Mediatised “Statist Neoliberalism” in Kenya during the Time of Covid-19: The Case of the Standard

Abstract

The Covid-19 (acronym for the coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic negatively affected the world economy akin to the global financial crisis of 2008, leading to the revival of the debate about neoliberal rationalities. Although many nations attempted to contain the pandemic through a public goods approach, the authors argue that these state interventions concealed neoliberalism by advancing its governmentalities. Further, they use Norman Fairclough's (1992) interdiscursivity to describe how in Kenya, The Standard newspaper's coverage of the government interventions was dialogical, euphemising neoliberalism through content that seemed to advocate state welfarism while advocating for the free market at the same time. The interdiscursive analysis was enriched by using Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (1985) concept of chains of equivalence and difference to explain the power relations behind the euphemisation of neoliberalism. The authors also argue that the invisible free-market mechanism becomes hegemonic when it takes over populist demands through the transformation of the chains of difference – the antagonism against neoliberalism – into chains of equivalence, the points of similarity between neoliberalism and people's welfare demands. For the current study, the authors selected articles on Covid-19 that appeared in the Standard, chiefly those written on policy issues and published during the early period of the pandemic. Two regular themes were analysed to illustrate the euphemisation of neoliberalism, namely, corruption watchdogism and unemployment narratives. The authors use interdiscursivity to illustrate how these two themes euphemise neoliberalism.