Hope
written by wan , March 27, 2008

Is this refering to IDP's? Are we Kenyans willing to give our IDP's a chance to rise up again or have we concluded that we can as well send them to live on MARS OR JUPITAR? Tell me, if they were our neighbors have we invited them to go back to their homes and hence helped them in their pursuit to rich the sky?Kenyans we need one another.

kaa ngumu
written by Stephen Wanyama , March 27, 2008

As had been written here over and over again, and as lamented by the Mungatana, Amina Abdallah and others, the peace deal was not worthy of the paper it was written on or the fanfare with which it was received. The IDPs' resettlement does not seem anywhere on the agenda.

Wan, as we keep insisting that our primary identities are ethnic rather than national, what business have IDPs living outside of their ethnic enclaves? What business do civil servants have expecting that they can be tolerated as servants of people they only owe a subordinate secondary loyalty? We must take care of our people first seems to be the spirit of our times, first broadcasted by the ODM, then advanced with pin-point accuracy by the Rift Valley warriors, sanded by the revenge mobs from Central Kenya and now gaining currency even with worldly American scholars. Why can we not join the dots? Put your tribe first, they all say, or in paraphrasing Keguro's everlasting words,

It is alright to disavow the invitation to identify ourselves as national, international, or cosmopolitan. It is tempting, the idea that we can have values and loyalties that are greater in scope than tribe. Compelling is the notion that we would be better people if our loyalties were less local, less idiosyncratic, less attached to nine clans that face Mount Kenya, but we must believe in the love for our tribes, we must believe in its potential, now let's see where that leads.

Amazingly, Raila was on PBS evincing surprise saying,

"This conflict has unmasked the face of true Kenya, and what we're seeing is not really beautiful. For 45 years, we have lived a lie, that we're a unified nation. We're not."

I posit that any country in the world, if a demagogue was in place, could erupt in exactly the same chaos Kenya did, you really needn't have different ethnic groups. All you need is incitement, there are a million and one cleavages a politician could choose to highlight in a society. Shameful that intellectuals should seek now, not to correct, but to legitimise such thought. Check this video here.