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emerging issues 221 Epilogue — Emerging Issues in Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of Ethnic Diversity in East Africa: Is Good Governance the Destiny? Ngeta Kabiri Introduction The essays in this volume raise pertinent issues on the question of ethnicity in Africa, East Africa and Kenya in particular. They address the question of the challenges and opportunities of ethnic diversity in Eastern Africa, with a view to understanding, supposedly, a malice that afflicts Africa with adverse consequences. The essays cover a wide range of themes, from the nature of ethnicity in Africa, including how it is a socio-political construct, to how it can be harnessed for socio-economic and political development in an attempt to build a harmonious multi-ethnic society. A number of issues emerge that are significant to an understanding of, and formulation of responses to, the question of ethnicity in Africa. There are issues on how to conceptualize ethnicity (including how it is to be investigated), the question of whether ethnicity is a project of the political elites or the elites are merely responding from pressures from below; the conditions under which ethnic tranquility can be secured; the incentive structures that can be put in place to alter the calculus of those who use ethnicity from employing ethnic mobilization as a tool of negotiating for status, power and resource allocation; the extent to which ethnicity can be deployed for positive economic outcomes, and whether the bulk of the above can largely be reduced to a question of governance. Each of the foregoing issues is highlighted below in light of what the chapters in this volume suggest, plus some insights from the wider literature in this field. On conceptualizing, and problems of investigating, ethnicity in Africa There seems to be a dominant view that ethnicity is a fluid phenomenon and that it is not always easy to define what it is. Moreover, there is a view that presets ethnicity as something not given (with the meaning that it can be constructed and deconstructed) (Mbatia et al, Munene, in this Volume— henceforth Vol.). Within this frame, there also emerges the point that there is a lot of shared characteristics amidst differences (see, for example, Schipper, 222 ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN EASTERN AFRICA Vol.). The question posed then is that of how the phenomenon of ethnicity can be studied and policy responses proposed if it is as ephemeral as the investigators purport it to be. Of interest from this perspective is the question whether those analyzing what they refer to as ethnic problems are actually referring to the same thing. In other words the question is how we can know ethnicity when we see it. Are we, for example, confronted by the same problem of investigation as when we are dealing with religious problems (where religious interests, beliefs and doctrines are cited as informing the behavior in question)? In the discussion on ethnicity in Kenya, many analysts and popular opinion refer to the disturbances of the 1990s and more recently, the 2008 upheaval as ethnic. Yet, as some in these papers indicate, there is also an attempt to refuse to read these events as ethnic. Odoyo (Vol.), for example, refers to them as state sponsored violence thereby representing a clear attempt to refuse to call them, unlike many other commentators, ethnic violence. Thus Odoyo suggests a way of conceptualizing ethnicity in a manner that is very similar to that enunciated by Ake (1993:4) who contends that: If ethnicity is manufactured at will and manipulated to serve any number of selfish purposes, then it is only an ‘object’, the case for calling it a cause of the numerous problems regularly attributed to it would not be sustainable. Conflicts arising from the construction of ethnicity to conceal exploitation by building solidarity across class lines, conflicts arising from appeal to ethnic support in the face of vanishing political legitimacy and from the manipulation of ethnicity to divide colonized people, are not ethnic problems but problems of a particular political dynamics which just happens to be pinned on ethnicity. (see also Keefer (2010) on the possibility of ethnicity effects being a by-product of other functions of the political environment.) This suggests, therefore, a need to conceptualize what is called the ethnic problem in Africa politically rather than simply in terms of what is visibly observable. To this extent then, some like Ngugi (2009) have suggested a materialistic conception of tribalism that issues only two tribes: the halves and the have-nots. This conceptualization...

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