By JAINDI KISERO

We may be witnessing the beginning of a new era of assertiveness and activism by the Asian business class in Kenya. Indeed, last week's street demonstration by Asian businessmen along Kirinyaga Road of Nairobi to protest against crime meted against the community, was a very rare phenomenon.

Kenya Asians have been a "low arousal people": a politically docile group which although representing an economically critical segment of the population of Kenya, are people who are prepared to endure injustice and unfairness with feudalistic servility.

Stereotyped as corrupt and often regarded by middle class indigenous Kenyans as "paper citizens', the Asian businessman has been intimidated to the extent that most of them prefer to circumvent unjust laws rather than fight for their repeal.

Most of us do not accept that they are authentic Kenyan citizens and refuse to recognise that as opposed to our forefathers who became Kenyan citizens by biological accident, the Kenyan Asians are descendants of people who became Kenyans by choice.

Is is not true that at independence Asians had three choices: either to become British citizens, adopt Kenyan citizenship, or return to the Indian sub continentÐ but that most of them chose Kenya as their motherland?

Is it not pitiable that most of us pay lip service to the issue of minority rights and regard local Asians as the millstone around the neck of indigenous entrepreneurs, aliens who have refused to intermarry with Kenyan tribes and who live in segregated enclaves.

When we scapegoat them for undermining efforts by the government to economically empower indigenous locals, do we realise that phenomenal success of this immigrant community is not restricted to Kenya, and that immigrant communities tend to be naturally enterprising wherever they live?

Aren't cases such as those of the Jews in pre-war Germany, the Chinese in South East Asia, and the Lebanese in West Africa, good illustrations of the almost direct correlation between immigrant communities and entrepreneurship?

How can one explain the fact that the East African Asians who immigrated to Britain during the Idi Amin years in Uganda are today a major economic force in Britain.

Clearly, we are dealing with a deeper phenomenon here. Prof Ali Mazrui has argued that the very readiness of East African Asians to uproot themselves from their ancestral soil to try their fortunes in lands that were fundamentally different from their own, implies that the Indians who immigrated to this region had a high degree of enterprise and ambition.

Which is why reports that Asian businessmen are running away from Kenya cannot be taken lightly. Surely, we cannot successfully convince foreign investors to come to Kenya when our own people are exiting.

In the past, a major exodus of Asian businessmen would have had a negligible impact on the macro economy. Exchange control regulations strictly controlled repatriation of capital.

So strict were the regulations that even multinationals found it difficult to repatriate profits. Any immigrant wishing to sell his shares to a local had to apply for approval to the defunct Capital Issues Committee.

Indeed, it is these regime of regulations that shielded the macro-economy from the the great Asian exodus of 1968.

Today, the regime has changed phenomenally and billions of shillings can be moved from one corner of the world to another in a matter of hours.

Indeed, until foreign exchange regulations were abolished in 1993, a great proportion of the net savings of the Asian community were laundered out of the country, especially to banks in Britain and Canada.

The practice within the community was to run business with funds borrowed from abroad, but repartriate all profits and net earnings.

When Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda in 1972, he had hoped that his cronies would inherit the businesses of the expelled Asians. But he was rudely shocked to see notices put by commercial banks on nearly all the doors of the companies showing that the businesses belonged to lending institutions.

In Kenya this trend changed in 1992 when Ð spurred by the high interest rates on treasury bills - both local Asians and the Asian diaspora in Europe expatriated billions of speculative monies into the economy.

It is instructive that most of the the so-called Asian banks mushroomed in this same period. Almost every other local sub-tribe in Kenya incorporated a commercial bank, with the Visa Oshwal community taking the lead.

What this background shows, is that any major exodus of Asian businessmen from the country in the prevailing environment can induce massive capital flight and precipitate chaotic fluctuation of the Shilling.

The policy implications of what is now referred to as the Asian factor in Kenya, is that we must put in place policies which will support private enterprise and ignore the colour, race and tribe of the entrepreneurs.

We will not modernise this country if we insist on associating citizenship with kinship. We must move from the world of kinsmen to a world of compatriots.

The period between 1963 and 1969 will go down in the history as the period when the Asian community in Kenya went through the most primitive type of persecution by the elite of this country.

In the name of the policy of Africanisation, Asians were given quit notices from their businesses and their shops were allocated to Africans by The provincial commissioners who doubled as chairmen of "provincial business allocation allocation committees".

A sensational story is told of three industrialists who woke up one morning to hear an announcement by the Nairobi business allocation committee that their businesses had been allocated to politically well-connected locals. The companies were Flora Garment Factory Ltd, Patco Industries Ltd, and Karania Packers Ltd.

There existed a "trading appeals tribunal" created by parliament to specifically oversee forceful transfer of Asian business to Africans.

The trade Licensing Act of 1967, banned Asians from trading in rural areas and non central areas of major towns.

Many years later the the government realised that the quit notices had not succeeded as the Africans who acquired the dukawallah shops sold them back to the Asian businessmen.

And when the government sanctioned harassment of Asian businessmen threatened to disrupt the economy in 1969, the purging of Asian shopkeepers stopped.

Jaindi Kisero (pictured) discuses what is referred to as the Asian factor and argues that local Asians are an economic force and the country must put in place policies which will support private enterprise and ignore the colour, race and tribe of the entrepreneurs.

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