{UAH} Pojim, Philip Ocheing has spoken!! Why I support a strong central government - Opinion - nation.co.ke
|
1:41 PM |
No comments |
Jubilee and I are strange bedfellows. But what I don't support is only the method by which Jubilee is undermining devolution.
Otherwise, even I have no truck with that constitutional provision. The question is: How can a Wanjikuist reject any plan to "empower" her?
"Empowering the people" is the red herring. For, although I have always defended kabwela's rights, I just don't see how our devolution – the way it is manned – can deliver power to any Kenyan.
Today Julius Nyerere – probably our epoch's most honest political potentate – would not hasten to admonish Kenya with the warning: "Given your present circumstances, please do not try it."
For in 1971, the president sponsored a new set of party-based guidelines called Mwongozo – verily akin in spirit to Kenya's new Constitution – with which he tried to decentralise political power from the country's Indian Ocean capital down to the Ujamaa village.
I remember it vividly because I was working for him in Dar es Salaam as a senior editor of the Standard Tanzania (under Benjamin Mkapa). And the enthusiasm with which we all embraced this early attempt by an African state to devolve power to the "grassroots" was overwhelming.
But even more vivid in my head is that Mwongozo came a cropper completely. In implementation, devolution proved ignominious.
Why? Because – as should have been obvious to us all along – deep layers of stinking social decay were what the ruling party (Tanu) had succeeded in devolving.
What we had moved from Dar es Salaam to Chamwino – the Ujamaa village that we, in the media, had been made to glorify as the ideal – were administrators and economic managers who, although pouring fulsome praise on Mwalimu and "socialism" at the top of their voices – were rotten to the core.
What Dar es Salaam's Ikulu had sent to the "grassroots" to implement our devolution programme were incorrigible thieves, liars and braggadocios, men who wallowed like tausi in their own self-importance.
But the question is: Hasn't anybody seen such waste and ostentation in Kenya's present devolution process?
Haven't you heard that – in the manner of Patrick Renison and Kenya's other colonial tyrants – every one of your new county rulers has declared himself "His Excellency the Governor" and his wife "the First Lady"?
Every governor has demanded a mansion bigger than Barack Obama's White House, a personal "airstrip" larger than London's Heathrow, a mlolongo of cars more sinuous than Monsieur Hollande's, a guard of Grenadiers more resplendent than the thousand saints whom a European hymn writer thought he saw as Jesus "descended" in his "second coming".
By "devolving", then, we are merely unloading to the countryside whole cadres from a central structure already rotten with greed and deep in financial mires and land grabbing.
The question is: Why are we doing it? The answer: So as to keep up with the Joneses of global political propriety.
Yet until only yesterday, the Joneses – the Gnomes of Zurich – tyrannised us, robbed us of our wealth and poured terrible abuse on our racial attributes.
The question is: How have those despots suddenly discovered that "democracy" is Africa's only salvation – to be implemented to the letter in order to merit "aid"?
In this way, we simply perpetuate that behaviour – so that, even when our ethnic seams are already so dangerously frayed, we perpetually play at superficial "democracy" in a manner that can only intensify our ethnic conflicts, dredge our national disunity and permanentlThat is why I support a strong, enlightened, central government. To waste your already dangerously meagre political energy into a million mini-governments is to condemn yourself to fatal powerlessness at the centre.
To decentralise consumer avarice and elite arrogance is to empower nobody.y moor our production wheels to the ground.
0 comments:
Post a Comment