Let's All Be Vigilant

Ours is an affiliation of convenience-By this I mean our nationhood. Our state-hood. When the partition of the African continent was carried out by the European powers, they did not care who was separated with whom and who was bunched with whom, as long as the lines put the necessary resources on their sphere of influence, traditional enemies were  bundled together while cousins were separated by a simple line later on referred to as the international border. The large, expansive Cushite peoples were split into Somalis in Somalia and Somalis in Kenya, Somalis in Ethiopia, etc. The Teso were split into the two nations later on known as Kenya and Uganda. Mt Kilimanjaro was offered as a gift to a Germanic monarchy by the British one and by so doing, the Wa Chaga and other peoples like the Wa Pare were split into two foreigners with their Kenyan counterparts.

We have always had our ethnic identities since time immemorial and we will always do. There is nothing we can do about this and the soonest we learn to appreciate the benefits-and there are many that come with it,- the better. Diversity has been embraced positively all over the world and fruits are visible to all who care to see. It has also, unfortunately, been abused in nearly equal measure and again, the bitter fruits can be seen all over the globe. Our biggest enemy is negative ethnicity. Negative ethnicity feeds and breeds on itself. It forces peoples into a rut, a vicious cycle that is very hard to get out. It promises benefits and at the same time denies benefits and the victims are put in a perpetual carrot-in front-of-donkey situation. It creates lords and serfs. It is immoral.

Sadly part of the reasons- and they really are not reasons but excuses-for ethnic reasoning  which leads to negative ethnicity is the endemic corruption that we have all perpetuated. We have become immune to the pangs of corruption as long as it is being practiced by 'our brothers' or 'our people'. As long as 'it is our turn to eat', then it is not corruption. We even use corruption to try and keep 'others' out of power and when others effectively lock us out of power we start shouting that they are the most corrupt. We only see corruption when practiced by 'others' and we brand them and their ethnic group en masse, as corrupt.

This rut that we all have been driven into becomes most obvious every five years when we hold our general elections. Our systems have been set up such that one has to be nominated in ones local region to run for any seat. If one misses the support of the local community, then it's an uphill task to get nominated therefore one starts by convincing the local masses who are usually ignorant of national issues that their chance of ever getting the 'fruits of governance' is by electing him/her. Usually the targeted population is the most marginalised and under-informed, usually living in abject poverty and misery. These are the gullible citizens who form the grassroots support base. These are the fodder that fuel the fires of 'euphoria' that the politicians rely on to get elected, the same troops that may be used to create a voting block by eliminating any opposition by either ethnic cleansing, or simply intimidation of voters or competitors. This sadly leads to our general elections looking like an ethnic census and methinks they will for a long time to come. What we need to do is to use what structures we have in our constitution to neutralize any negative effect this may bring about by instilling the philosophy of winner-not-take-all after our elections. Our elections should not be zero-sum affair between ethnic groups. We already have some entrenched in the constitution and we ought to give them a sober evaluation and re-evaluation while crafting other useful ones, working on our constitution to serve the majority of citizens rather than the small political class.

It may be true today that the government is more 'of all peoples, by all peoples and for all peoples' than has ever been in our history of self governance. It is not perfect as has been brought to light by the acts of the 11th parliament, some commissions of the reformed judiciary, and to some extent too by some acts of the executive-both national and county. Some might be wished away as 'teething' problems but some are fundamental flaws-unforeseen, I hope, and need to be dealt with with the urgency of now. We should not sit back and let entrench a corrupted contract of governance. The masses need to be educated and re-educated on ways and needs to engage government everyday of the five years and not merely to sit back in complicity waiting for the next general election. All those that voted for the government and those that did not are together in affiliation of chance. It is our shared responsibility to check our agencies of governance because in the final analysis, when all the dust has settled, it is them against us. It is their turn to eat and it is still our turn to be eaten. Sote tukae macho.

Why The Senators?

The line being spun by the Senators is that by ignoring, or for that matter contemplating abolishing the senate, is tantamount to killing devolution at birth, those grand masters of Kenyan politics of greed and selfishness are simply playing on the ordinary mwananchi's ignorance of the new constitutional order.
They will not point out that devolution is demanded by the constitution and is not pegged on an individual's (read the current president) whims and desires. In fact the current regime is held accountable by the constitution to implement all the laid down clauses, chapters and schedules and this will be the yardstick that will be used come the next elections-which I suspect the current principles will be expected to run.
Truth be told, and this is my opinion, I feel the senate was an unnecessary addition to the peoples' representatives, I feel we are over-represented and then taking the fact that our representatives don't seem to be 'adding value' to our lives, I would agree with the abolitionists. Let's do away with the Senate and also let's streamline the rules of engagement between the National assembly and the citizens.
The spirit of the constitution was that if the people were dissatisfied by the conduct of an elected member they could recall them by simply having a given number of voters sign a petition and forward it to the speaker. That spirit was rubbished by our not-so-worthy parliamentarians, most of whom who are now hiding in the Senate and the citizen was left the looser.
The same ease with which the politicians can get nominated and elected into office, the same ease should be the procedure to get them out of office- especially since such a need would be precipitated by acts or omissions bordering on criminality.

First Things First...

My feelings on government (UhuRuto) promises have featured elsewhere on this forum before- even before the 'Jubilant government' had landed the job officially . I have strictly no problem with the said promises but my feelings are that we as a nation need to deliberate and come into some form of consensus on our priorities.

Job creation is certainly a good objective because it is a backbone for affordable livelihood for most Kenyans living in abject poverty. Security, both national and civil is another goal that we need not loose sight of. Kenyans are hard working and it waters down their aspirations if they create fear among themselves simply by working hard to alleviate their circumstances. We do not want a situation where people are forced to migrate from certain regions simply because they are targets of marauding gangs who target well-to-do citizens, be it in the Northern, North eastern, Coast, Kiambu, Bungoma, Kisumu or Baragoi. We all need to feel safe wherever we are, whatever we are doing or whatever our standing in society.

With attainment of adequate job levels- and we need to make sure that jobs created fit all strata of society- citizens will be able to afford basic livelihoods. There should not be the consequent mass migration by a cowed population to apparently secure regions like urban centers. Let us feel safe to live and work in all regions.

When most of these (goals) and others that Kenyans definitely will come up with are attained, our school children will be studying in proper classrooms equipped with basic amenities and facilities of learning, roofs probably fitted with functional solar panels and bore-holes (or artesian wells) supplying clean running water. Trees and rocks will be subjects of study not shelter and furniture in the schools. Well-fed and dressed children will be playing on well maintained and manicured fields in the schools, chasing and kicking real soccer balls not 'sodom apple' fruits between two rocks on a dusty, stony field. Then, and only then will they be nearly ready for a laptop apiece.

One wild card agenda I would like to throw out there for consideration- because I am a thinking Kenyan like most of us- is that instead of the direction we are taking towards nuclear energy (a certain American president could not differentiate it from 'new killer' energy), and that was before Fukushima Daiichi, how about working on either acquiring an eye in space that would maintain surveillance on our region round the clock so that we can see stuff, like cattle rustlers herding thousands of livestock across large expanses of terrain, scores of marauding gangs ransacking villages, swarms of locusts, among other national disasters that we seem so helpless at 'seeing'. We could either lease one of those up there or we could launch one of our own- Now this may be a far-fetched idea but it is my submission that we have not fully exploited the available sources of energy in the region to warrant venturing into nuclear energy.

Waiting To Exhale

The nation is literally waiting to exhale.
For all those Kenyans who voted either way because of fear of domination by the other parties (or ethnic communities), shame on you. For all those who voted for the winners, let's hope they will be haunted by images of you on the queues, like refugees, heavy laden with your hopes and dreams wrapped in the jubilee banners, let us hope that they will not tell the difference between you and your fellow refugees-because thank God, all refugees look alike.

These 'new' leaders will be walking into offices crammed with lots of junk in the closets. There are myriads of skeletons lurking behind closed doors in those offices. Some of these skeletons were stashed away by regimes that these leaders participated in, others were thrown in before they were born Our prayer is that the government of the people will prevail and no more skeletons will be made. That these old skeletons will be pulled out and circumstances surrounding their existence addressed to finality. The landless peasants, the displaced IDPs, the impoverished masses  need a hope for tomorrow. The marginalised communities in the far-flung corners of our beautiful country still seek inclusion in all matters of nationhood. They are tired of being foreigners in their own country. For those that did not vote for you- and they are legion, we ask that you try to prove their fears ill placed. They had their own reasons for not trusting you and the onus is now upon you to prove them wrong. Corruption was given a passing mention in the campaigns, just like an afterthought, and it is our humble submission that it bears a very heavy responsibility in the situation we find ourselves in. We would like this addressed towards creating an open, clean and transparent form of government.

These new leaders all rode on the tide of the new constitution and unfortunately some seeds of doubt were scattered that some people did not have the plan to implement it. We pray that these seeds do not gain root. It is our hope that having passed this en mass, it is ours and all we ask of you is to respect and implement it. Any portions of the contract that you do not like, please ask us about any changes but do not at any moment conspire behind closed doors and boardrooms to alter it. Let no one creep into the constitutional bodies we formulated with the aim of subverting or privatising our aspirations. 

About the promises you made during the campaigns, we know you may not be able to keep all but we only ask for your indulgence to keep us informed of any failures and hardships you encounter. We are a knowledgeable masses and are quite aware that priorities are dynamic, they may change from day to day-just as we might suggest that you feed the children before giving them laptops, and of course guaranteeing security to all- parents and children!.Just remember that we hold these promises against you and we will always ask you what you are doing about them. Just as we are waiting to exhale, we are watching you. Do not let us down.

Peace because of ICC?

Justice and peace are indeed complementary. True. Is it injustice for individuals to plunder their nations and stash the loot in Geneva and other Western capitals while their citizenry suffer in abject poverty? ICC, USA and other demigods, are these not crimes against humanity too?
Millions of poverty stricken masses the world over are dying and perishing because an individual or a number of them emptied their national coffers and banked it all in private accounts in Europe and other Western capitals, others have actually invested in these foreign nations with these foreign governments paying a blind eye to it.
Selective application of justice and paying lip service as shown by the West only makes their enemies more vibrant and incensed. The US does not hold any moral high ground to either advice or comment on activities of the ICC and the ICC, its staffers or officials has no business litigating or commenting on cases pending in court, to the media. I could be wrong but this is sub judice.
'...They say what we know is just what they teach us,.....that we are so ignorant and...whenever they want they can reach us through political strategy...' These words by Marley should provoke our conscience and remind us that we should strive to shape our own destiny.

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.