After a bloody post-election crisis, Kenya has found a political
solution. Once again, we have found ourselves resolving or countering a
political impasse by throwing high paying jobs at a select few.
To stop
politicians from interfering with our day to day lives, and using
Kenya's hordes of unemployed, embittered and disillusioned youth as
canon fodder in their power struggles, we have offered them plum jobs.
We have a negotiated solution that will see the cost of government go
up in a country which, already, "devotes a disproportionate shares of its taxes on administration and wages at the expense of provision of services."
In an interview in the UK's Financial Times, Raila Odinga, the biggest
winner in the negotiated settlement, comes across as a thoughtful
politician with a rational agenda for the future of the Kenyan nation.
He takes his proposed new role as Prime Minister head on, stating that
government policy will emerge through consensus in the cabinet and his
duty will be, beyond trying to influence that consensus, to oversee and
coordinate its implementation. Raila paints this new deal as heralding
an era where, the 'disconnect', seen in the past between 'rhetoric and
practice', will cease to exist in government policy. Beyond the
politics, however, he takes on the thorny issue of Internally Displaced
People and that perpetual blotch on the fabric of this Nation called
Ethnic Clashes. He proposes the establishment of dialogue between the
leaders of various ethnic communities to rally for peaceful
inter-ethnic coexistence. This, he proposes, will be achieved through
the formation of a national ethnic conference. The ethnic crisis, he
says, stems from different roots: "'You have for example the
Kikuyu-Kalenjin, which is purely land. Then you have Kisii-Kalenjin,
which is a boundary dispute. There's Maasai-Kisii, Masai-Kikuyu, which
is about land and water. Luo-Kikuyu is more economic because they don't
have a common border. It's more marginalisation, and it's the same
thing with the Kikuyu-Luhya."
At that point he begins to lose me.
First, I would like to point out that nowhere in the interview does he
talk about reparations and restitution. What happened to the rhetoric
of 'no peace without justice?' Or was the justice about ODM gaining
power rather than the resolution of long-standing social and economic
injustices against the mwananchi? Where and when, Mr. Prime Minister,
can we, and I believe this to be a fundamental part of our healing
process, hang us some criminals? (Metaphorically speaking of course.)
Is the Prime Minister's silence on this matter an attempt at protecting
an emergent status quo that has brought genocidaires from opposite
sides of the political divide into the same government? This silence
worries me, especially when I hear others - politicians from the Rift
Valley, for instance - speak of amnesty for those accused of inciting
or perpetrating ethnic violence.
But returning to Raila's view of where the ethnic crisis stems from,
how is the rift between the Agikuyu and the Luo and the Agikuyu and the
Luhya about economics and marginalisation? How can my family and I be
responsible, in virtue of our Gikuyuness, for the marginalisation of a
family in Bungoma or Rarieda that we do not know of? We might have our
inherited prejudices against those whom I was raised to refer to as the
Beasts From The West but we neither make government policy nor are
consulted on it. When regions in this country lack roads or access to
clean water, do not blame me - I am just a private citizen. Blame
successive governments. Governments that, whether or not they were
headed by an ethnic Gikuyu or Kalenjin, had in them Luos, Gusiis,
Kambas: a motley crew of tribal chiefs.
The problem with Kenya is that the political elite has always used the
tribe as a bargaining chip. In the war for political power and
attendant economic might, the Kenyan politician always marshals his/her
tribes people as cannon fodder. It is no wonder then that those
politicians who find themselves bundled out of the scramble for the
national cake bring 'their people' down with them. Luo Nyanza, for
instance, is one of the poorest and least-developed areas in Kenya, yet
it has more PhDs and Hummer-driving elites per capita than any other
province in this country. The ethnic-Luo individual has done well for
himself, walking the corridoors of political power on two continents.
But what has she or he done for 'the people'? Let us take one Luo
individual: Oginga Odinga.
At the birth of the Kenyan nation, with divide et impera deeply
ingrained in us, our biggest challenge was the big tribes versus the
small tribes. The Agikuyu and the Luo were on one side - they not only
had the distinct advantage of sheer numbers but, also because of these
numbers, they had more of their own who were educated and economically
empowered. The small tribes sought majimbo as a way of countering this.
The big tribes said no. The small tribes, or their tribal leaders at
least, were co-opted as soon as Uhuru arrived. KADU had lost the
General Election in 1963, but it didn't mean that they lost in the
looting of the young nation. They brought their tribes with them as a
bargaining chip but not for sharing of the loot. Soon after Kenya
became a republic under a centralised system of government. A nation
called Kenya had been founded on the principles of equal justice and
the right of every one of its citizens to own - through legal means, of
course - land and property anywhere in the country. But the tribal
leaders went and got themselves all the land in Kenya. There is one
Kikuyu who went on to get himself a corner of State House, a thousand
acres here, one hundred thousand acres there and almost an entire
district in coast province. (Have you asked Ronald Ngala, the champion
of the small tribes of the Coast and everywhere who he was representing
in Government when this happened?) That Kikuyu wasn't my father or my
relative and he never took that land for me or my relatives. So why
should my people, who bought a measly acre of land from a Nandi out in
Eldoret be evicted? Where can a Luo, whose grandfather went to Limuru
to work for a pittance in a shoe factory, return to?
As the boat that was young Kenya proceeded to cruise steadily, tribe became a non-issue in national politics. With a Kikuyu - Jomo Kenyatta
- as president, and the son of Ramogi as his deputy, the Luo and the
Agikuyu could not accuse each other of economic this and
marginalisation that. Then Kenyatta and Odinga had a falling out. One
day, in his political base of Kisumu, Odinga and Kenyatta traded
insults in public and by the time they were done, 11 Kenyans lay dead.
From then until the death of Kenyatta, Odinga's political star was
thrust into oblivion. The ker went down with his tribe.That was the
last time, Muiguithania would be seen in Luo Nyanza. That was the last
time 'development' would go to Luo Nyanza. Kenyatta - the 'leader' of
the Kikuyu had a fight with the leader of the Luo. Unfortunately, Mzee
was the president and 'developer' number one. One Kikuyu marginalised
the Luo. But that Kikuyu, just like the other who took all the land,
was not my father, and he didn't divert the money for building schools
and roads into my home district; no, he sent it to a numbered account
in Switzerland or bought himself an acre in Monaco. Who knows? Do not
ask me, all I know is that me and mine never saw that money. One other
thing that I know is that, even though there are hundreds of thousands
more poor people in Luo Nyanza than in my home district, the poor in my
home district remain poor. The poor, in Kenyatta's home district of
Kiambu, where I come from, still die of the same preventable diseases
as yours do; they are victims, too, of the plunder of this country
that, when the recycled faces of our new portmanteau government are
analysed, doesn't were a tribal but aristocratic face.
It is no wonder, then, that when the Prime Minister-designate claims
identifies the cause of the Luo-Kikuyu ethnic crisis as economic
marginalisation, I gag. I dare him to look at any Kikuyu member of his
government: the only way the term 'economic marginalisation' can be
applied is to refer to what they have done to the rest of the
citizenry.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
What land did the baby who was snatched from his mother and thrown back into the flaming church own?
What land did the Kikuyu students of Baraton University own? the Kalenjins stormed the campus and forced the rest of the students to point out the kikuyus.