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.