'Echoes of War' debacle has shred Ruto's creative economy agenda

The National Drama and Film Festivals would ordinarily pass as a thrilling season for art lovers and a moment for young people to demonstrate their raw and pure talent. In many such festivals, some actors have not only found their breakthrough into stardom, but also have had their careers and livelihoods redefined.

However, this year, it seems we have a found an unintended new version of heroes courtesy of government functionaries meddling in the Butere Girls High School drama piece titled ‘Echoes of War’. From the face of it, many things do not make sense as to why senior people in government would choose to meddle with such a play late into the festivals.

If anyone wanted to silence this perceived radical form of expression and demonstration of the evils of our current public leadership, why wait until the play has gone through the lower layers of the competitions to the national level? Is it not common sense that by the time it is at the national level thousands of fans of the festivals have already watched and recorded it through different digital platforms?

Besides, by the time it is at the national level, several professional adjudicators and educators would have evaluated and scored it to proceed through the ranks of the festivals. That makes the purported statement from the Cabinet Secretary for Education shared on various social medial platforms look cheap and hollow.

For clarity, I have had the privilege of going through the entire 41 pages of the written script with the artistic context set in the Royal Velvet Emirates (that has been circulating online). If this is the original script, then it passes as a masterpiece that exposes the evils that characterise our crop of public leadership.

While this may not be easily palatable to a kleptocratic version of leaders, the script blends a strong opportunity to exploit the wonders of Artificial Intelligence technologies to solve our basic problems in health, education and other public services.  The conclusion powerfully summons bother leaders and the people to reconcile, make peace and reconstruct the country. It is thus difficult to understand why powerful people in government would apply selective amnesia to suppress this form of expression that critiques, but also proposes actional solutions to our societal problems.

Turning to the core focus of this article, deploying security apparatus to meddle with our creative arts is an outright affront not only to the talent of our children, but also to government official policies on the creative economy and the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC). The proponents of CBC have not missed the opportunity to advance the view that the curriculum is designed to blend our children talents and expressions with their classwork.

Does the government now want to regulate this form of expression through brutality? Throughout human civilisation, art has been a double edged sword that extols the good in a society but equally exposes the evils in the very same society. There is no form of government that has ever been able to completely suppress art from expressing the lived realities of any society.

Kenya Kwanza shall not be the first to succeed — it is a lost course, especially in our present Constitutional dispensation and advancements in technology. The best that the government aggression against the young heroes from Butere Girls has achieved is to create more awareness about the play and re-awaken the revolutionary spirit of the Gen-Zs witnessed last year. Talk of scoring an own goal while completely unprovoked.

More fundamentally, this debacle opens the country to the broader debate on the role of the creative industries in economic growth and development. For avoidance of doubt, one of the primary pillars of the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) is digital superhighway and creative economy.

As of today, there are at least three policy and legal instrument at various stages of approval in government to streamline creative industries and economy in the country. These includes The Creative Industries Act 2023 at the National Assembly, The Creative Economy Support Bill 2024 at the Senate, and a draft Kenya Creative Economy Policy 2023, at the Ministry of Youth Affairs, Creative Economy and Sports. In all these policy instruments, performing arts is unambiguously defined as part of the creative economy. According to the draft Kenya Creative Economy Policy of 2023, the technical Ministry asserts that the role of creativity is a force in contemporary economic life, that affirms that economic and cultural development are not separate but are part of the larger process of development. The policy further references the United Nations General Assembly Resolution Number 74/198 that declares the Creative economy as a key driver of sustainable development.

According to this resolution, the creative industries contributes to at least nine of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These includes goals (1) no poverty, (5) gender equality, (8) decent work and economic growth, (9) industry, innovation and infrastructure, (10) reduced inequalities, (11) sustainable cities, (12) sustainable consumption and production patterns, (16) peaceful and inclusive societies, and (17) means of implementation and global partnerships.

From a casual google search, the creative economy is presently projected to contribute at least 3.1 per cent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and about 6.2 per cent of global employment. It is thus a significant driver of economic growth, generating annual revenues of over Sh260 trillion ($2 trillion) and supporting over 50 million jobs worldwide. This is predicted to account for at least 10 per cent of global GDP by 2030. Economists project that for every $1 spend in the creative sector, it has a multiplier effect to generate $2.5.

Based on various data sources, the creative economy accounts for about five per cent of the Kenyan Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Going by the current GDP estimate of Sh14.3 trillion, this translates to an annual GDP of over Sh715 billion.

The Economic Survey for 2024 does not exclusively provide the creative economy sub-sector, but the arts and entertainment segment is estimated to account for 74,000 direct jobs (in 2019) and 81,000 jobs (in 2023) of formal jobs both in the private and public sectors.

According to the draft Creative Economy Policy of 2023, one of the primary objectives of the policy is to promote our heritage and environment. This is through the promotion of our national values, Kenyan culture and freedom of expression under Articles 10, 11 and 33 of the Constitution.

Based on this policy objectives, it is counterproductive when the government then appears to outrightly censure free expression of our art and creativity. The irony is further compounded when government openly stifles creativity at home while at the same time publicly promoting export of menial labour for the same young people to foreign capitals. This smacks of total confusion and lack of policy coherence across government.

With hindsight, this exposes the widespread failure or inconsistencies for all the government programs under the Kenya Kwanza administration. If it is not a rushed implementation without proper structures, it is policy goofs that unnecessarily expose the administrations supreme leader as portrayed in the ‘‘Echoes of War’’. Instead of fuelling the fire, it would be advisable for the nation’s supreme leader to hear the message instead of trying to shot dead the messenger!