Prof. Peter Kagwanja (born August 8, 1963, in Rwathia location of Kangema Division, Murang’a County) is a
Kenyan academic who has widely consulted on
politics, governance and
geo-strategic issues. He is also the founding President and Chief Executive of the
Africa policy Institute, a Pan-African think-tank specializing in policy research on security, governance and strategic issues in Africa. As an academic émigré in the
United States of America, Europe and South Africa during the latter years of President Daniel arap Moi's regime, Kagwanja worked with numerous universities, intellectual networks and international research think-tanks, including the
International Crisis Group, where he served as a Pretoria-based regional director in Africa. He has written widely on
refugees,
counter-terrorism, and
youth and generational politics in Kenya.
Kagwanja is famous for his published intellectual works on the Mungiki youth movement, which is popularly demonized as a successor to the Mau Mau and a sharp reaction to the intense modernizing direction of the Agikuyu.[1] As one of Kenya’s youngest political thinkers and strategists, Kagwanja has become better known as an adviser to President Mwai Kibaki's government. He led the think-tank of Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU)during the watershed talks on a new constitution in Kenya’s lakeside town of Naivasha.[2] Kagwanja eventually became the Co-director of the National Secretariat set up by the Government to manage the campaign for a new constitution in the run up to the 4th August 2010 referendum.[3]
He has authored numerous professional articles and books, including, State of the Nation: South Africa in 2008 (2009) and Kenya’s Uncertain Democracy: The 2008 Post-Election Crisis (2010).
Peter Kagwanja was born on 8 August 1963 in Kenya-Njeru village, Rwathia location of Kangema Division, Murang’a County in central Kenya. But he was raised in Maragua town, 68 kilometers North of Nairobi. He attended primary education at the Catholic Church Mission School, Kianjiru-ini (1972–1978) before moving to Kirogo Secondary school (Murang’a) and Kangaru High School (Embu), where he obtained his Advanced level (‘A-Level’) Certificate. Kagwanja proceeded on with university education in 1985, when he secured a government scholarship to study at Kenyatta University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Education (Arts: History, Politics and Philosophy) in 1989. He immediately secured a scholarship from the Department of History and Government in the same University to pursue a Masters degree. He wrote a thesis entitled "Kwame Nkrumah's Theory and Practice of Labour and their Manifestation in the Kenyan Trade Unionism to 1966", graduating in 1994.
After a stint as a lecturer in history and politics at Moi University and researcher at Center for Refugee Studies at the same university, Kagwanja proceeded for further studies in America as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also obtained his doctorate in History, Politics and International law (Human Rights and humanitarian law). He wrote a dissertation titled "Unwanted in the 'white highlands': The politics of civil society and the making of a refugee in Kenya, 1902-2002."
Kagwanja began his academic career as a graduate Assistant at the Department of History and Government, Kenyatta University, Nairobi Kenya (1990-1) before moving to Moi University where he served as lecturer in Political Science and History and researcher at the Center for Refugee Studies in the University (1992–1998). Kagwanja moved to the United States as a J.W. Fulbright Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign (USA). While at Illinois, Kagwanja served as a fellow at the Center for African Studies and taught Modern African history. In the interim, he was a visiting fellow at the African Studies Centre at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands (2002), and a researcher with the Centre for International Cooperation, University of New York, on a multinational project on Regional Conflict formations.
From 2003, Kagwanja became an émigré in South Africa where he served as senior researcher on African Peace and Security with Safer Africa. He later served as research director with the International Crisis Group before joining the Human Science Research Council (HSRC) as Research Director (2006-7) and Executive Director of its Democracy and Governance Programme (2007–2008). During the period, he founded the Africa Policy Institute where he has served as President.
While working for think-tanks, Kagwanja maintained linkages with academic institutions. He served as Research Associate at the Department of Political Science, University of Pretoria; visiting professor of African Diplomacy at the Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa (2008–2010); external examiner with the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg; and a regular visiting scholar at Oxford University (UK) and Center for African Studies at Uppsala, Sweden. He has also served in the advisory board of flagship journals on African Affairs, including the African Affairs.
Kagwanja has received fellowships and grants from a spectrum of institutions and foundations: the J. W. Fulbright Staff Development Fellowship (1998–2000); University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) (2000–2001); Oxford University (April 2004, January; 2008) ; African Studies Center (ASC) University of Leiden, Netherlands (April- June, 2002). He has also received research grants from the International Development Research Center, IDRC (2007; 2008–2010); the Council for Social Science Research in Africa, CODESRIA (1991, 1994–96, 1999; 2002; 2004); Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway (1998–2000) and; Ford Foundation, Nairobi (2001).
Kagwanja has regularly served as an expert Consultant on policy, governance, security and strategic issues with African governments (Kenya & South Africa), African regional bodies (African Union, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD); the United Nations (Peace Building Commission, and the Office of Special Advisor on African Affairs) among others. Some of Kagwanja's recent books include State of the Nation: South Africa 2008 (2009); An Encumbered Regional Power: The Capacity Gap in South Africa’s Peace Diplomacy in Africa (2009), Kenya’s Uncertain Democracy: The 2008 Post-Election Crisis (2010).
As the Post-Cold War pro-democracy movement washed over Kenya in the late 1980s, Kagwanja emerged as part of the intellectual wing of the “Young Turks.” As a university student and later lecturer, he channelled his thoughts through the Daily Nation, Society, Financial Review (which was later outlawed and its editor, Peter Kareithi, forced into exile) and the Nairobi Law Monthly, whose pages and Editor-in-Chief, Gitobu Imanyara, became the boldest voice of change against one-party tyranny. As a junior lecturer teaching History and Politics at Moi University and a researcher in labour and policymaking in Africa, Kagwanja was a founding member and Moi University’s Representative to the National Committee of the University Academic Staff Union (UASU), formed in April 1993 as a successor to the University Staff Union (USU) that was proscribed in 1979. Together with Dr. Korwa Adar (Chairman), Dr Kilemi Mwiria (Secretary General) and other UASU organizers, Kagwanja was sacked in November 1993 following UASU’s 1993-1994 nationwide strike by lecturers from Egerton, Nairobi, Moi and Kenyatta Universities.
The failure of the UASU action pushed Kagwanja deeper into intellectual activism, joining civil society think-tanks such as the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) and intellectual networks like the Historical Association of Kenya and the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). As a research consultant and associate under its then Executive Directors Maina Kiai and Willy Mutunga, Kagwanja generated KHRC’s seminal research publications on political violence and the struggle for democracy and constitutional change in Kenya. As Secretary-General of the Historical Association of Kenya (1995–1998), serving under the tutelage of renowned historians, Bethwell Ogot and William Ochieng’, Kagwanja expanded scholarship on nationalism, identity politics and Kenya’s struggle for democracy. Kagwanja’s CODESRIA network goes back to 1991 when he secured its award to complete his Masters thesis, but deepened after the UASU strike when he joined the Council’s Governance Institute on “Institutions, Constitutions and Democracy in Africa” (1994) and its multi-national Working Groups on “Labour and Policy-Making in Africa” (1996–98) and “Globalization and Citizenship in Africa” (2001–2002).
Kagwanja is better known in the academic circles as the author of insightful works on generational politics particularly relating to the Mungiki movement. His research has highlighted the Mungiki as a social movement that emerged in the 1980s in the pristine rural parts of Kenya’s Rift Valley as part of the larger national resistance against the one-party authoritarianism of Daniel Moi’s era, before turning stridently violent upon its entry into the urban milieu.[4] In a 2006 article, "Power to Uhuru",[5] Kagwanja argued that Mungiki popularized a brand of generational politics based on Gikuyu traditional system of power transfer across generations (itwika) as an idiom of resistance and push for a change of guard from the old politicians to the ‘Uhuru generation’ (those born after Kenya’s independence in 1963). Despite the defeat of the Moi regime in the 2002 elections, Mungiki’s generation politics failed to deliver power to the youth, forcing some of its segments to adopt violent and criminal strategies for survival and for asserting youth power in politics. While Mungiki reportedly featured in the 2008 post-election violence,[6] Kagwanja argues that in the context of the diffused violence in the post-Moi era, Mungiki has come to refer more to ‘Kikuyu’ youth in the margins of political and economic power than to a known cohesive youth movement.[7]
As an émigré in South Africa from 2002, Kagwanja trained his career focus on African geo-politics in the context of regional and global security and governance. In November 2003, he took an appointment with Safer Africa, a Pretoria-based think-tank, as senior researcher on peace and security and head of its Africa Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) project aimed at supporting the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). Kagwanja became part of a burgeoning group of South Africa-based African intellectuals behind the transformation of Africa’s peace and security architecture weaved around the African Union, NEPAD and regional economic communities (RECS). Kagwanja took up appointment as director of Southern Africa project of the Brussels-based think-tank, the International Crisis Group, in 2003-2006. While here, Kagwanja generated reports and professional articles on policy-relevant research to drive advocacy especially on the crisis in Zimbabwe, Angola, Swaziland and Zambia and on Africa’s multilateral institutions, particularly the AU, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). In 2006, Kagwanja became the research director of the Democracy and Governance Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in Pretoria, becoming the Programme’s Executive Director in 2007 and its lead researcher on Africa. He also served as one of the editors of HSRC’s flagship annual publication, the State of the Nations and authored several monographs, chapters and articles on South Africa’s peace diplomacy in Africa.
Kagwanja became the “latest entrant” to President Kibaki’s team of advisors as the chief strategist for the Party of National Unity and “the intellectual…identified to manage the Kibaki succession” after 2009.[8] He emerged as an influential intellectual voice in Kenya’s public sphere following the release of the controversial Proposed Constitution of Kenya Draft by the Committee of Experts on Constitution Review (CoE) launched on 17 November 2009. He also steered the PNU think tank to the watershed constitutional talks during the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) retreat in the lakeside town of Naivasha in January 2010. The Naivasha retreat agreed an American-style Presidential system of government checked by a two-chamber parliament, a reformed judiciary. two-tier devolved structure consisting of 47 counties and a vibrant civil society.
Kagwanja’s writings were highly critical of the proposal for a divided executive with two centers of power. His stance philosophically derived from a radical critique of the power-sharing arrangement in the Grand Coalition government of President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga proposed by the team of African mediators led by former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan to resolve the 2008 post-election crisis. While arguing for a one center of executive power and an American-style presidential system, Kagwanja also advocated for strong checks and balances along Montesquieu's doctrine of separation of power between the various arms of government.
On devolution, he proposed the idea of 'developmental devolution’ largely inspired by Amartya Kumar Sen’s thesis: development as freedom, that stresses the transfer of resources to devolved structures as a bottom-up strategy of empowering the grassroots.
On 23 January 2010, Kagwanja wrote a strong defense of ‘developmental devolution' as an alternative to divisive Kenya-style ethnic federalism (Majimboism) widely blamed for the tribal violence in parts of the country. This builds up to his earlier critic of Majimboism in a paper co-authored with Willy Mutunga, “Peter Kagwanja and Willy Mutunga: Is Majimbo Federalism? Constitutional Debate in a Tribal Shark-Tank.”
On 11 May 2010, Kagwanja was appointed as a Co-director of the National Secretariat formed by President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to manage the campaign for Kenya's new constitution. Kagwanja and his team emerged victorious during the 4 August 2010 referendum with the "Yes" registering a resounding 70% of the popular vote. The constitution was promulgated on 27 August 2010, ushering in Kenya's Second Republic.
In June 2010, Kagwanja highlighted that ethnicity will play be a key factor in the Kibaki succession politics, drawing from his research on the Mau forest evictions and scenarios.[9] On Dec. 15 2010, the International Criminal Court(ICC) indicted six Kenyans in relation to the 2007/08 post-poll violence, among them Head of Public Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, Amb. Francis Muthaura. Kagwanja was listed among likely candidates to fill the powerful docket.[10]
Kagwanja has authored numerous opinion pieces, professional articles, books and book chapters. He is widely quoted for his works on youth, particularly the Mungiki--an outlawed youth group in Kenya. He has been in the editorial boards of leading professional journals, including African Affairs and Journal of African Elections.
