Dear Otero,
The events of that Friday evening in that pub will forever remain entrenched in my mind. The narrator spoke with a conviction I have never seen. I sat there glued on my chair as the story unfolded before me.
A long pause had followed in the pub. I tried to sip my beer, but half way stopped and put the bottle down on the table. I looked around at my fellow guzzlers. I was not alone. Unopened bottles and glasses full of beer stood untouched all around. Of course everybody had been listening to the story. Our narrator, a Tusker Malt in his hand sat reflectively, gaping pensively at the ceiling. The mood of the silence must have affected him as well. He took a long draught from the bottle and put the beer back on the table. As if prearranged, we all followed suit and sat staring at him anxiously like school kids waiting for the teacher to announce the results of a test. And his voice when he spoke seemed to have been affected by the attentive silence.
“Our problems in Kenya can be traced way back to the period of our second liberation,” he said and paused again. “That was the period gentlemen, if you can still recall, when tired of the dictatorial regime in place, we had agitated for reforms to pave way for participatory democracy. Gentlemen, those were the years when our hard won freedom was suppressed by our very own brothers, a period when we cried and thought it better to go back to colonialism. Who would have thought that Africans could turn against each other? Forget our collective march to independence chanting our cries of Uhuru? You mention it…greed, selfishness, that was it gentlemen. The problem as we came to realize much later, was that as we marched to independence, hoping to equally benefit from the departure of our colonial masters, we forgot and, or failed to notice that some of us had hidden motives…self interests. There were those who wanted to consolidate power firmly to themselves and were not ready to relinquish it to anyone else…the proverbial house of shelter where people barricaded themselves in and from there threw stones through the window to those who attempted to take shelter in it…yes, you are right brother, in our march to independence our political leaders were yapping for that new seat of authority- the presidency. That was the coveted prize and it was a game of wits. As the saying goes, not all monkeys could swing at a go and thus it was upon the cleverest monkey to outwit the rest and take the first shot at the swig. And so gentlemen, no sooner had the instruments of power passed on to black hands and the Union Jack lowered for the last than our leaders began bickering and fighting over the prize. This, my brothers prompted some to break away from the mainstream party and form other parties which they could use as vehicle to get to power…yes my friend, the era of multiparty politics had just began. But do you think that this was sustainable? Yes…no? No, no, it wasn’t sustainable. No post-independence leader could allow his grip to power to be threatened by some few ungrateful egrets…but come to think of it, same song, and same space as they fought for independence…why then were the differences? You forget gentlemen, the nature of our African leaders. They forget so easily…for why would Kenyatta detain Odinga, or Ngei, or any of those who languished in Kapenguria with him? You are right brother, what was of importance was to take control of the state and once this was firmly in control, the rest of those who joined you in the struggle could afford to be forgotten. And so gentlemen as a result Kenya was declared a de facto one party state all in the name of unity and nation building. This meant that the dissents either agree with the mother party or quit altogether. The reasoning was simple; we cannot eat political ideologies. We needed to create a nation where the youth and the future generations will find solace. There were those forces from outside the continent which wanted to see us continuing to be divided because, that way, their interests would be served better. And as one of the proponents of one party state said, there were those forces at home which because of minor differences in strategy and ideology made it impossible for us to co-operate. And with such reasoning advanced to a people who had suffered so much under colonialism, who, among the masses could object to Kenya being a de facto one party state?
Those were the times, gentlemen, the period of great oppression and distress in our nation. We cried and chanted mapambano, amid political assassinations and at last, twenty eight years after our independence, our cry was heard. Multiparty democracy was restored and in 1992 we all marched forward and sang the song of change.
You all remember that period, don’t you? Yes, exactly as you say. It was the period that saw the birth of new political parties in Kenya. For the first time since independence our democratic space had been widened. For quite a long time, people had been used to the only party…the Baba na Mama party, yes, you recall? You were part of it, weren’t you? That was the founding party as it was called by many and everyone…in fact for you to be considered a true patriot; you had to be aligned to the party in one way or the other. The party had been in existence for so long that people used to call it just “the party”. And so gentlemen, with the emergence of multi parties, the existence of the party was threatened and so brothers; everything had to be done to consolidate power within the confines of the party.
It was a period of great hopes and dreams, dreams of a new nation. Politicians having been given the license to make noise went full blast. This was a period that people could afford to dream, dream of new things to come. KANU had been in power for so long and people felt that it had lost its significance to the politics of the time. There was this great wave of political euphoria and for once everyone that the veteran president would lose in the election. But you know very well that in Africa leaders don’t lose elections, whether you vote for them or not…and so it happened, the professor of politics? You mention it, my brother he was a professor indeed and above all, the architect of Nyayoism and a darling of the people. He taught and preached peace, love and unity to us, the core values of the Nyayo philosophy. KANU was national party and not a tribal one…it was the driving force behind the Kenya African nationalism. The architects of multi parties missed a mark the moment they established their parties within tribal lines. Parties were formed to safeguard the interests of a given community.
And so gentlemen, those of you who still think that the Kenya we live in is a product of colonialism ought to think deep. I’d rather think that the birth of the Kenya you and I live in today was the inception of multiparty politics…no, no I’m not a proponent of a one party system…no, all what I mean is that by agitating for multi party democracy we thought that we were fighting autocracy, little did we know that we had opened the floodgates for a more complex problem; the problem of ethnicity. Our politicians were politically immature for multipartism. Instead of forming parties based on ideologies, they opted to form tribal strongholds for themselves, and what did this breed? Ethnic cleansing. That was the period that saw the skirmishes in the Rift valley…yes, look at it from this point of view, Rift valley was a KANU stronghold with the Kalenjins forming the bulk of the majority. They had, since independence, peacefully co existed with their Kikuyu brothers, reason being that they were all in KANU and so when the DP was formed the two broke ranks as the Kikuyu were regarded as rebels. This meant that they had to go! And so the era of tribal politics had began in Kenya. Tribalism became a paramount factor in our politics, a fact that is prevalent up to this day.
Gentlemen, what is the matter? Your glasses are empty. Hey waiter, bring us more liquor. Lets drink gentlemen, yes, Tusker the true spirit of the nation! Liquor is the only common factor that remained in us. We had nothing left to show of our national hood. We all called ourselves Kenyans by citizenship but deep within ourselves we were a tribe first. We in fact joined in the call for ethnic purity and formed tribal strongholds to safeguard our interests as a tribe.
We all know what happened next. Then period after 1992…exactly, the call for our second liberation. Liberation from what? Autocracy? Ethnicity? What? I don’t know…the call for constitutional reforms, Katiba mpya…that is it gentlemen. I don’t want to talk about the constitution because what we heard in 1992 is in fact what we were told in 1997, 2002 and in 2007! The process of giving Kenyans a new law was politicized and stalled as it became a campaign tool. As a result we had to wait for ten more years before the prospects of having a new constitution and hence the so called second liberation became imminent!
The year 2002 found us still engrossed in the fantasy of having a new nation. Everybody felt that we needed change. Change of guard, change of politicians and change in everything. We felt that we needed to erase our past, forget that our nation had been in existence for the last thirty nine years. And so everyone took up the call, our politicians included. Everybody wanted change…fresh ideas, dynamism. Perhaps sensing the danger, overnight our politicians became young and smelt change. Change, like rest hung loosely in the air. Those who had played a leading role in our national politics in the past decades, all still wanted to be young. After all it was a period of change! Once a snake undergoes ecdysiast, does it stop from remaining old? Anyway you know it better. Politicians who had been at the helm of our politics suddenly underwent ecdysiast and became glittering young. Can you imagine that my area MP who is older than the republic itself suddenly became young and could even afford a few words in distorted sheng?
Anyway what followed was a series of fake manifestos and once again we fell prey to political lies. Remember them? Yes, those ones…a new constitution within the first hundred days, zero tolerance to corruption and what did you say? A coalition government…oh yes, the NARC dream. Gentlemen, you still recall those days? When each passing day was a new chapter in our lives? Everyone had hope, yes, hope in the new state of affairs and so we blindly recycled the same old people in the name of the new dream and soon we were under the very same politicians who had led our country down the slopes of inflation, bad governance, corruption and so on…old wine in new wineskins, correct. We all waited in anticipation, still hoping and dreaming. We still had faith even when things seemed to go wrong…apathetic? Maybe, I don’t know, but it might be true to some extent. The euphoria of change had driven every one of us blind and full of hope.
Me? Yes, gentlemen, me too. I had actually harbored high hopes in the new nation. Let me see, or rather count…they had promised us restoration of democracy, all what we wanted as a nation reborn. They promised to revive the economy which was in shambles. There was this promise to create 500,000 jobs a year…the youth enterprise fund, zero tolerance to corruption, the era of Nchi ya kitu kidogo was coming to an end…of course, gentlemen ethnicity was to be crushed, yeah, the NARC dream comprised all tribes in all regions…Nyanza, Rift valley, Western, Coast, Central, Eastern and even the North…all of them were part of the dream! It was the first time since the march to independence that we came together, politically, not as a tribe but as a nation. The NARC dream was a juicy morsel we couldn’t to spit from our mouths…correct, good fortune had placed it in our mouths and none of us was stupid enough to spit it out. For once I thought we had collectively shed our tribal politics and embraced the true spirit of nationalism until gentlemen, until the events that led to the post election violence in 2008.
You ask what happened to the NARC dream. Well, the dream never materialized. Since it was just an ordinary dream, the dreamers woke up to the reality as soon as the coalition government was formed…gentlemen, you are no longer drinking. Is Tusker out of stock here? Sure, sure the bar owner must have signed an agreement…you call it a memorandum of understanding with the brewers that Tusker will forever remain plentiful here…the M.O.U. yes you mention the M.O.U, that gentlemen, was the beast that shattered the NARC dream. There was this gentlemen’s agreement; of course that’s why it was called the NARC dream. Why else would I, in my normal senses, agree to sell you a bull I do not have just because my daughter is ripening and can fetch some good dowry once she marries? Of course she might even decide to become a nun! In fact gentlemen, the M.O.U contained a power sharing formula and the parties went ahead to allocate these portfolios in advance. The dreaming part of it is that none of the allocated offices were in our constitution and the agreement place was rush the constitution through parliament to create these office to suit themselves…just like it happened in 2008. Gentlemen, it was all about power. The proposed constitution was not meant to restore sovereignty to the people but to create room to the political class to wield more power! A constitution by politicians for politicians! You all know the position; the constitution was not delivered within the first hundred days as promised. Those who know better, a constitution is not a bottle of beer that you can guzzle down your throat in one gulp!
A long pause had followed in the pub. I tried to sip my beer, but half way stopped and put the bottle down on the table. I looked around at my fellow guzzlers. I was not alone. Unopened bottles and glasses full of beer stood untouched all around. Of course everybody had been listening to the story. Our narrator, a Tusker Malt in his hand sat reflectively, gaping pensively at the ceiling. The mood of the silence must have affected him as well. He took a long draught from the bottle and put the beer back on the table. As if prearranged, we all followed suit and sat staring at him anxiously like school kids waiting for the teacher to announce the results of a test. And his voice when he spoke seemed to have been affected by the attentive silence.
“Our problems in Kenya can be traced way back to the period of our second liberation,” he said and paused again. “That was the period gentlemen, if you can still recall, when tired of the dictatorial regime in place, we had agitated for reforms to pave way for participatory democracy. Gentlemen, those were the years when our hard won freedom was suppressed by our very own brothers, a period when we cried and thought it better to go back to colonialism. Who would have thought that Africans could turn against each other? Forget our collective march to independence chanting our cries of Uhuru? You mention it…greed, selfishness, that was it gentlemen. The problem as we came to realize much later, was that as we marched to independence, hoping to equally benefit from the departure of our colonial masters, we forgot and, or failed to notice that some of us had hidden motives…self interests. There were those who wanted to consolidate power firmly to themselves and were not ready to relinquish it to anyone else…the proverbial house of shelter where people barricaded themselves in and from there threw stones through the window to those who attempted to take shelter in it…yes, you are right brother, in our march to independence our political leaders were yapping for that new seat of authority- the presidency. That was the coveted prize and it was a game of wits. As the saying goes, not all monkeys could swing at a go and thus it was upon the cleverest monkey to outwit the rest and take the first shot at the swig. And so gentlemen, no sooner had the instruments of power passed on to black hands and the Union Jack lowered for the last than our leaders began bickering and fighting over the prize. This, my brothers prompted some to break away from the mainstream party and form other parties which they could use as vehicle to get to power…yes my friend, the era of multiparty politics had just began. But do you think that this was sustainable? Yes…no? No, no, it wasn’t sustainable. No post-independence leader could allow his grip to power to be threatened by some few ungrateful egrets…but come to think of it, same song, and same space as they fought for independence…why then were the differences? You forget gentlemen, the nature of our African leaders. They forget so easily…for why would Kenyatta detain Odinga, or Ngei, or any of those who languished in Kapenguria with him? You are right brother, what was of importance was to take control of the state and once this was firmly in control, the rest of those who joined you in the struggle could afford to be forgotten. And so gentlemen as a result Kenya was declared a de facto one party state all in the name of unity and nation building. This meant that the dissents either agree with the mother party or quit altogether. The reasoning was simple; we cannot eat political ideologies. We needed to create a nation where the youth and the future generations will find solace. There were those forces from outside the continent which wanted to see us continuing to be divided because, that way, their interests would be served better. And as one of the proponents of one party state said, there were those forces at home which because of minor differences in strategy and ideology made it impossible for us to co-operate. And with such reasoning advanced to a people who had suffered so much under colonialism, who, among the masses could object to Kenya being a de facto one party state?
Those were the times, gentlemen, the period of great oppression and distress in our nation. We cried and chanted mapambano, amid political assassinations and at last, twenty eight years after our independence, our cry was heard. Multiparty democracy was restored and in 1992 we all marched forward and sang the song of change.
You all remember that period, don’t you? Yes, exactly as you say. It was the period that saw the birth of new political parties in Kenya. For the first time since independence our democratic space had been widened. For quite a long time, people had been used to the only party…the Baba na Mama party, yes, you recall? You were part of it, weren’t you? That was the founding party as it was called by many and everyone…in fact for you to be considered a true patriot; you had to be aligned to the party in one way or the other. The party had been in existence for so long that people used to call it just “the party”. And so gentlemen, with the emergence of multi parties, the existence of the party was threatened and so brothers; everything had to be done to consolidate power within the confines of the party.
It was a period of great hopes and dreams, dreams of a new nation. Politicians having been given the license to make noise went full blast. This was a period that people could afford to dream, dream of new things to come. KANU had been in power for so long and people felt that it had lost its significance to the politics of the time. There was this great wave of political euphoria and for once everyone that the veteran president would lose in the election. But you know very well that in Africa leaders don’t lose elections, whether you vote for them or not…and so it happened, the professor of politics? You mention it, my brother he was a professor indeed and above all, the architect of Nyayoism and a darling of the people. He taught and preached peace, love and unity to us, the core values of the Nyayo philosophy. KANU was national party and not a tribal one…it was the driving force behind the Kenya African nationalism. The architects of multi parties missed a mark the moment they established their parties within tribal lines. Parties were formed to safeguard the interests of a given community.
And so gentlemen, those of you who still think that the Kenya we live in is a product of colonialism ought to think deep. I’d rather think that the birth of the Kenya you and I live in today was the inception of multiparty politics…no, no I’m not a proponent of a one party system…no, all what I mean is that by agitating for multi party democracy we thought that we were fighting autocracy, little did we know that we had opened the floodgates for a more complex problem; the problem of ethnicity. Our politicians were politically immature for multipartism. Instead of forming parties based on ideologies, they opted to form tribal strongholds for themselves, and what did this breed? Ethnic cleansing. That was the period that saw the skirmishes in the Rift valley…yes, look at it from this point of view, Rift valley was a KANU stronghold with the Kalenjins forming the bulk of the majority. They had, since independence, peacefully co existed with their Kikuyu brothers, reason being that they were all in KANU and so when the DP was formed the two broke ranks as the Kikuyu were regarded as rebels. This meant that they had to go! And so the era of tribal politics had began in Kenya. Tribalism became a paramount factor in our politics, a fact that is prevalent up to this day.
Gentlemen, what is the matter? Your glasses are empty. Hey waiter, bring us more liquor. Lets drink gentlemen, yes, Tusker the true spirit of the nation! Liquor is the only common factor that remained in us. We had nothing left to show of our national hood. We all called ourselves Kenyans by citizenship but deep within ourselves we were a tribe first. We in fact joined in the call for ethnic purity and formed tribal strongholds to safeguard our interests as a tribe.
We all know what happened next. Then period after 1992…exactly, the call for our second liberation. Liberation from what? Autocracy? Ethnicity? What? I don’t know…the call for constitutional reforms, Katiba mpya…that is it gentlemen. I don’t want to talk about the constitution because what we heard in 1992 is in fact what we were told in 1997, 2002 and in 2007! The process of giving Kenyans a new law was politicized and stalled as it became a campaign tool. As a result we had to wait for ten more years before the prospects of having a new constitution and hence the so called second liberation became imminent!
The year 2002 found us still engrossed in the fantasy of having a new nation. Everybody felt that we needed change. Change of guard, change of politicians and change in everything. We felt that we needed to erase our past, forget that our nation had been in existence for the last thirty nine years. And so everyone took up the call, our politicians included. Everybody wanted change…fresh ideas, dynamism. Perhaps sensing the danger, overnight our politicians became young and smelt change. Change, like rest hung loosely in the air. Those who had played a leading role in our national politics in the past decades, all still wanted to be young. After all it was a period of change! Once a snake undergoes ecdysiast, does it stop from remaining old? Anyway you know it better. Politicians who had been at the helm of our politics suddenly underwent ecdysiast and became glittering young. Can you imagine that my area MP who is older than the republic itself suddenly became young and could even afford a few words in distorted sheng?
Anyway what followed was a series of fake manifestos and once again we fell prey to political lies. Remember them? Yes, those ones…a new constitution within the first hundred days, zero tolerance to corruption and what did you say? A coalition government…oh yes, the NARC dream. Gentlemen, you still recall those days? When each passing day was a new chapter in our lives? Everyone had hope, yes, hope in the new state of affairs and so we blindly recycled the same old people in the name of the new dream and soon we were under the very same politicians who had led our country down the slopes of inflation, bad governance, corruption and so on…old wine in new wineskins, correct. We all waited in anticipation, still hoping and dreaming. We still had faith even when things seemed to go wrong…apathetic? Maybe, I don’t know, but it might be true to some extent. The euphoria of change had driven every one of us blind and full of hope.
Me? Yes, gentlemen, me too. I had actually harbored high hopes in the new nation. Let me see, or rather count…they had promised us restoration of democracy, all what we wanted as a nation reborn. They promised to revive the economy which was in shambles. There was this promise to create 500,000 jobs a year…the youth enterprise fund, zero tolerance to corruption, the era of Nchi ya kitu kidogo was coming to an end…of course, gentlemen ethnicity was to be crushed, yeah, the NARC dream comprised all tribes in all regions…Nyanza, Rift valley, Western, Coast, Central, Eastern and even the North…all of them were part of the dream! It was the first time since the march to independence that we came together, politically, not as a tribe but as a nation. The NARC dream was a juicy morsel we couldn’t to spit from our mouths…correct, good fortune had placed it in our mouths and none of us was stupid enough to spit it out. For once I thought we had collectively shed our tribal politics and embraced the true spirit of nationalism until gentlemen, until the events that led to the post election violence in 2008.
You ask what happened to the NARC dream. Well, the dream never materialized. Since it was just an ordinary dream, the dreamers woke up to the reality as soon as the coalition government was formed…gentlemen, you are no longer drinking. Is Tusker out of stock here? Sure, sure the bar owner must have signed an agreement…you call it a memorandum of understanding with the brewers that Tusker will forever remain plentiful here…the M.O.U. yes you mention the M.O.U, that gentlemen, was the beast that shattered the NARC dream. There was this gentlemen’s agreement; of course that’s why it was called the NARC dream. Why else would I, in my normal senses, agree to sell you a bull I do not have just because my daughter is ripening and can fetch some good dowry once she marries? Of course she might even decide to become a nun! In fact gentlemen, the M.O.U contained a power sharing formula and the parties went ahead to allocate these portfolios in advance. The dreaming part of it is that none of the allocated offices were in our constitution and the agreement place was rush the constitution through parliament to create these office to suit themselves…just like it happened in 2008. Gentlemen, it was all about power. The proposed constitution was not meant to restore sovereignty to the people but to create room to the political class to wield more power! A constitution by politicians for politicians! You all know the position; the constitution was not delivered within the first hundred days as promised. Those who know better, a constitution is not a bottle of beer that you can guzzle down your throat in one gulp!
No comments:
Post a Comment