It is Time!

                                                Contents

Ujamaa began its work in January 2001 but got its official registration in September of the same year. The genesis of Ujamaa Center lay in the restlessness borne out of the moment of need and opportunity in Kenya that needed an organized response as the ballast of cooperation activity continued to fall from precipice to precipice. Kenya has and continues to undergo great change in perspective. Kenyans have lost faith in the government and are increasingly becoming more and more critical of the other centers of civic mobilisation. Whether this trend is driven by the lack of a specific character of the civil society, government or the private sector or lack of known standards and priorities to which the leadership of these three pillars of society oblige and comply with is not useful scholarship. What is useful and true is that the character of the dominant mainstream ideologies are deceptive and can only lead to exploitation. Ujamaa Center was thus founded as an experiment in spirituality and volunteerism, an experiment in constructing alternative systems to these mainstream ideologies. The Center is registered in Kenya as a not for profit, non-governmental organization.

Too often community development is seen purely to be about programs, five-year plans, sets of activities, which can be quantified and reported. Village level workers therefore often find themselves under pressure to achieve global and national goals within given time periods which forces them to employ less democratic methods to speed up programs. Ujamaa takes a different approach. For us community development becomes a crusade, a cause to which one must be deeply committed. Community development for us is not neutral it carries an emotional charge. It is dedicated to progress as a philosophy not science. We view progress with reference to certain values and goals within a given political and social system. Community development is thus a movement institutionalized through organizational structure and accepted procedure. Development for us relies on devotees and has its charismatic leaders who are forthright about it. Participation is active and driven by the community almost spontaneously. Where the spontaneity is not forthcoming we in the Center share the view that it is our responsibility to stimulate and arouse it in order to secure active and enthusiastic response to the movement in order to have all forms of betterment. In the Coast of Kenya many agree that it is time to take on this understanding. The purpose of this booklet is to introduce you to Ujamaa, its philosophy and its programs.

Our goal is to challenge, through organised social action the entrenched systemic exploitation of local communities and the entrenched social inequities in the coast of Kenya to which there is growing awareness. Ujamaa’s strategy is to implement vibrant programs that effect the greatest change in the lives of communities and their organisations in Kenya. We emphasise on facilitating relationships, which capitalise on the use of alternative systems and spirituality in order to build social and community capital. The first phase of this effort is based in the Coast but we hope the learning from this pilot phase will be replicated in other parts of the country.

The Coast of Kenya has a history, social structure and economic character that differs strikingly from the rest of Kenya. It is a region that is founded on regional, racial and religious divisions that have made it vulnerable to manipulation from the rest of Kenya the very reason why the state has generally failed to address key development issues in the region. Political patronage is therefore the main cause of economic stagnation in the region. As patronage resources have continued to dwindle over the years, less controllable forces have been unleashed on society since the late 90s that at one stage led to land violence in Likoni in 1997 in the South Coast.

The socio-culturally heterogeneous society known for its politics of cultural pluralism since the early days when upcountry Kamba traders, Mijikenda farmers, Swahili, Arabs and several others coexisted long before imperial colonialism is now in danger. Also on the decline are Kenya’s earliest and still most impressive gains by labour unions that the coast is also known for. The fundamental of Ujamaa Center’s restlessness was founded on the tragedies suffered by the coast people.

As we traversed the province in our search for alternatives we came across more and more evidence of exploitation of natural resources by the few leding to the marginalisation of the many, unemployment and hunger. People had no access to the sea and its rich bed, land, natural crop, parks, sanctuaries and forests. It is from this experience that we began to understand the root of disintegration of the coastal society and economy. We had to do something to change this situation.

“To be the Ultimate Center for the study of the practice of Alternative Systems in Kenya”

Our Goal
To implement vibrant programs that will effect the greatest change in the lives of communities and their organisations in Kenya’s Coast Region based on relationships which capitalise on the use of alternative systems and spirituality in order to build social capital

We are convinced that there is need for a profound change in human attitudes. This is essential to the survival of the three pillars of governance in Kenya: these attitudes have a lot to do with the earth, the community, and nationhood and truly to life itself. Actual needs of our own societies must become the locus of our actions and interventions.  The people of Kenya must acquire the capacity to institute organized resistance to various violations of the humanist aspirations. Communities must ask hard questions about forces in our society that commit grave injustices upon humanity. We must concern ourselves with so much indifference, lack of commitment, self-centeredness, and resistance to personal change as a prerequisite for greater change. Civic and political activity must be based on a council system that emphasizes coordination by mechanisms of shared moral codes, force of habit and custom. Apart from these the center rejects the rationalized bureaucratic authority that lacks an organic connection between its structural logic and peoples’ mythologies, ambitions, hopes and metaphors of governance.

In our work we question the industrial economy that evidence shows has a vested interest in keeping people out of their natural resources. We examine why our government remains a prisoner of the dominant worldview through which it colludes with the interest group that retains the lion’s share of national wealth for itself. The community’s socio-economic and cultural existence we believe is symbiotically tied to their natural capital. Yet to this day much of the best agricultural land remains in the hands of absentee landlords from the minority racial groups as most of the local communities remain de jure squatters.  What this has done is to ensure that long-term agricultural improvement is absent. Cultivation is mostly temporary, substantial portions of land even if settled appear ‘idle’ and this explains the appetizing condition for land hungry occupiers from up-country. The appropriation of resources that follows from this is untenable.

For us the real culprit is the state whose political economy is such that the exploitation of natural resources minerals, forests, quarries, etc is crucial to its growth. The state sees natural resources only as instruments towards the agenda of industrial growth and economic development-sources of revenue. This is what has led to the systemic disempowerment and exploitation of the coast peoples (by the state, non-coastals and powerful locals) thereby denying them control over the natural livelihood resources such as forest, land and water.

We therefore founded our center as an intermediary that would build citizen awareness and help organize civil society at the local level in order:

§   To check the exploitation of natural resources, which would otherwise deplete resources, marginalize people, raise unemployment and increase migration.
§   To ensure the restoration of coastal land ownership where this has been denied, assert identity as an important tool of empowerment and build indigenous leadership to propel the empowerment process among the diverse local communities in the coast.
§   To stop the easy acquisition of land for private and public purposes which has led to the displacement on many people over the years by various development projects while others alienated their land due to indebtedness, mortgage, deception in land transfer not to mention the infirmities of the legal system which is strongly weighted against the poor
§   To announce the undeclared emergencies at the local level such as the fact that natural crops like coconuts, and cashew nuts, the kayas (natural forests), the sea resources that the coast people should benefit from are out of reach of most dwellers

Our approach is to make the voices from the micro sphere reach the macro policy-making world. This will be done through mobilizing and organizing opinion against an economic framework that is antithetical to the interests of the poor. The Center has launched a capacity building programme that aims to build awareness and strengthen local village leadership around the common cause of a new resource exploitation framework. Village level activists emerging from the capacity building programme should acquire ability to solve problems and start holistic alternative, sustainable community projects to uplift the people. This process should spur the emergence of a mass based (non-registered people’s organization) led by committed local men and women that can articulate the aspirations of the deprived and the dispossessed and offer a united voice to the fragmented struggle for livelihood rights at state level in order to effect long term change. Land redistribution, access to forestland and implementation of social legislation is the ultimate object of this community building work. We work with the poor and the broader civil society in order to build strong and socially sustainable institutions. Collective action for us is central to challenging irresponsible and selfish capital and so our message to our partners, local communities and other stakeholders is that we must embrace processes rather than events and short-term projects.

Launched in January 2003 with support from the Heirich Boll Foundation, the overall goal of this project was to support as well as create the productive potential of the poor through the creation of viable agribusiness alternatives for sustainable poverty reduction at the local level. For this to work it became necessary that community access to resources is improved, markets are developed and training in practice oriented vocational activities and a certain level of entrepreneurial capacity is ensured. The core purpose is to work for the generation of more income opportunities by spearheading the establishment of agro-industries that utilize local natural resources.

This pioneer project began by carrying out a baseline survey on viable agro industry initiatives in Kwale, Mombasa and Kilifi targeting the Center’s local partners. Following this study a training workshop was conducted on on aspects of entrepreneurial skills and product development (suitable technical training and mobilization of inputs to commence work). The communities initiated projects in beekeeping, vegetable production and agro forestry from the Support Fund that was available to them to implement their community action plans. The project also led to the launch of a quarterly newsletter to disseminate information and exchange with farmers, experts and agencies. Plans to scale up the initiative and generate ongoing learning have made the center establish as an innovation center where cooperative marketing, business support services and product development can happen.

The communities of Bayamose in Kilifi, Tsunza in Mombasa and Tiwi in Kwale have each undertaken to continue the cooperation with experts/agencies that the project has accessed them such as KARI and KEFRI. Research, training and consultancy capability is now available to Bayamose Development Committee, Rome for Sustainable Development and Tiwi Development Forum all institutions formed as a result of this project. These institutions have made networking, coordination and cooperation in terms of exchange of expertise, experience, pooling of resources, cooperative marketing and production and joint programmes much more meaningful and easy. Peer learning among the groups and intermediaries has also improved.