The Politics of Divisibility: Safaricom and the Remaking of the Corporate Nation-State

Chapter 5 turns to the independence period and the rise of mobile telephony and digital financial services through an exploration of the rise of the region’s largest corporation, Safaricom. An erstwhile state-held entity, Safaricom began its path to privatization in the late 1990s, culminating with the company going “public” in 2007–08. Privatization, I show, was an incremental process that turned on the production of divisibility—a discursive, epistemic, and material process that transformed a series of entities—an infrastructure, a corporation, a national asset—into objects of calculation subject to division. The production of divisibility generated new infrastructural attachments as it reconfigured boundaries between public and private, state and corporation, citizens and shareholders. New and discomfiting forms of both attachment and detachment—encapsulated by the (re)emergence of the corporate-state and the shareholder-citizen—were produced in these shifting frontiers.