Rights go hand in hand with personal responsibility, even for slum dwellers

I fled Nairobi for brief refuge down south just before I was hung, drawn, and quartered. I made my escape just before desperate female hordes invaded my neighbourhood in search of men, lured to Nyayo Stadium by some visiting charlatan who promised them husbands on the power of his divine intervention.

No, I was more scared of the champagne socialists who had reacted with such angry self-righteous indignation to my last contribution on this page.

I wrote last week while still feeling the heat from the fierce petroleum pipeline fire that burnt to death scores of poor slum dwellers in the Sinai section of Nairobi’s sprawling Mukuru shantytown.

The slum dwellers, egged on by two-bit politicians and civil society activists, had for a long time defied efforts to move them from hovels atop a ticking time bomb.

I suggested that the defiance was just a reflection of a culture of impunity that we ordinarily associate with the high-and-mighty, accustomed to getting away with mass murder and grand larceny.

I was persuaded that the culture of impunity goes down to the bottom of the pile, hence slum dwellers living atop an oil pipeline can defy all attempts to move them for their own safety.

I concluded thus: “Today, let us not blame the government... In the wake of the Sinai disaster, we must examine our own sense of entitlement, impunity, and greed.”

On the whole, reactions from readers were positive. Many who commented lauded the call to individual responsibility, but the champagne socialists, in their own little closed online discussion groups, were apoplectic.

The invective directed in my direction from fellows who claim to respect diversity of thought and opinion was frightening.

I was depicted as a dangerous extreme capitalist who was for extermination of slums and their inhabitants.

I was likened to one who holds the poor responsible for their own poverty, a heartless and brain-damaged beast incapable of appreciating how unjust social and economic policies drive the desperately poor to desperate measures.

Somebody suggested that I was like Marie Antoinette, wondering why the poor cannot quaff champagne instead of some killer moonshine, or why they prefer the dangerous, unsanitary hovels of Sinai to taking up dignified residence in the lush pastures of Karen and Muthaiga.

In other words, I was being asked to understand that the poor have every right to establish their hovels right next to a pipeline carrying highly-inflammable liquids, and to engage in a mad rush for “free” petrol whenever the Kenya Pipeline Company system develops a leak.

The poor, in other words, have the right to collective suicide and the finger of blame must be pointed at a society that is responsible for their condition.

I cannot buy that. However desperate the conditions, however unjust the society, whatever the load imposed by an oppressive socio-economic regime, the concept of individual responsibility can never be thrown out of the window. It goes hand-in-hand with individual rights.

I have written often in this column against the criminal and unsustainable gap between rich and poor, against policies designed to enrich the rich and condemn the rest to utter poverty.

To paraphrase and update JM Kariuki, Kenya is a country of 40 billionaires and 40 million beggars, and hence Chou En Lai’s words that Kenya is ripe for revolution still hold.

But you are not going to change society, or your own condition, by being irresponsible, reckless, and self-destructive.

Neither are you going to change society over wine and canapés on the diplomatic cocktail circuit.

This is not to absolve the Kenya Pipeline Company of blame over the inferno. An oil pipeline that leaks is their responsibility, not an accident.

To let the flammable stuff flow into the waterways is plain criminal and the individuals responsible for the ensuing loss of life must be held to account.

The councillors, MPs, and chiefs who run the slums for personal, political, and economic gain and “sell” plots over the pipeline must not be allowed to escape.

But that still does not mean the rest of us should wilfully endanger our lives, and follow it by that familiar finger-pointing when the inevitable happens.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com