Perils and Pragmatics of Critique: Reading Barack Obama Sr's 1965 Review of Kenya's Development Plan

Abstract

Barack Obama Sr's 1965 critique of the Kenya government's Sessional Paper number 10: 'African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya' reads today as remarkably shrewd and prescient - shrewd in its efforts to navigate the perilous political differences among the major figures and forces of the day including Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, as well as the false securities of ideologies, in this case the messy, irresolvable debates over the relative values of African socialism, African tradition, and capitalism ... prescient in its warnings regarding gratuitous privatisation of productive resources and public goods; excessive disparities in wealth; and uneven regional development. Indeed, he makes an almost forgotten case for the African state (and for good governance, progressive taxation, and effective regulation of private investment). The 1965 article is an improbable yet extraordinarily acute rehearsal of the best critiques of structural adjustment (and its...