Today virtually all areas of human endeavor, from child protection, health, governance, human rights, housing, gender, human trafficking etc. boast of some voluntary entity or the other formed to pursue different multiple outcomes in the best interest of society. Owing to this, one would be mistaken for thinking that due to this scattered CSO universe a nearly endless array of opportunities for communities is on offer. That every outfit claims to be implementing local development programs it is expected that there could be incontrovertible evidence of impact or studies that confirm meaningful impact that meets a raft of the many known public expectations. On the contrary speaking about CSOs today revs up so much anger and fear in so many people that I think it is important to take a moment and reflect on the reality of our time in the voluntary sector.

Granted that the operating environment for CSOs and activism has changed over time, due to the political and economic power of the anti-CSO movements, today’s activism seems to operate in a situation where practice is completely disconnected from reflection. The practitioner is much more involved in verbalism that does not inform or produce compelling activist narratives that are grounded in replicable and scalable outcomes or projects. What passes for activism today is for the most part episodic. A new kind of activist has also emerged in the sector distinguishable by his or her remarkable disregard for common sense. Anyone who has had opportunity to participate in the COVID 19 Zoom Conferences will confirm the full display of tomfoolery with which these new day activists discuss society’s problems.

There is a shocking dose of what I would like to call ‘willed ignorance’ on the part of most of the emerging leadership of the civil society. Executive Directors, Coordinators of programs of mainstream CSOs and a motley of new outfits that proliferate almost daily, many of them paper based or briefcase as they were previously known, all exhibit unforgivable delusional resentfulness that is ridiculous, dangerous, dishonest and inevitably disastrous. I broach this delicate subject to goad our gaze of collective moral rebuke that seems to look the other way even as this abyss of incompetence deepens.

When human rights defenders choose to use every opportunity thrust at them to defend a victim of human rights abuses, to jostle for media coverage and maintain a celebrity status or score petty political points, what should victims of abuses do? What is one to do when activists discuss COVID with the grace and intelligence of a group of secondary school students arguing on WhatsApp comments? How can a ‘movement’ choose to engage in empty sloganeering and completely ignore the problems facing society by failing to create an organic connection with social movements that would constitute its progressive base?

As an activist of many years I have raised my voice at every opportunity about our fragmentation and the need to strengthen the civil society sector, I have called out our uninformed and obstructionist posture. I have with support from national and international actors engaged in processes aimed at improving the legitimacy of CSOs to reclaim their role of standing between power and the powerless. From 2014 I have been part of a concerted endeavor to build a strong Coalition of CSO actors in the Coast region that connects to national networks. The sector in the region according to an internal report published in April 2018 is characterized by:

“…a veritable explosion of networks, some formed by state actors in a situation where CSOs constantly undermine each other, CSOs engage in negative competition and struggle to survive and where a good number of actors are not properly grounded, do not have physical offices and lack a well-founded theory of change and depend on guts; the sector lacks a coherent agenda, mandates woefully overlapping, duplicity and disagreements that have little to do with ideology but mere instances of methodological nuances beset the sector…”

The core purposes of CSOs for me and in the collaboration has always been the wish to meet the demands and desires of the people. To do this I believed then as now that CSOs must build agency for the poor and consolidate a social base particularly in remote parts of the country, link with academia and have strong institutional foundations. Over the years 3 to 4 organizations in Mombasa have acquired the image of big brother by reason of their strong institutional foundations and a secure financial base. This dichotomy has produced a very toxic environment with a never ending personality and trust controversies.

 A lot of time is therefore spent not in pursuing human rights as politics, or human rights as culture but in dealing with egos, competition and internal controversy.  After a veritable investment in building a viable coalition, baseless narratives steeped in slander and name dropping by detractors of the network were picked up by a prominent but conflicted Catholic Priest who runs one of the local human rights NGOs and sits in the Board of another as issues worthy of mediation.

In a clear act of meddling the work that had been done was tossed out of the window and a new pliant leadership appointed unilaterally towards the end of 2019 to set aside the legitimate Coalition that was in place. This development reminds me of Richard Buckminster Fuller, a twentieth century architect, inventor and environmental activist who was concerned about the use of natural resources in a sustainable way and who once said.

“If the success or failure of this planet and of the human race living on it depends on what I am and what I want to be, then it must also of necessity depend not only on what I do, but also on how I do that which I must do to leave it a better place to live in”

The troubling times in the CSO sector is the product of internal contradictions, fierce internal competition and the hard choices that have to be made between the population’s need and the donor’s priority. The satisfaction of the actors own material requirements seems in the case of Mombasa to trump the needs of the grassroots.