Misguided Kenyan middle-class to blame for leadership failures and cultural bankruptcy

As electioneering heightens and politicians compete for the vote, let’s face the truth their rhetoric tries to hide. The problem in Kenya has never been the people, the regular Wanjiku, Onyango or Hamisi.

The problem is the colony in the mind of the educated African middleclass of all ethnic colours, shape and size.

In the last elections, people voted peacefully. The elite could not count the vote. The leadership did not even have faith in their own institutions.

Instead of insisting on counting and recounting the vote, instead of testing the institutions however weak, they instigated violence among the very people who had cast their votes without a single incident of violence. The elite opted for the power of violence instead of the power of the vote.

When later everybody urged the Kenya elite in power to set up mechanisms for looking into what or who brought about death, devastation and IDPs, they said: Don’t be vague; Go to Hague.

When what they called for in Parliament was later taken up by The Hague, the same turned round and said, Imperialism.

They made a mockery of the entire history of people’s anti-colonial struggles.

They even ignored mediations from other African leaders. It took the actions of a foreign emissary, an American Secretary of State to literally bang together the heads of the Kenyan leadership to produce a solution they could as easily have arrived at themselves.

Can we think of a situation in which an American leadership would wait for an emissary from Africa to bang their heads together to ignite a solution?

Self-hatred will never be a good foundation for integration or a vision of the future.

Last year, Parliament voted to ban African languages in public places, and this despite provision in the Constitution to give life to African languages.

Colonial powers

Even colonial powers never passed such a motion. It happened in the slave plantations of America and the Caribbean where African languages were similarly forbidden.

These elected representatives were ready to take a leaf from the slave plantation and violate the Constitution to protect English against the invasion of the languages spoken by the people who elected them.

The fact that the motion was not signed into law does not alter the fact that many MPs raised their hands to show how much contempt they have for Kenyans and their languages.

Yet some of these will run around promising heaven to the people whose lives they have consigned to hell.

The Constitution has a positive position on African languages. But this means nothing if there is no economic, political, cultural and psychological will behind the implementation.

So far, all the will and resources are put behind English. The Kenyan African middleclass is running from their languages.

In the process, they perpetrate child abuse on a national scale.

For to deny a child, any child, their right to mother tongue, to bring up such a child as a monolingual English speaker in a society where the majority speak African languages, to alienate that child from a public they may be called to serve, is nothing short of child abuse, and also quite frankly, national abuse.

To have mother tongue, whatever it is, and add other languages to it is empowerment. But to know all the other languages and not one’s own is enslavement.

Unfortunately up to now, the post-colonial government and the entire elite have chosen enslavement over empowerment.

In Kenyan elite schools, students and their teachers talk of shrubbing, meaning African language interference with English.

But they don’t see it as shrubbing when English interferes with African languages. Let us not turn our children into linguistic slaves, aliens in their own communities.

The Kenyan is not an abstraction: he or she has roots in all the communities, and languages of our country.

It’s wonderful to have roads and flyovers and skyscrapers: but these mean nothing when they are constructed on empty bellies, shacks, and diseased bodies.

There were times, sounds like ages ago, when the African leadership talked passionately of eradicating ignorance, disease and poverty.

In those days you could more or less tell the guiding vision by the kind of names the political parties gave themselves.

Kenya African Union; Kenya Democratic Union: Kenya People’s Union are a few that come to mind.

Compare that with the meaningless names the political parties give themselves today.

What we need is a new leadership with a people-based vision of tomorrow, a vision that measures progress and development by the quality of the lives of those at the bottom of the mountain not the few at the top.

Or as JM Kariuki once said: Let’s not build a nation of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars.

He should have added that the 10 millionaires are nearly always created on the backs of million workers and farmers.

A few tips. As you campaign, don’t say, unless I win, the election is rigged. This is recipe for disaster. Instead, promise to take any irregularities, real, assumed or imagined to a court of law.

Our institutions need testing not kneejerk rejection. If they don’t perform, then we struggle to reform them. Don’t mention the word TRIBE or TRIBESMEN.

Refer to a community by the names they call themselves: like the WaGiriama, or Giriama people; the Wakamba or the Kamba people.

And lastly show how policies you champion will empower the ordinary farmer, worker, the jobless, the landless. Luoness or Gikuyuness is not an ideology.

There are wealthy Luos and wealthy Gikuyus; there are poor Luos and poor Gikuyus. On whose side are you? The poor or the wealthy? That’s the basic question no matter what region, community, religion or language you come from!

Religious leaders. Stop selling your prayers to the highest bidder. God is not for sale. Pray for the empowerment of the least among us.

Politicians: don’t criminalise differences of policy. Fight arguments with arguments, policy with policy, not with machetes and spears.

The writer is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine