[UAH] Brave New World: These Luhyia are not tribal enough!
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1:39 PM |
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Kenya is at a crossroads, or so several writers have announced. And they have sketched developments that indicate movement in the right direction and others that point in the opposite direction.
It would seem that this state — of a promise as ready to be fulfilled as to be aborted — is a permanent condition.
In 1963, Kenya could have been described as a country about to lift-off or crash. The same imagery could have applied after the defeat of Kanu in 2002. But in both these cases, neither the lift-off nor crash happened.
I wondered about this permanent stasis recently, this inability to make the mental leap that will set us on a path to catching up with South Korea or Malysia.
Consider our political leadership. A while ago, there was a news clip featuring Gideon Moi, a Senator, giving a speech in Western Kenya.
After giving a brief history of which tribe has occupied State House over the years, the Senator offered his analysis of why the Luhya community has failed, to use his words, to "enjoy" the seat of presidential power: They do not vote as a block for one of their own.
Instead of congratulating the community for being in step with the new Constitution — for voting on the basis of "community of interest," not on the basis of tribal loyalty — the Senator, who is supposed to propose policies and enact laws to bring the values in the Constitution alive, berated the community for their progressive stance.
While Moi was giving lessons on political mobilisation on the basis of tribe, his counterparts in the National Assembly were introducing a motion in parliament to disband the Salaries and Remuneration Commission for daring to revise their salaries downwards from close to a million shillings a month plus benefits to half-a-million shillings.
Never mind that when allowances and other benefits are added to this "lowly" pay, Kenyan MPs would still take home a pay package bigger than MPs in Britain, a country much richer and whose cost of living is much higher than Kenya's.
To paraphrase Bill Clinton's campaign exhortation, for our MPs it would seem, "It's the money, stupid!" Thus a young Senator from the Rift Valley would rapturously tell a TV host that his pay now as compared to before was, oh, so much bigger, and he used to walk but now, oh, the TV host should see the car he was driving.
Nothing about the youth agenda; nothing about where Kenya is and needs to be and what needs to be done to get us there; nothing about his new position being an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of Kenyans. All that be damned, the young Senator had already achieved his goals.
As the young Senator gushed about the trappings of his new position, the country was under siege by criminal gangs. In Nairobi, there was a spike in gun murders and audacious daytime robberies. At the Coast, a secessionist movement was becoming violent, targeting policemen and police posts in daring and deadly attacks.
In the north, terrorists, with impunity, carried on with their murderous rampage. In Bungoma, Busia and Nyandarua, gangs armed with machetes were moving from village to village slashing anyone and everyone, leaving women, children , grandmothers and grandfathers in hospital or dead.
And as the National Assembly set about discussing their salaries, floods were wreaking havoc all over the country, an annual harvest of death and destruction that we seem completely incapable of dealing with.
In the Nairobi CBD, power was playing hide and seek, and we heard the same tired talk of what needs to be done to assure a steady and cheap supply of power by the same-old talking heads.
And even as Kenyans reel from all this stupidity, greed and death, there persists a cacophonous din of sirens and motorcades, designed more to intimidate the public than protect their well-fed and overpaid cargo.
For how long will we continue to be both a promise of hope and a warning of death?
Tee Ngugi is a social and political commentator based in Nairobi
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