Harambee, Swahili for "pulling together," was inherited by Daniel arap Moi from Jomo Kenyatta as a community self-help model for building schools, clinics, and infrastructure. Under Moi, it transformed into a political theater and fundraising machine, weaponized to demonstrate loyalty, extract resources from businesses seeking government favor, and project an image of participatory development that masked deepening state failure to provide basic services. The harambee system under Moi was not grassroots development; it was elite performance art, where politicians competed to pledge the largest donations at events attended by the President, using state resources or funds extracted from the private sector through implicit or explicit coercion.
Kenyatta had launched harambee in the 1960s as a nationalist alternative to colonial dependency, encouraging communities to pool labor and funds to build schools and health centers while the government focused on larger infrastructure. The model had genuine developmental impact in some areas, fostering community ownership and filling gaps in state capacity. But even under Kenyatta, harambee had political dimensions; contributions were tracked, and communities that demonstrated loyalty through fundraising received government support, while those that did not were neglected.
Moi expanded harambee's scale and political function. By the 1980s, harambee events were national spectacles, broadcast on state media, where cabinet ministers, MPs, and businesspeople pledged millions of shillings to projects, often in the President's presence. The pledges were rarely about the projects themselves; they were demonstrations of political loyalty and wealth. The amounts pledged often bore no relation to actual need or project viability. A primary school might receive pledges totaling KES 10 million when KES 2 million would suffice, while a hospital in a neighboring district received nothing because no politician saw political advantage in supporting it.
The sources of harambee funds were dubious. Politicians raided government budgets, diverting funds meant for their ministries or constituencies to harambees where Moi would be present. Businesspeople, particularly those seeking government contracts, licenses, or land allocations, pledged large sums knowing that generosity at harambees was noted and rewarded. The Goldenberg fraudsters, for instance, made conspicuous harambee contributions, laundering stolen state funds through charitable donations that enhanced their legitimacy and political protection. The system created a circular flow: steal from the state, pledge at harambees, gain political favor, secure more opportunities to steal.
The Kalenjin regions, Moi's ethnic base, were disproportionate beneficiaries of harambee largesse. Schools, clinics, and roads in Rift Valley constituencies received pledges that dwarfed those in Luo, Kikuyu, or coastal areas, unless those areas had politicians who could mobilize resources or the President was visiting. The harambee system thus reinforced ethnic inequality under the guise of community development. The Nyayo philosophy framed this as rewarding loyalty; critics saw it as ethnic favoritism dressed up as self-help.
The public performance aspect was critical. Moi would arrive at a harambee by helicopter, greeted by thousands of supporters bused in by local politicians. The event would feature speeches praising Moi's leadership, traditional dances, and the ceremonial handing over of checks, often oversized prop checks for photographic purposes. Moi would deliver a speech emphasizing unity, self-reliance, and gratitude to those who contributed. The media would report the event as evidence of Moi's popularity and the government's commitment to development, omitting the coercion and corruption underlying the spectacle.
Not all pledges were honored. A culture emerged where politicians pledged amounts they never intended to pay, knowing that the publicity value came from the pledge itself, not delivery. Communities that built schools or clinics based on promised harambee funds often found themselves abandoned mid-construction when pledges went unpaid. The result was a landscape dotted with incomplete projects: school buildings without roofs, clinics without equipment, roads half-graded. The harambee model's rhetoric of community ownership became a cruel joke; communities bore the costs and risks while elites reaped political rewards.
The economic impact was redistributive, but regressive. Harambee shifted the cost of public service provision from the state to communities and individuals, a form of privatization that deepened inequality. Wealthy areas could mobilize resources for quality schools and clinics; poor areas could not. The structural adjustment programs that cut government spending on education and health coincided with increased reliance on harambee, creating a system where the state retreated from service provision while demanding that communities fill the gap. The burden fell heaviest on the poor, who contributed labor and meager savings to projects that often failed.
International donors and NGOs, observing harambee's dysfunction, tried to introduce more structured community-based development models. But the harambee system was politically entrenched; Moi resisted any reforms that would reduce his ability to use it for patronage and control. Donors' attempts to bypass harambee by funding projects directly through NGOs were met with suspicion and, in some cases, obstruction by local KANU officials who saw it as undermining their authority.
By the 1990s, as political liberalization created space for criticism, opposition politicians and civil society condemned harambee as corrupt and inefficient. The independent press published exposés on unpaid pledges and misused funds. The churches, some of which had benefited from harambee donations, began questioning whether the system aligned with Christian principles of justice and equity. But harambee persisted through Moi's presidency and beyond; it was too useful as a political tool to abandon.
The harambee legacy is visible across Kenya today: incomplete schools, underfunded health centers, and a political culture where displays of wealth and generosity matter more than systemic solutions to poverty. Moi did not invent harambee, but he perfected its weaponization, transforming Kenyatta's community self-help model into a system that extracted resources from the public and private sectors, redistributed them based on political loyalty, and left ordinary Kenyans bearing the costs of services their government should have provided. Harambee under Moi was development theater, not development, and the stage props of oversized checks and presidential helicopters could not hide the reality that the system enriched the few at the expense of the many.
See Also
- Nyayo Philosophy
- Moi and the Kalenjin
- Goldenberg Scandal
- Structural Adjustment Programs Kenya
- Moi Economic Policy 1978-1990
- Moi Era Corruption
- Patronage and Resource Distribution
- Political Rallies as Performance
Sources
- Widner, Jennifer A. The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya: From "Harambee!" to "Nyayo!". University of California Press, 1992. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520073937/the-rise-of-a-party-state-in-kenya
- Ng'ethe, Njuguna, and David K. Leonard. "The Political Economy of Harambee in Kenya." In The Politics of Service Delivery in Democracies: Better Access, Greater Equity, or Both? edited by Steven Friedman. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137398413_5
- Branch, Daniel. Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011. Yale University Press, 2011. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300141467/kenya/