Rome....Day One.

When the dust finally settles and the eating class get down to their age-perfected science (or is it an art) of eating our national cake, we Kenyans have always gotten back, and we will, to our honest task of baking the cake. I have referred to it elsewhere on this forum, as 'treading the wine-press' and I believe, with my own frail wisdom, that these are one and the same. We bake the cake-they eat it. We press the grapes, they drink the wine. They do the shooting, we do the dying, we do the voting, they do the looting, what's the difference?
My take from what we just concluded with the ruling from our Supreme court is that though we are not out of the woods yet, there is a ray, nay, a glimmer of light through the tunnel. Our salvation is not far, our liberation match is so close the ground is literally shaking and those who cannot feel the tremor will surely be trampled when the stampede gets here. And it is soon.
I pray that as we embark on our daily tasks of 'nation building' as our leaders (curiously this rhymes with eaters?) always beseech us to, we ought not loose sight of the milestones we have gained. We now have the precedent of contesting an electoral process in court and though the outcome this time around may have been hampered by the time constraints, we ought to work on the mechanisms laid down by the constitution so that next time around, our justice does not suffer the 'hands tied' syndrome again.
We now have a body that is a little close to what we envisaged as to what an electoral prefect should be. We don't have a perfect one, but I dare say and hope this one is malleable and ductile. We ought to put it under a microscope, identify the defects and put it back on the forge and fix it. It can serve us better the next time around. We have the time to do these things, all we need is sobriety and patriotism, and we can summon these. Our electoral prefect, like Caesar's wife, ought to be impeccable, it's duties; transparent, free, fair, accurate to an acceptable margin of error, verifiable and accountable. Before the next electoral process, we ought to accomplish this.
As we continue building on the gains we have made so far, let us agree to perform a post-mortem of the last election with the sole purpose of holding a better process next time, let us know exactly where our systems, be they human or automated, failed us. Let us without apportioning blame or imputing ill motive, take that electoral process back to the lab and analyze it. The next one should find us better prepared. It took more than one day to build Rome.

Our Hope, Kenyans..

It saddens me to see the hope in our eyes, the hope of a better tomorrow devoid of all that ails our country today, but alas! We look at the wrong direction from where our help comes from. Today, we peg our hopes and aspirations on our new constitution, on the new government elected on the backbone of this constitution, on our newly elected leaders who shouted on the rooftops that they will manage and uphold the said constitution, and they did not let slip the secret that they had already started to sculpture the document around their own dreams and aspirations, that their main goal for re-election was to go back and complete the job.

We screamed at and cursed these lot at the close of the tenth parliament, held mock funerals for all of them and then come election day on 4th of March, we queued hours on end to re-elect these same individuals to higher seats in the Senate and executive offices, both local and national. We forgot that we had buried them, we forgot that these same chaps had fleeced our national coffers with scandal after scandal, awarded themselves hefty remuneration and retirement packages, refused to pay taxes. We had forgotten.

And that's what our main problem is. We forget too easily. We forgive and forget. Our new constitution might not help us because the people we entrust to implement and safeguard it is simply interested in other things all together. They will shred it, emasculate it, trash all that which guarantee our liberties and retain the skeleton of the structure that ensures their entrenchment onto power. We have, as we have done since the inception of our nationhood, entrusted wolves and hyenas to herd our cattle.

We need to re-think our collective national ethics, borne, tested and tried through millennia in our customs and traditions. We need to realize that though we pride in our various mother-tongues, that is all that is different between us- and that is something to be proud about, not be ashamed of. We are all the same. If anything, there is just two of us, two distinct peoples-those treading the wine-press and those sipping the wine. We just need to look at the posturing and jostling going on at this time, them positioning themselves at vantage points to reap the best in the next regime. Toasting each other with the finest of wines. The same vigour and artistry they displayed when they were coalescing and splitting just before the March polls, forming and re-forming coalitions on hourly basis. The vitriol they poured on each other on the campaign trail has not even dried and they are best of buddies now. These are them. They will never come to our aid. Because we are us. We exist for their benefit. It's never two ways.

Our day in the sun will however come. The day we will embrace what our traditions embraced, respect of oneself, ones neighbours and their property, refrained from the vulture attitude of grabbing anything that is hanging loose, respect of public resources, cut-throat greed, treating our local thieves as the thieves they are and not protecting them as if their heinous activities were communally sanctioned. We will one day see through the veil of ethnocentricity and pick a government of the people, for the people. The wine-press will grind to a halt and we will all take a break, each with a glass of wine in our hands and we will toast each other, and then we will go on treading the wine-press to national prosperity.

Let's Sing Our Own Song

The West has its own skeletons in their closets and due to the near-perfect propagation of information today, nearly every village on earth knows the unfair power-play, ills, corruption, intrigue and political manipulations/machinations that is Western democracies and the decadence eating away at the Western way of life.

Recent(or historical) events like the civil rights movement in the US, the subsequent assassination of MLK, then later on-JFK, the stealing of (or rigging of) the 2000 elections for GWB, the acrimonious vitriol after the election of BHO in 2008 and 2012, the disfunction of the US style of governance as currently established are all well in the public domain.

The escapades of the likes of Berlusconi in Italy, DSK (formally of the IMF) in France or is it NYC and others have left the West feeling vulnerable. The mainstream press in the West has also shown its true colours as far as objectivity or manipulation of views is concerned. A while back, the Murdoch news house in the UK opened up a can of warms they would have rather remained un-opened. Recently in Kenya, CNN uncovered or covered a militia comprising of one fighter displaying how ready Kenyans were to unleash violence onto one another after the recent elections. This is after the US president advised western journalists about the dangers of visiting such places like Syria or Kenya!

The West has lost the moral high ground to patronize developing nations. As Bob Marley once sang, '…We refuse to be what you wanted us to be…you can't educate 'us' for no equal opportunity….'

That is the reason they are fidgety about the developments in Kenya and other developing countries. They would like to control more the happenings there but they are aware the people know this and are alert. They are stumbling on themselves trying to position for individual and national points of advantage-yet retaining the noninterference attitude expected of them. They know what resources are in the offing to be exploited, and they know too that being seen as too eager to control the events may draw animosity from the populations. They cannot afford to antagonize the local regimes, yet they need to exert their influence in the outcomes of the political maneuvers going on.

We and Them..

We head to the polls to vote for them, win or lose they go back to drink wine together and we go back to treading the wine-press.
Ewe Maulana nguvu yetu, ilete amani kwetu. Utushawishi kwenye mwelekeo wa utu bora

Maisha Bora

Kenya is developing and if indicators of this phenomenon are scarce, one just needs to remember the recent presidential debates and some governorship ones to see what I mean. Kenyans, both candidates and spectators carried themselves with maturity and decorum and left some of us wondering if maybe Kenya has finally come of age.

All is not rosy however, and we still have traits that we need to get over to realize that elusive dream of a mature nation. We need to remind ourselves daily that we do not need to be micromanaged and prompted all the time to live and act positively. We are still dying in scores on our roads mainly because we still board either overloaded vehicles or unroadworthy ones. We are still rushing towards overturned fuel tankers to collect spilt fuels for crying out loud! We litter our environment without care and pollute our rivers knowing very well that our healthcare is still wanting-we ignore the simple teaching that hygiene could keep dangerous and expensive (to treat) diseases at bay. We are still inclined to crossing the super highway not over the 'monkey bridges', but on the road itself- we are too much in a hurry to get to the other side- In more mature societies, low speed traffic is prohibited on super highways let alone pedestrians!

We witness unscrupulous wananchi/public officers giving and receiving bribes and go about our business as if all is normal-'ni kama vindeo, ni kama ndrama!' We watch as thugs harass us day in day out and go on our way as if it's our noble obligation to be harassed. We watch politicians play with our national psyche, cheat us in generating our national income and at expending of the same. We watch helplessly as our national pride and national heritage is degraded and defaced by a few with criminal intent-our wild life is threatened with extinction by poachers and road signs/street lights are stolen by scrap metal dealers. We really do not need by-laws to practice what is right. We do not need Michuki rules to avoid unroadworthy or overloaded vehicles. We just need a more positive and realistic self-evaluation.