Inequality gets under the skin of both poor and rich

• … the rich in Germany report less status anxiety than the rich in America and the German poor less than the American poor, because Germany is more equal.
• Richest 125 Kenyans hold more wealth than 42.6 million of their compatriots, 77 per cent of the population.

Have you ever scrolled past a politician posing beside his fleet of luxury SUVs, or a selfie from a helicopter, and felt something tighten in your chest? Many Kenyans feel it almost on a daily. Last week it was President William Ruto walking his daughter down the aisle in a blazer linked to a Stefano Ricci collection whose pieces reportedly cost up to Sh1 million, in a country where nearly half the population lives under the poverty line.

That feeling has a name, status anxiety, the constant calculation of where you sit in the pecking order. In the book Why We're Getting Poorer, the economist Cahal Moran describes its reach in five words: inequality gets under everyone’s skin. It torments the well-off as well as the struggling, and Kenya suffers it from top to bottom. Our political class are both its most afflicted patient and its most reckless carrier, while ordinary Kenyans pay for the display in their homes, marriages and wallets.

The evidence across countries is striking: the rich in Germany report less status anxiety than the rich in America, and the German poor less than the American poor, because Germany is more equal. Humans judge almost everything by comparison, the way a hand dipped in a bowl of water cannot tell its temperature until it has felt a second bowl, and income has become our handiest measuring stick.

Dipping our hands in the Kenyan bowl, Oxfam Kenya’s report a year ago, The Great Economic Divide, found that the richest 125 Kenyans hold more wealth than 42.6 million of their compatriots, 77 per cent of the population, and the number of people in extreme poverty has grown by seven million since 2015. Above it sits a State that owes Sh13 trillion and spends about 70 per cent of its revenue servicing that debt, so fundamental services like education and healthcare that might narrow the gap are sacrificed first.

This explains why politically connected elite with enough wealth to last their great-grandchildren still keep stealing, since nobody with a house in Karen and a ranch in Narok is going hungry. In a society this unequal, the people at the top suffer their own version of status anxiety and measure themselves against each other.

President Ruto wore Christian Louboutins worth about Sh160,000 on Jamhuri Day in 2023, and within 18 months, Kimani Ichung’wah wore a Sh129,000 pair to an Al Jazeera interview. Aaron Cheruiyot was filmed strolling into the Senate on red soles. And Kipchumba Murkomen appeared in the same Sh194,000 Stefano Ricci shirt as his boss.

They perform that competition for us. Every weekend this year, this newspaper has reported, helicopters ferrying politicians have crowded the skies over Luo Nyanza to fundraisers where millions change hands, and the convoys, mansions and fuel guzzlers reappear on TikTok for all to see. That display is the second bowl of water, and the boda boda rider at peace with his lot is made to feel his poverty more sharply, because the spectacle is staged for him.

The Cornell economist Robert Frank calls what follows an expenditure cascade. Within days of the wedding, a Kenyan menswear account was running Instagram adverts for “the blazer everyone is talking about”, promising direct orders to “Kenya’s power players”.

Each of us measures our needs against the people just above us, who are measuring theirs against the people above them, so when spending explodes at the top, the pressure travels down the ladder one rung at a time until it reaches households whose incomes have not moved. In American counties through the 1990s, Frank found, the places where inequality grew fastest also saw the sharpest rises in bankruptcies, divorces and long commutes, as families borrowed and worked longer hours to keep up.

Last week, a viral post on X viewed more than half a million times argued that since Ruto entered State House, inviting a date home in Nairobi costs at least Sh7,000: Sh3,000 for a cab from Ngong Road to Thika and back, Sh2,000 for a bottle, Sh800 for a home-cooked meal, plus a sweetener for the invitation.

Crude as it was, the post described an expenditure cascade with real precision, because the price of a respectable evening has been set somewhere above the young man doing the arithmetic while his income has stood still. Multiply that across rent, school fees, weddings and funerals, add the shame of being seen to fall behind, and you arrive at a quieter Kenyan crisis of mobile phone loans, strained marriages and dawn commutes from Kitengela and Juja.

Inequality gets under everyone’s skin, the book reminds us, including the men who insist their wealth rewards hard work and that envy is a disease of the idle. They are among the most anxious people in the country, locked in a contest where the next pair of red soles and the next chopper always belong to someone else, and a contest with no finish line produces stealing with no end. Closing the inequality gap is therefore in everyone’s interest.

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The writer is a whistleblower & Founder at uongozifellowship.com

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