Each day, we awake with the power to determine our relationships with others, with the opportunity to spread good will or bad, with the capacity to open the doors of friendship to another human being, or to start an enmity, with the ability to affirm another, or to destroy a soul. 

We choose, and become. 

Recently, we Kenyans participated in destroying our own hope for the future.  Being short sighted, we believe that the tragedy is that two men, Mr. John Paul Oulu and Mr. Kamau King'ara, are dead, when the real tragedy is that all of us have been damaged and indelibly stained.  Even Dante could not have imagined such a degradation-- a new circle of his inferno may have to be forged in our nightmares, but all  of us are now surely a step closer to the hell reserved for those who eat their own children.

We have killed two men whose major transgression against us is that they loved us as they loved themselves, and that they were willing to risk their own lives to improve ours.  Oulu and King'ara, in their work for the Oscar Foundation, answered our collective summons to our best and our brightest to range themselves on the side of, and to work to empower, the poor and the disenfranchised.  It is well-wrought, this Oscar Foundation dream, stiffened by persistence and conviction, grown by small and steady success; and driven by a trenchant social vision, full of hopes for a just society and  sparkling with the determination to create an informed citizenry bound together by common effort and aspiration

It should have been enough for us that Oulu and King'ara cared enough to make the Oscar Foundation real, to breathe it into life, to sweat each day in affirming its strength and its promise.  Evidently, their bounty to us was not enough, for being the greedy, selfish, petulant, demanding objects of love that we Kenyans are, we made these same dreamers and builders pay for their gifts to us with their lives.

"Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces." 

Oulu and King'ara  are dead, shot and killed next to our State House, in the bright glare of our sunlight, in our capital city of Nairobi, apparently by agents of our state-we must therefore assume that they have died on our behalf, killed on our orders, sacrificed to our demand.   For in whose name and under whose authorisation do agents of the Kenyan state act, if not our own?

We have chosen this.  We have become it.

Our silence has allowed these assassinations; our passivity has encouraged those who believe that our country is an o.k. corral in which their cowboy fantasies are to be the highlights of our politics.  These capricious and adolescent whimsies are riveted on the politics of "Bang! Bang!," crude bullet-ridden arguments, ethical ducking, dodging and crouching, accompanied by hysterical spurts of the dust of moral indignation, flung into our eyes. A distraction.  So much theatre and such abdication of adulthood and responsibility reduce us all to infantilism and primitivism.  Thus we have become single-celled organisms responding only to the stimuli of fear and hatred.  The political elite smile, all the way to the bank-fear and hatred are exactly what they have in plentiful supply. 

 Even though our leaders have reduced all of us to props in a mindlessly violent and morally worthless script, they cannot be blamed solely for these prolonged forays into theatrical narcissism.  Daily, we, the Kenyan people, give them permission to enact these scenarios; nor does our stupefied indulgence stop there.  Having funded the entire production, like gullible idiots, we then queue up complacently to pay for the performance, and are promptly mugged by these same leaders' accomplices as we leave the theatre.  And still, we play along, each day enslaving ourselves a little more to their mindless snuffling at the trough, each day emerging more pig-like ourselves.  Soon, we will join the other crazy swine in rushing over the cliffs to our doom.

Each time we resign ourselves to bribing another police officer, each time we read a newspaper detailing another insult to our intelligence and fold it away with no further action, each time we allow an ethnic slight against Others to pass by us without objection, each time we resolve that the troubles of others are not our concern- each time we permit these outrages against our citizenship, we tighten the noose around our own necks.

It is said that if you put a live frog into boiling water, the frog will jump out.  If you put a frog into mild water and slowly turn the heat up under it, the frog will let you boil it to death.

Yet, we are not without prophets.

We can all now read of John Githongo's battles against the intimate monster of corruption-the book is available all over the world, despite attempts at local prohibition.   Martin Kimani has enjoined us to wrestle our country and our future out of the rapacious, palsied death-grip of Generation Disaster; Keguro Macharia has called us to ownership of our country, to stand and be counted, to grow up as fellow citizens and take charge of our own destiny.  Muthoni Wanyeki warns us that in unleashing this latest impunity, we are headed to the grave.

Are we listening to these portents?  Can we hear? Other prophets, for other times and places have spoken to us:

 First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left to speak out for me. 

It is not that we have not been warned. 

The Prime Minister has expressed outrage and calls upon international goodwill to find the perpetrator of the dastardly deed.  It is an excellent sentiment, and we would all agree--except that H.E. Mr. Raila Odinga is the Prime Minister of the Grand Coalition Government of the Republic of Kenya, and we have the dead bodies from the Post Election Violence to prove it. 

So who is in charge? 

If it is not the Prime Minister in charge of the manner in which our state assets and our state agents are to be utilised at the extreme of their violent potential, how are we to explain the staggering salaries paid to our political elite? What for, these huge salaries and perks, whose very taxability we are not even supposed to inquire about? What for, the motorcades? What for, the veneration? To what end, all the power and the influence? So that the Prime Minister can exclaim, along with the rest of us, of his shock and distaste at the tragic waste of our most promising minds?

Many Kenyans have done that for free: we are not for that reason entitled to motorcades and a disproportionate access to our Kenyan resources.  We do not for that reason expect the traffic to stop in its tracks. If the Prime Minister has no additional powers beyond the capacity to be as articulately outraged as the next Kenyan, it is difficult to see where our value-added in this government has come from. Yet, at least the Prime Minister is able to say that he is outraged. 

On the Presidential front, The Great Silent One continues in his inscrutable ways, his wonders not to perform.  Perhaps he believes that politics, like poetry, ‘ is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess at what is seen during a moment,'  for he merely peeks out, announces his marital status, and, not noticing the bullets whizzing practically past his nose, goes back inside and closes the door, to our Statehouse. 

Was that a metaphor for the state of our country, or a mime?

If we are all to be outraged or indifferent, citizens and leaders alike, who pulled the trigger? Who gave the order, whose head nodded in assent? Who authorised the time and use of the vehicle that ferried the assassins? Whose signatures are on the paperwork, and to whom do these individuals report? Who is running the government-and whose taxes paid for those bullets?

Sisi wenyeinchi, tuna maswali.

In whose names are these atrocities carried out?

If I am to put my hand to murder, I would like to be consulted beforehand. If the voices of my brothers and my colleagues are to be silenced in the fullness of their blooming, with my weapons and using my servants, my consent is necessary.  If the slaughter is to be performed next to my house, the house of all the people, in the witness of the full sun and of fellow citizens, my permission is critical.  This blood dripping from my hands: who put it there?

I am only one voice - but this country belongs to me too.

I have not consented to this. 

I am a citizen of the republic of Kenya, and I have not authorised these deaths - who is this who dares act thus, wearing the uniform of my servants?

In whose name have you killed all the others?  In whose name do you try to make me afraid?

You death-mongers, you liars, you small minded and petty thieves. 

You are all fired.

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