Kenya vs. NGOs: Round 3?

by Cecelia Lynch

States and NGOs generally have a fraught relationship: the state relies on them to provide (some, but never enough of) the social services it does not want to spend money on, but NGOs have their own agendas which are often at odds with those of the state. Kenya’s current debate over a proposed amendment to the Public Benefits Organizations Aid Act of 2013 represents a particularly challenging round in this difficult relationship, and there does not appear to be a completely “good” side to the story.

Since neoliberalism became the only game in town for most African governments in the early 1990s (after the end of the Cold War), the proliferation of transnational, national and local NGOs has continued apace. NGOs and their external donors have frequently become major players in state governance; but at the same time states, including Kenya, moved to regulate them, beginning in the early 1990s.

This was Round 1 of the post-Cold War NGO order. Attempts to regulate NGOs masked a Catch-22: they were quickly becoming the preferred channel of foreign aid for Western governments, and African states did not want to cut off their sources of funding, but their explosive growth and the requirements of their state donor backers represented yet another form of external control over and infringement on state sovereignty. In an era in which cuts to government spending were being imposed by the IMF and World Bank, many of the socio-economic gains of the early post-colonial period were being reversed. The result was more privatization, layoffs, and increased poverty – seemingly requiring the presence of NGOs. The choice for many seemed to be clear: welcome the NGOs but keep an eye on them.

By the mid-2000s, faith-based NGOs and their religious networks alone were said to provide up to 70% of health-care/secondary education in Kenya. The prevalence and complete saturation of NGOs into Kenyan society was evident to me as a (white) Westerner conducting research in the country in the mid-to-late 2000s, especially when people would stop me on the way to interviews with NGO representatives to ask a) whether I worked for an NGO, and b) whether I had any jobs they could interview for. NGOs had become not only primary providers of socio-economic goods; they had also become major employers for the growing numbers of middle-class professionals (and those on the margins who cleaned their offices and tended their gardens). Clusters of NGO signs are evident in urban neighborhoods of Nairobi, as in many neighborhoods in cities across the continent, and are themselves clustered in areas near embassies, UN offices, and nice shopping malls, emphasizing in many cases their ex-pat nature and reliance on foreign state donors. Thus NGOs, often thought to provide social welfare to the very poor, were establishing themselves as providers of health and education to broader populations and as major conduits for success in cosmopolitan, professional careers.

NGOs enormous and apparently growing role as a middle-class professional employer is one of the main issues at stake in the current debate over the amendment to the Public Benefits Organizations Act. According to one estimate, up to 100,000 jobs could be cut if the amendment passes. Why, then, would the Kenyan government want to limit the amount of “foreign” funding for NGOs, if it cannot or will not take up the social welfare and employment slack?

The answer, apparently, is two-fold, and both “folds” are problematic. One part of the answer in Kenya is that, since the late 1990s, governments have worked with the U.S. in its “anti-terror” campaign, which means targeting Islamic NGOs for extra surveillance and sometimes expulsion. Another part of the answer is that Kenyan NGOs investigating the violence of 2007/2008, sometimes but not always with considerable support by transnational groups based in the U.S. and Europe, named officials in the Kenyan government itself as complicit.

The Kenyan government has generally been OK with NGOs that help it keep social unrest at bay by providing health and education services, even though the neocolonial implications might grate. But after the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, through the George W. Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and with the recent violence in Nairobi, northern Kenya and the coastal region, the government has been under pressure from the U.S. and, lately, Kenyan citizens, to act. Many local NGOs, both Kenyan and Somali, have increasingly had a choice of whether to try for funding from Western donors or those based in Middle Eastern and North African countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and for awhile, Libya. Muslim charities, in particular, for example those working with Somalis, are frequently rejected by Western donors but targeted by the Western/Kenyan security dragnet. This situation – targeting Islamic groups and NGOs – represents “round 2” of the ambivalent relationship between the Kenyan state and NGOs. The spiral of suspicion has increased in recent years with the government’s decision to intervene militarily in Somalia, which has provoked counterattacks from groups such as Al-Shabaab.

The government says its amendment to the Public Benefits Organizations Act — which represents a new “round 3” — is for security reasons; i.e., to prevent foreign infiltration and control of NGOs’ work. Many Kenyan journalists, however, note that the amendment will affect thousands of NGOs whose funding comes from Western sources that have helped implicate government officials in the violence of 2007, thus imperiling many more thousands of jobs. Their criticism of the government is apt, but perhaps is not the end of the story.

The Kenyan debate indicates the double-bind represented by the NGO world and the state in the context of neoliberalism and the war on terror today, and the problematic implications of each. The state wants the NGOs to keep running social services, and it tries to control their agendas but it cannot keep them under wraps. NGOs cannot run the state but they wield more power in it than they are frequently willing to admit. NGOs bring multiple and often conflicting agendas to the table, and those agendas get transformed by statist security as well as economic logics.

The current debate over the proposed amendment to the Public Benefits Organizations Act, in short, highlights the predicament of the Kenyan state vis-à-vis the neoliberal NGO world, the war-on-terror dragnet, and its own human rights failures. For NGOs and the state, this should be a time of reflection regarding where they are each positioned in terms of providing real social welfare to the citizens of Kenya, and where the state and Kenyan civil society can go in the future if they really want to work together to decide on common goals, unfettered by the objectives of external donors. Unfortunately, the moves on each side appear to be sliding over the most important questions of accountability to the most vulnerable Kenyans in addition to those of the rising middle class.

Cecelia Lynch is a professor of political science and director of the Institute for International, Global and Regional Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also co-editor of the CIHA Blog.