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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Biodiversity, Local Decentralisation and the Politics of neo-Patrimonialism in Kenya’s natural resource regime
| Panel |
26. Decentralising power and natural resource control: responses and perspectives
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| Paper ID | 171 |
| Author(s) |
Kisekka, Fred Ntale
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | As many tropical African countries labor to transfer powers relating to natural resource regime management, they are inherently held hostage by two covert evils; elite power capture and nested tenets patrimonial politics, ultimately defeating the true intended objectives of any decentralization program.
The focus of this paper is to examine how sub-nationalist politics that emerged within the post independence ruling party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU), government marked by high levels of ethnic heterogeneity and a history of political and economically privileged presidential cronies, benefited from the large tracks of national biodiversity resources, particularly forest belts, which considerably led to degeneration of the national biodiversity. I also argue that overgeneralization and over concentration of power in the hands of the ruling president and his cohorts contributed to this quagmire, characterized by interpersonal interchanges, social and political relations.
I use the term political patrimonialism to capture the imagery of glaring facets, social, economic and political bootstrap-relations that historically defined a shared political preference to the plurality of conventional politics and service delivery. These mosaic-like practices were each abhorred and confronted by strong hostile external forces from the underprivileged masses, university students and other related civil society activism. Though a parallel system of decentralization based on regional and provincial and district local governments were established to delegate powers, it was far from what the leadership style at the centre obtained.
Keywords: Biodiversity, Local decetralisation and Neo-Patrimonialism.
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