our ancestral home as consisting of a kitchen and bedrooms in one corner, with a courtyard housing cows and horses on the opposite end.” The family is believed to have owned that ancestral home for centuries. As far as can be told, the ancestral home does not survive. The family lost all their landed property during Partition as was typical for Hindus and Sikhs who fled Pakistan and Muslims who fled India.

Gobind's father, Ganpat Rai Khorana, was a patwari, that is, a village agricultural taxation clerk at the lowest level of the administrative system of British-ruled India. We know little about Ganpat Rai, except that he insisted on educating all his children. Khorana later recalled: “Although poor, my father was dedicated to educating his children and we were practically the only literate family in the village.”

1. Keynesian Stabilisation Policy and Deficit Spending

In conditions in which economic debate is dominated by the “New Keynesian” Economics and New Macroeconomics and governments claim that they can do nothing to remedy the enduring conditions of recession in the industrialised countries because of the excessive size of their budget deficits it seems pure folly to discuss the role of “Keynesian” policy to further economic growth. But, as the current recession persists, pressures build for something to be done, and as Dennis Robertson noted of highbrow opinion, if you stand in one place long enough it comes back round to you. It thus seems appropriate to recall a number of generally overlooked aspects of Keynes’ approach to economic policy so that if like the hunted hare, opinion does come this way again, it might be diverted from past errors.

The first problem is to define Keynes’ economic policy views. Even before Keynes published the General Theory proposals for public works financed by public debt to com¬bat the depression were promoted by a wide range of economists of various political per¬suasion. Public spending as an anti-cyclical policy tool was part of the economic legacy of the Hoover administration, and Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign was based on balancing the budget (providing Ronald Reagan with cutting quotations for the same purpose). Something more precise than deficit spending is required.

2. Offensive Policy to Cure an Existing Depression Keynes supported those who proposed deficit spending, but made a sharp distinction between what I will call “defensive” and “offensive” economic policy. The latter relates to the policy to apply in depressed conditions, while the former is to be ever-present in order to provide a defence against depressions.

On the offence Keynes tried to shock received views by suggesting such schemes as burying jars filled with banknotes in order to dig them up again. Many critics did not notice that although this was “make-work”, at least it was “work” and not an entitle¬ment or a handout. They also failed to notice that Keynes quickly added that such schemes were rather foolish, and that the “make-work” should better be “real” work on things that might actually serve some useful purpose such as schools, hospitals and the like.

The subject of the transnational movement of people, whether voluntary or, as in so many cases, forced, is now one of the central issues confronting not only global governance but also local politics and cultural attitudes in the societies where migrants manage to settle. This valuable book takes up this issue through a careful and sensitive case study of one particular instance to such movement and settlement – that of Somali migrants to Denmark. Their presence, in a country and climate very different from their homeland, raises numerable issues, not only for the situation of refugees and asylum seekers in Denmark, but today throughout much of Europe. These issues, which the author contextualizes in his case study of the city of Aarhus, include not only the inevitable issues initially of employment and social and cultural integration but also those of the routes to citizenship and the impact of immigration on local public policies, which have to be revised to confront questions of housing, language learning, social security, and of course considerations of social acceptance in the new host community. But what gives the book an added edge is that the author, while providing a detailed case study of the Somali community in Aarhus, contextualizes this in a much wider frame-work of the now global issues of local transnational encounters, the politics of citizenship and forced repatriations, and the diplomatic relationships of Denmark to Somalia and the development aid concerns that this provokes. Many migrant studies focus on issues of reception – of how migrants and perceived and assimilated (or not) into local communities far removed geographically and culturally from their places of origin. The originality of this book is that it deals not only with this level of analysis (and provides rich insights into the situation of the daily lives of the Somali community in Denmark), but puts these issues in the much larger framework of citizenship in a globalized world, transnational civic mobilization and mechanisms for the support of refugees (and potential ones), and the efforts by migrant communities to improve their own image in the eyes of receiving societies.

The political story of Kenya captured in the foregoing nine chapters is the story of much of postcolonial Africa and, perhaps, the postcolonial world elsewhere in the Global South. Particularly reminiscent of the regimes of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya are those of Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe as well as those of Kamuzu Banda in Malawi, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Abdou Diouf in Senegal, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny and his successors in Ivory Coast. Paul Biya's regime in Cameroon is even worse. In power since 1982, Biya apparently spends more time per year living abroad than in the country he (mis)leads, even as the country burns under a nasty politically instigated ethno-regional conflagration. With regard to Kenya, in light of the foregoing analysis, the pertinent question, as the epilogue to the volume, remains what the future prospects of the country are. Toward this end, a few conclusions can be drawn in an attempt to address this question as elaborated in the ensuing two sections. First is a negative prognosis followed by a more positive outlook on the country's future prospects. The chapter ends with a note on some significant paradoxes inherent in the political development of postcolonial Kenya.

A Negative Prognosis

In the first place, it is noteworthy that the betrayal of anticolonial nationalism discussed in Chapter 3 has defined the nature of Kenyan society politically, socially, and economically, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The notion of willing-seller-willing-buyer as the basis for the disposal of land in the “White Highlands” after independence defined a major historical injustice that remains to this day (see Chapter 7). It resulted in a tiny minority of the Kenyan political elite acquiring the land that was forcefully taken away from Kenyans by White settlers, leaving the majority of Kenyans dispossessed by this colonial heist landless in the postcolonial dispensation. Given the agrarian-based nature of Kenyan livelihoods, this reality explains the extreme income inequality in Kenya, one of the worst in the world. Of the five presidents Kenya has had so far (1963–2024), only Mwai Kibaki attempted to address this issue. Kibaki set up the Ndung’u Land Commission to probe into irregular and illegal allocation of land in Kenya since independence.