By Gwada Ogot
Gwada Ogot
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (JM) is arguably Kenya’s most conscientious political leader ever. He was murdered on 2nd March 1975 by suspected government agents. His legacy remains strong in Kenya and a memorial service in his honor has been commemorated annually since his death. His hallowed vision for Kenya is captured in the following words he wrote: “It takes more than a national anthem, however stirring and a national court of arms, however distinctive, a national flag, however appropriate and a national flower, however beautiful, to make a nation.”
The statement is a search for a missing component of leadership, the quality of being humane.
His demands for social justice cost him his life. This is a factual prospect that faces any leader who attempts to rock the pirate ship of the status quo in Kenya, but one worth every drop of effort and every spot of risk. The call to national duty is not optional.
Great nation’s rise by great innovations and Innovation elevates quality ensuring comprehensive national profit. Great leaders too fire national consciousness enhancing the prisms through which the citizenry views itself and others in tandem. No sane nation pegs its resurrection on feigned salvation or neither the import of its false promises nor compromises on its own logic of posterity.
In Kenya, colonial military and psychological warfare facilitated the plunder of our minds, culture and natural resources. The redemptive acts against these foreign buccaneers were locally mediated by justified blood and iron which forced round table negotiations.
Neo-Colonial leadership maintains the pillage insuring itself via strategic ethnic profiling. The net result being that poor leadership stimulates national anger and frustration. It also cultivates mistrust and suspicion amongst the population. In the process, they facilitate continued domination and insulate their bounty by keeping the masses in conflict. The nation is caught in the rebellious grip of false prophets of change and reform mercenaries who thrive on crisis and confusion. It is essential to infuse integrity and order into the reform effort devoid of low brinkmanship, cheap propaganda and vested political interests. Freedom from national malignance is imperative. With liberty a clear obligation, how and when the citizenry intervenes, on behalf of the nation will be determined by the measured actions of its new leaders. Matters of food security, economic liberation, land reform, policy overhaul and institutionalization of patriotism must take precedence over the needless brouhaha of political bickering.
The short distance we have so far covered as a nation is directly proportional to the short-sightedness of our leadership. The scoundrels in power have taken us as far as they possibly visualize and can therefore see no further. The nation must look beyond them towards the alluring future to which they do not belong. Crafting your future is not a charade or a convenience, neither is it an act or simulation, nor is it a test or experiment and it definitely is not, a contest between popularity and principle. It is a new order that reconstitutes conservative beliefs, restructures society, restores national prestige and power and renews national sense of responsibility and responsibility.
It goes beyond impulsive press conferences, quick city marches and other forms of showy national protests, a national movement is requisite. Despite popular use of all these dramatic techniques, nothing has changed or changes. These are surface appliances which attract surface responses. The activists act in expected manner and the police respond in routine fashion. So corruption, in its every conceivable shade continues with unabated impunity as the people watch the brotherhood in a feast of fury.
“It is an amazing fact but one amply attested that some human beings have an infinite capacity to endure injustice without retaliation and apparently without resentment against their oppressors. Instances of this phenomenon are numerous and they come from every part of the world where one group dominates another. Militant leaders of protest movements have been driven to despair by the apathy they have encountered among those they would lead to freedom; Members of dominant groups have often commented on the cheerfulness and loyalty they observe among those who would seem to have no reason for such sentiments.”
The above passage drawn from Harry M Johnson’s book, Introduction to Sociology, aptly describes a puzzling trend in need of an appropriate social prescription. A serious national introspection that may help explain why we are where we are today and in addition help project where we want to be as a nation tomorrow. The desire of the people to move on is strong but conditional and must be without the current crop of leaders. More so, for a people who completely surrender national common sense to the same known political pirates at every election, such examination is inevitably urgent.
Back at the yard, the malignance of ethnic slush is as always prominent, influencing trade, rental occupation of buildings, access to private and public services and determines a considerable part of national relations. Even critical policy decisions that govern institutions of higher learning, research, planning and implementation suffers such biased degradations. These actions cement the path for illicit personal aggrandizement; vital cogs in the corruption wheel of fortune. As a result, honest effort is repudiated and national growth ultimately stunts. Civility in the mean time was long deleted from the national memory disk.
The darkness of our imperial rape cannot however dim the light of future national prospects. There is no doubt that beyond our national social degeneration lies untapped a well of moral prosperity. Every Kenyan is consciously aware, that somewhere within our national hearts, someplace, wherever within our national quarters, there lives a flowing fountain of peace not perfect but gratifying, a warm acceptance for each other, based on a true feeling that we so often ignore, and a spirit so strong, it tolerates the worst of our national character. Feelings of patriotism ring not only from exploits over others but also in victory paeans over a self inflicted leadership plague.
How have we, if at all, combated poverty, unemployment, landlessness, insecurity, a lack of patriotism, social irresponsibility, ethnicity, natural and artificial vagaries, scarcity of clean water and all the myriad challenges daily facing our nation? At what point do Kenyans stop the nightmare which we all actively simulate? Or do we have to wait until that moment when we have milked all parastatal dry, raped all our women sore, killed all the able men, retold our lofty reform tales, cut the last of juicy deals and consumed every available national confidence and resource? Then onto ourselves we will turn, each one of us coldly aware of our very dark capacities.
Patriotism shows gratitude to ones nation, a union of its nationals, their personal aspirations and national understanding irrespective of what may have been spoken of each other, thought of one another, or inflicted one upon the other. In matters of conscience such as these, the people have no choice.
The entire Kenyan public is today reduced to a gleeful voyeur as elected leadership plunders the country in ways coarser than those of the colonial buccaneer, raids national coffers, steals stores constitutionally entrusted upon it, speculates with national lands, incites civil strife, and sells the national soul for silver and gold. Indeed it is the Kenyans people who stand accused of being moribund and ineffective and not its expired leadership. A people who vote in buccaneers for leaders then go on to actively complain about it have nothing to mitigate on their behalf. What is the expected state of a nation that habitually elects criminals, canonizes murderers, and honors infidels?
In central province, the peasant Kikuyu farmer forever lives helpless at the mercy of bloody gangs and conniving middlemen, the artificial poverty of Nyanza decays a whole people yet pays dividends to the leaders, the unjustifiable waste of North Eastern province, her hunger, thirst and pain, the seismic conflicts of the rift valley and their latency for recurrence, the freewheeling spiral of Nairobi into modern Sodom and Gomorrah, unfair land allocations at the coast all point to a nation gone awry. Yet we all look the other way as the clouds darken above us. Former American President, George Kennedy gave the prophetic warning that, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
Punishment, within its legal context, is an integral part of any social reform process. It is the only way for those who obtain public confidence by false pretenses and who commit indecent assault on society. Prosecution of leaders who have exhibited exhaustive mastery of every perversion from opulence, insolence, prostitution, devil worship, drug dealing, perjury, murder and theft is fair path for any country seeking renaissance.? Only by jumping over the soaring stile of justice can Kenya embrace the new and beckoning beginning. In this regard, there are no short cuts.
Author Colin Wilson in his masterpiece, the Criminal history of Mankind, writes of British revenge against a decade of swaggering Roman brutality, “they hung up naked the most noble and distinguished women and they cut off their breasts and sewed them into their mouths in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through their bodies. ‘These atrocities probably had a ritual element-not unlike the Mau Mau in modern times. The men were treated with similar ferocity.” Atrocious acts such as these are also today regular features of Kenyan society including be-headings and skinning of victims. To make matters worse, they are on an upsurge and threaten the entire fabric of our national existence as a nation. The choices for Kenyans is starkly clear- either embrace these hideous forms of vengeance or revert to the due process of law which punishes crime indiscriminately.
For a nation deficient in unity of purpose and without a common national vision, our national psyche as a people remains hostage to the political ping pong of unscrupulous leaders who profit from induced national morass. In the process, patriotism is ridiculed as a domain for the realistically weak and ethnically infirm. Tribal bigotry and malevolent innuendo are ironically proffered as suitable substitutes, lairs for the strong tribes’ people in a 21st century nation.
Greater national cohesion, a dream so long held by Kenyans and it’s still hoped for fulfillment, likewise hurts at the will of rudimentary forces preaching tribal domination and economic strangulation within its very borders. The polarizing credos of the political elite, cooked for self sustenance fuels national socio-economic decay at the peoples dear expense. Yet we will overcome for the ailment has been nationally diagnosed and the antidote of a new leadership prescribed to save our country Kenya.
This illuminating light shines at the end of the tunnel for our nation. Even though we acknowledge that our leaders may have thrown out the bath water with the baby and soap, the Kenyan people retain in their hands the basin of togetherness, an integral ingredient that defines our shared senses. So strong are the bonds of a people’s common experiences, a people’s joy and tears together, a people’s hopes and desires as one, and an overwhelming wish for peace and reliable progress together. To harness the potency of a people’s power, the injection of a new leadership is requisite.
The world around us is changing and we must compel ourselves to change with it. The country is up to its neck in the behavioral sink besieged by crippling official corruption, confirmed lack of leadership, foresight and habitual impunity. These are the humiliating hallmarks of the trap we today call our national government. Kenya can sink no further for there is no where left to sink. From the nadir we currently find ourselves in, the country can only arise.
To the elders who possess the lessons of yesterday, to the middle aged whose responsibility is today and to the youth in whom potential lies, for inspirational direction I share with you the words of tribute paid to Republican senator George Norris of Nebraska in September 1932 by Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith as written in Profiles of courage, a book by John F Kennedy,”History asks,” Did the man have integrity? Did the man have unselfishness? Did the man have courage? Did the man have consistency?
To JM Kariuki all four questions are robustly answered in the affirmative. What will your answers look like at the inevitable trial of conscience?
To you all these questions will ultimately be directed by your conscience, by your children and children’s children in regard to what you did when Kenya was rotting and what you did to help resuscitate Kenya and pray what you do today aids correct answers.
The early bird catches the worm — the Kenyan public has for far too long played worm for manipulative political leaders. Are you the early bird that catches the worm or are you the early worm caught by the bird?” Information communication is the answer. Information is power.
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