Dear Otero,
You might be wondering why I have taken the pain to narrate this episode of that one Friday evening. This is because of the truth that dawned on me that evening that made me discover the Kenya we live in.! The evening had seemed to drag along slowly, as we sat glued to our seats, and listening to the narrator. I looked at my watch; it was just a little past seven P.M. I had a whole Friday evening ahead of me. Looking around in the pub, we had been joined by new patrons who almost immediately fell to the spell of the narration. I emptied my half empty bottle and staggered toward the lavatories to empty my bladder which was burning with liquor contents. I didn’t want to miss any part of the story which to me seemed no only interesting but genuine. If all of us had one day sat and thought objectively like our narrator here, some of the things that had happened to us as a nation in the recent past would never have happened. For once some things which had occurred in the recent past began to crystallize in my mind just like snow on the tip of Mt. Kenya. Truth was finally dawning on me that the Kenya we lived in today was not the Kenya we had wanted at independence!
When I staggered back to the drinking hall, more patrons had poured in and sat attentively listening to the narrator unfold those events we all knew about but none of us had bothered to think about. I quietly staggered towards our table and sank silently on my chair. The waiter had already replaced my empty bottle with a fresh one. I took a long draught and shifted my attention to the narrator.
“I can vividly recall the events that preceded the constitutional referendum. Remember those days, gentlemen? When the whole nation was bracing up for the first ever constitutional referendum in the history of our country? Yes, gentlemen, every one was happy that the whole process which had began years ago and stalled severally, was now about to materialize. For years we had waited and hoped that one day we shall have a new constitution and when we were a step away to having it, you all know what happened. Our know –it- all politicians came in and distorted the true context of the draft constitution. Gentlemen, the campaigns leading to the referendum made me despise politicians. For once I wished I had a gun for I would have massacred the entire clique of the politicians. Honestly, why would a sane man lie to the masses about the contents of the draft constitution just because it didn’t suit his ego? Why not let Wanjiku as we were called decide on it? The issue of tribe came in again –that the draft document was meant to oppress a certain tribe while oppressing another. Pure nonsense it was. And we Kenyans were duped once again. I happened to listen to my village folk’s debate about the constitution one day. Gentlemen I did shed tears at the level of apathy among my people! You know what they told me? That their MP and their beloved son had already read and interpreted the document for them and hence they would go with the position he took! You look perplexed gentlemen, wasn’t it true in your areas too? But that’s the Kenya we live in!
The post referendum era was the most interesting of all. Having convinced the apathetic Mwananchi to reject the draft constitution, it was now time to lay foundation for the 2007 general elections! The mention of 2007 gentlemen leaves an indelible mark in our hearts. This was the period when we completely forgot that we were Kenyans and fortified ourselves as tribes first. Gentlemen, never would I have thought that Kenyans could turn against each other with such vengeance as we did in late 2007 and in the early days of 2008! But looking at our development since independence, it was possible to foresee it if only we had taken time to learn from our painful history.
We rose against each other merely because our politicians were not satisfied with the outcome of the elections. We joined in the calls for mass actions, barricaded highways, burnt and looted property, and as if that was not enough we took the call for ethnic cleansing…we had to remove ‘madoadoa’ from our midst. Innocent people were killed, while those behind it locked themselves at the comfort of their mansions with their families away from the burning streets and watched from their televisions as we shouted ‘Haki yetu! Haki yetu!’ and continued to burn down a country we so much loved and adored. It took only two months to reduce everything we had built since independence into ashes. Kenya was burning. And in the silence of the night, our children wept and sang painfully to a prayer of distress…
…Father, our Kenya needs you now,
Father we need you to come down.
Father Kenyans have lost their ground
Father if we ever need you it’s surely now!
Brothers, remember those nights that we couldn’t sit together as one, drink and chat? When we sat in the darkness of our rooms and waited with pangas and knives for our neighbors to attack us? Can anyone tell me why we got to this? How could one look at his own brother and cut him down? How could one stand and watch as his supporters burnt innocent children and women in a church? Just because someone somewhere thought he had won in the election when he hadn’t actually won? Or because one lost in an election he had actually won? We had done our duty, which was to vote, why then would I be misled by some other person to cut down my neighbor, I had lived with for decades, a neighbor I could wake at any hour of the night to borrow salt and cooking oil…we were stupid and blind ourselves. I say if we ever find ourselves in this situation again, let’s rise against the principals and not our fellow brothers who we see and meet daily.
At last the battle of who had won and who had lost came to a ceasefire and I tell you brothers, we were the greatest losers. Those of us who ganged up and fought in the streets became the greatest losers. And when our beloved politicians saw that we were now tired of slaughtering ourselves, they signed the National Accord to share power among themselves while we who burnt and killed each other got an extra burden of sustaining a bloated government thanks to our stupidity. It was all about power, gentlemen, whom from among you benefited from that bloated cabinet? No one!
The grand coalition government brought with it the wrangles of 2003 and for once I thought that a coalition government was unworkable in our kind of politics, where our politicians lacked self discipline. But that was basically expected. We had, as usual recycled the same elements that had been at the helm of our previous regimes which we had all labeled as autocratic, corrupt and non-reformative. So the end result is that we had the same autocrats, the same corrupt oriented leaders and those opposed to change in our government.
…true gentlemen; we cannot altogether brand the Grand coalition government a total failure. The greatest shortcoming as I saw it from my own perspective is that it couldn’t fight such vices like corruption because it was the same corrupt individuals who headed it and so each fought tooth and nail to protect his own skin…you make me laugh, but its quite important that you have brought this issue up, the social contract between the people and the government was breached right from the beginning. We voted for change, a change we all hoped and waited for, but now the kind of change we got was not really the one we had wanted. We saw a change in the cost of living, where the basic foodstuffs shot up in price and in so doing exposed most of us to starvation and for once the Kenya we thought we knew became a stranger to us! That gentlemen, was the change we fought and shed blood for!
When I look at some of the events in our country today, I sometime ask myself whether our politicians are conscious of what they are really doing. Talk of none issues and you talk of our leaders. When Koffi Annan mediated the National Accord that brought in the grand coalition government, every politician was in full praise of the man who had created jobs for them. Now look at this, when the same Annan said that the perpetrators of the post-election violence should face trial at the Hague, every politician turned against the man…let Annan know that Kenya is a sovereign state and should be left alone to deal with her own problems. I’m left wondering, where was our sovereignty when we fought and killed each other? Why did the same politicians accept Annan to mediate the power-sharing deal?”
Otero, when I looked around at my fellow listeners, every one was glued on his seat, a beer in hand and looking straight at the narrator. Everybody seemed to conceptualize the turns our country had taken to its present. Our narrator rose from his seat and staggered toward the lavatories. The pub came back to life. Everybody was speaking at once and from the noise I could catch a few words “…these politicians have taken enough for us to notice… we have been used for long…never again shall we allow these buggers to take us for a ride!” And when the narrator staggered back to the pub, everyone fell silent. He stared at his audience with drunken eyes and slumped onto his chair. We all stared at him.
“The Kenya we live in is the Kenya we don’t want, and the Kenya we want is the one we have no idea about!” he said and paused. Just then my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. I looked at my watch, it was almost eleven. I cursed at how fast time flies, and gulped down the remaining beer. I staggered out of the pub; it was time to meet with my girlfriend!
And as I drove home that Friday night, the full sense of what I had sat through in the pub came to me in full force. For long we had cried and blamed the colonialists for the problems in the country, but I now came to realize the Kenya I lived in was very different from the one the Colonialists left behind. We had failed to learn from our past and this history kept following us into the present. The events of the post-election violence had marked the climax of what we had been building all along. Tribalism had taken the better part of us and I could now clearly understand the Kenya I lived in, it was a land of tribalism, a land where ethnicity was a sacred thing, a land where for anything to move, it had to base on a tribal line. We called ourselves Kenyans but deep inside we were a tribe first trying to rush to a road of nationalism. A road that will never be built because the engineers are the same proponents of tribal politics!
You might be wondering why I have taken the pain to narrate this episode of that one Friday evening. This is because of the truth that dawned on me that evening that made me discover the Kenya we live in.! The evening had seemed to drag along slowly, as we sat glued to our seats, and listening to the narrator. I looked at my watch; it was just a little past seven P.M. I had a whole Friday evening ahead of me. Looking around in the pub, we had been joined by new patrons who almost immediately fell to the spell of the narration. I emptied my half empty bottle and staggered toward the lavatories to empty my bladder which was burning with liquor contents. I didn’t want to miss any part of the story which to me seemed no only interesting but genuine. If all of us had one day sat and thought objectively like our narrator here, some of the things that had happened to us as a nation in the recent past would never have happened. For once some things which had occurred in the recent past began to crystallize in my mind just like snow on the tip of Mt. Kenya. Truth was finally dawning on me that the Kenya we lived in today was not the Kenya we had wanted at independence!
When I staggered back to the drinking hall, more patrons had poured in and sat attentively listening to the narrator unfold those events we all knew about but none of us had bothered to think about. I quietly staggered towards our table and sank silently on my chair. The waiter had already replaced my empty bottle with a fresh one. I took a long draught and shifted my attention to the narrator.
“I can vividly recall the events that preceded the constitutional referendum. Remember those days, gentlemen? When the whole nation was bracing up for the first ever constitutional referendum in the history of our country? Yes, gentlemen, every one was happy that the whole process which had began years ago and stalled severally, was now about to materialize. For years we had waited and hoped that one day we shall have a new constitution and when we were a step away to having it, you all know what happened. Our know –it- all politicians came in and distorted the true context of the draft constitution. Gentlemen, the campaigns leading to the referendum made me despise politicians. For once I wished I had a gun for I would have massacred the entire clique of the politicians. Honestly, why would a sane man lie to the masses about the contents of the draft constitution just because it didn’t suit his ego? Why not let Wanjiku as we were called decide on it? The issue of tribe came in again –that the draft document was meant to oppress a certain tribe while oppressing another. Pure nonsense it was. And we Kenyans were duped once again. I happened to listen to my village folk’s debate about the constitution one day. Gentlemen I did shed tears at the level of apathy among my people! You know what they told me? That their MP and their beloved son had already read and interpreted the document for them and hence they would go with the position he took! You look perplexed gentlemen, wasn’t it true in your areas too? But that’s the Kenya we live in!
The post referendum era was the most interesting of all. Having convinced the apathetic Mwananchi to reject the draft constitution, it was now time to lay foundation for the 2007 general elections! The mention of 2007 gentlemen leaves an indelible mark in our hearts. This was the period when we completely forgot that we were Kenyans and fortified ourselves as tribes first. Gentlemen, never would I have thought that Kenyans could turn against each other with such vengeance as we did in late 2007 and in the early days of 2008! But looking at our development since independence, it was possible to foresee it if only we had taken time to learn from our painful history.
We rose against each other merely because our politicians were not satisfied with the outcome of the elections. We joined in the calls for mass actions, barricaded highways, burnt and looted property, and as if that was not enough we took the call for ethnic cleansing…we had to remove ‘madoadoa’ from our midst. Innocent people were killed, while those behind it locked themselves at the comfort of their mansions with their families away from the burning streets and watched from their televisions as we shouted ‘Haki yetu! Haki yetu!’ and continued to burn down a country we so much loved and adored. It took only two months to reduce everything we had built since independence into ashes. Kenya was burning. And in the silence of the night, our children wept and sang painfully to a prayer of distress…
…Father, our Kenya needs you now,
Father we need you to come down.
Father Kenyans have lost their ground
Father if we ever need you it’s surely now!
Brothers, remember those nights that we couldn’t sit together as one, drink and chat? When we sat in the darkness of our rooms and waited with pangas and knives for our neighbors to attack us? Can anyone tell me why we got to this? How could one look at his own brother and cut him down? How could one stand and watch as his supporters burnt innocent children and women in a church? Just because someone somewhere thought he had won in the election when he hadn’t actually won? Or because one lost in an election he had actually won? We had done our duty, which was to vote, why then would I be misled by some other person to cut down my neighbor, I had lived with for decades, a neighbor I could wake at any hour of the night to borrow salt and cooking oil…we were stupid and blind ourselves. I say if we ever find ourselves in this situation again, let’s rise against the principals and not our fellow brothers who we see and meet daily.
At last the battle of who had won and who had lost came to a ceasefire and I tell you brothers, we were the greatest losers. Those of us who ganged up and fought in the streets became the greatest losers. And when our beloved politicians saw that we were now tired of slaughtering ourselves, they signed the National Accord to share power among themselves while we who burnt and killed each other got an extra burden of sustaining a bloated government thanks to our stupidity. It was all about power, gentlemen, whom from among you benefited from that bloated cabinet? No one!
The grand coalition government brought with it the wrangles of 2003 and for once I thought that a coalition government was unworkable in our kind of politics, where our politicians lacked self discipline. But that was basically expected. We had, as usual recycled the same elements that had been at the helm of our previous regimes which we had all labeled as autocratic, corrupt and non-reformative. So the end result is that we had the same autocrats, the same corrupt oriented leaders and those opposed to change in our government.
…true gentlemen; we cannot altogether brand the Grand coalition government a total failure. The greatest shortcoming as I saw it from my own perspective is that it couldn’t fight such vices like corruption because it was the same corrupt individuals who headed it and so each fought tooth and nail to protect his own skin…you make me laugh, but its quite important that you have brought this issue up, the social contract between the people and the government was breached right from the beginning. We voted for change, a change we all hoped and waited for, but now the kind of change we got was not really the one we had wanted. We saw a change in the cost of living, where the basic foodstuffs shot up in price and in so doing exposed most of us to starvation and for once the Kenya we thought we knew became a stranger to us! That gentlemen, was the change we fought and shed blood for!
When I look at some of the events in our country today, I sometime ask myself whether our politicians are conscious of what they are really doing. Talk of none issues and you talk of our leaders. When Koffi Annan mediated the National Accord that brought in the grand coalition government, every politician was in full praise of the man who had created jobs for them. Now look at this, when the same Annan said that the perpetrators of the post-election violence should face trial at the Hague, every politician turned against the man…let Annan know that Kenya is a sovereign state and should be left alone to deal with her own problems. I’m left wondering, where was our sovereignty when we fought and killed each other? Why did the same politicians accept Annan to mediate the power-sharing deal?”
Otero, when I looked around at my fellow listeners, every one was glued on his seat, a beer in hand and looking straight at the narrator. Everybody seemed to conceptualize the turns our country had taken to its present. Our narrator rose from his seat and staggered toward the lavatories. The pub came back to life. Everybody was speaking at once and from the noise I could catch a few words “…these politicians have taken enough for us to notice… we have been used for long…never again shall we allow these buggers to take us for a ride!” And when the narrator staggered back to the pub, everyone fell silent. He stared at his audience with drunken eyes and slumped onto his chair. We all stared at him.
“The Kenya we live in is the Kenya we don’t want, and the Kenya we want is the one we have no idea about!” he said and paused. Just then my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. I looked at my watch, it was almost eleven. I cursed at how fast time flies, and gulped down the remaining beer. I staggered out of the pub; it was time to meet with my girlfriend!
And as I drove home that Friday night, the full sense of what I had sat through in the pub came to me in full force. For long we had cried and blamed the colonialists for the problems in the country, but I now came to realize the Kenya I lived in was very different from the one the Colonialists left behind. We had failed to learn from our past and this history kept following us into the present. The events of the post-election violence had marked the climax of what we had been building all along. Tribalism had taken the better part of us and I could now clearly understand the Kenya I lived in, it was a land of tribalism, a land where ethnicity was a sacred thing, a land where for anything to move, it had to base on a tribal line. We called ourselves Kenyans but deep inside we were a tribe first trying to rush to a road of nationalism. A road that will never be built because the engineers are the same proponents of tribal politics!
No comments:
Post a Comment