Organized crime is increasing, and banditry in the provinces is extensive.
Violence is on the increase – in December 2001 alone, 148 Kenyans died in
political conflicts between ethnic groups. Violence accompanies electoral
politics – in the run up to the 1992 elections over 1,500 people were killed.
So as a country becomes richer and per capitaincomes increase, political
instability should be eased.
However, there have been many poor and underdeveloped countries with
stablepolitical systems. What they have had in common is authoritarian
rather than democratic regimes. In fact it seems that the poorer the dictator-
ship the more stable it is likely to be. It also seems feasible that political
stability might cause affluence and economic growth rather than be the con-
sequence of it. Some politically stable nations achieved stability before they
achieved their affluence. Similarly, some totalitarian regimes have also been
able to produce stability before economic development.
Poverty and political stability can coexist because of the many constraints
on effective political action by the poor in defence of their rights and inter-
ests. Even with the right to vote, the power of the ballot box is easily emas-
culated by electoral frauds of one kind or another. In poor societies votes
can still easily be bought. Poverty also means that successful appeals to the
judiciary against the economically powerful and their allies in the bureau-
cracy when they obstruct the implementation of government reforms are
rarely made because of the social and financial costs involved.
Political mobilization of the poor is limited by their isolation as economic
actors, such as peasants working their own land with their own labour in scat-
tered fields. Similar experiences may be felt in some industrial situations,
such as mining, where workers are isolated in industrial villages and provided
with their needs at the point of employment. They may become unionized,
and that may constitute an important basis for political agitation. But union
activity may be restricted to concerns in the workplace rather than political
issues that affect people in their other roles. The political strength of numeri-
cally weak industrial workers in the Third World is further limited by the frag-
mented structure of small firms which creates ‘obstacles to a strong collective
organization of the working class’. Awareness of growing inequalities may
breed a degree of radicalism, but this is easily contained by state repression
and by clientelist and populist modes of political incorporation ‘which facili-
tate state control and regimentation’ (Mouzelis, 1989, pp. 20–6). In the infor-
mal sector of the urban economy households and units of production are
also isolated. Separate producers act in isolation to acquire minimal levels of
capital, confronting antagonistic social classes in isolation – landlords, mer-
chants, money-lenders, bureaucrats, and wholesalers who can exploit and
224 Understanding Third World Politics