The banquet of the untouchables: How Sub-Saharan Africa’s post-colonial elite feast on the bones of the excluded

By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo

In Kenya today, 125 individuals control more wealth than 42.6 million of their fellow citizens fully 77 percent of the population. Nearly half the country scrapes by in extreme poverty while the richest one percent holds 78 percent of the nation’s financial wealth. This is not misfortune. It is architecture.

Walk the dusty tracks of Turkana or the overcrowded alleys of Kibera and the numbers cease to be abstractions. They become hollow cheeks, children who leave school early because fees outrun wages, mothers who ration maize meal while elite compounds in Karen and Runda glitter with imported luxury. The same pattern repeats across Sub-Saharan Africa: growth that fattens the few and starves the many. Economic expansion has averaged around five percent in recent years in places like Kenya, yet poverty reduction has stalled or reversed. The link between rising GDP and falling destitution has been deliberately severed.

This is the politics of inequality, exclusion, and poverty not as residual failure but as sustained political project. The colonial state was an extractive machine. In Kenya the White Highlands were carved out for settlers, Africans reduced to tenants at the will of the Crown, forced into labour through hut taxes and the kipande. Independence did not dismantle the machine; it merely changed the operators. The same land concentration, the same patronage circuits, the same ethnic arithmetic of reward and punishment were inherited and refined by African elites. What the settler once claimed by race, the post-independence oligarch claims by proximity to power. The Mau Mau demand for land justice was quietly buried under “willing buyer, willing seller” schemes that legitimized dispossession while elevating a new class of African landlords and political brokers.

The result is structural exclusion written into geography, ethnicity, and class. Rural poverty rates remain roughly three times higher than urban ones. Northern and northeastern counties have stayed trapped at the bottom of the poverty distribution for a quarter-century while Mount Kenya regions advanced. Coethnicity with the president has long correlated with better public investment and lower household poverty. Devolution was supposed to break this pattern; the evidence suggests the old logic merely decentralised. The child born in a pastoralist county still faces years less schooling than the child born in a central highlands constituency. Education, health, and opportunity are rationed according to political geography rather than citizenship.

Across the region the same script plays out with local variations. South Africa’s Gini remains among the world’s highest. Resource-rich states see oil and mineral rents captured by ruling circles while the majority remain outside formal employment. Informal labour absorbs the surplus population without the rights, wages, or security that turn work into dignity. Debt service in Kenya has at times consumed more than two-thirds of tax revenue twice the education budget, many times the health budget while social protection reaches only a small fraction of the poorest. The fiscal system often taxes the poor more heavily, through regressive consumption taxes, than it transfers to them. Growth becomes a private banquet; the public is left with the crumbs and the bill.

Literary devices are unnecessary when reality itself is grotesque. Consider the image of a CEO in one of Kenya’s largest firms earning 214 times the salary of a teacher. Or the fact that the salary increase enjoyed by top executives in a single recent year could have paid public school teachers for six years. These are not market outcomes; they are the visible surface of political choices tax codes that favour capital over labour, procurement systems that reward connected firms, land registries that remain opaque, and a social contract that has been rewritten to protect accumulation at the top.

The emotional weight of this system is not abstract. It is the quiet rage of a young graduate who discovers that connections, not competence, open doors. It is the exhaustion of a smallholder farmer whose produce never reaches a fair market because middlemen and political cartels control the chains. It is the humiliation of watching public hospitals collapse while private clinics for the connected flourish. Inequality of this magnitude does not merely impoverish; it corrodes the possibility of common citizenship. When the distance between the gated estate and the informal settlement becomes a chasm, solidarity dies and grievance flourishes.

Original insight demands we abandon comforting myths. The problem is not insufficient growth. Kenya and several peers have grown. The problem is the political determination of who captures that growth. Structural inequality rooted in colonial extraction, preserved by elite continuity, and reproduced through ethnic and spatial patronage explains why poverty reduction has slowed even as economies expanded. More than half of income inequality in the region is attributable to circumstances over which individuals have no control: place of birth, parental education, ethnicity, and access to networks of power. Effort is real; the starting line is not the same.

This is not inevitable. It is maintained by actors who benefit from it and by institutions too weak or too captured to challenge it. Governments that speak of “bottom-up” transformation while protecting the upward flow of rents must be held to account. Parliaments that pass regressive finance bills and then face youth protests must confront the social contract they are breaking. Elites who treat the state as a private estate must face progressive taxation of wealth, land, and capital gains that actually bite. International financial institutions that celebrate GDP while remaining silent on distribution must recalibrate their metrics. Citizens especially the young who filled the streets against the 2024 Finance Bill must refuse to accept exclusion as destiny.

The path forward is not mystery. Universal, high-quality public services in education and health break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Progressive taxation and aggressive action against illicit financial flows reclaim resources currently locked in private vaults. Land reform that prioritizes productive use and justice over speculative holding addresses the original colonial wound. Labour market policies that expand formal, decent work reduce the informal trap. Transparent, formula-based resource allocation that ignores ethnicity and rewards need can begin to unwind spatial exclusion. None of this is technocratic fine-tuning. It is political confrontation with those who currently profit from the status quo.

Sub-Saharan Africa does not lack resources, talent, or demographic energy. It suffers from a politics that systematically converts public potential into private privilege. The banquet continues because the excluded have been told, for generations, that their hunger is natural. It is not. It is engineered. The words of independence promised a shared table. That promise has been betrayed with clinical precision. The only remaining question is whether the majority will continue to accept the scraps or finally demand the keys to the kitchen.

The writer is a social commentator

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