Looking for the Kenya 350kms from our villages

• A proposal to end tribalism in Kenya.
• A corporate view on local philanthropy.

A lot has been said about ethnicity, what causes it and much less about what we can do about it. The worrying thing though is that we do a lot of finger pointing - with most fingers directed at politicians.
I think the ethnic problems we face are both a product of poverty (leading to questions of inequitable distribution of resources) and the way we are shaped by society, perhaps innocently, as we grow up.
Here is what I mean; you go through university and get a good job. Your village starts noticing your success and obviously want to associate and ‘gain’ from the son of the soil. Before long, you are the patron of your village cattle dip, local water project and others. Nothing wrong with this at all.
However, when you are, say, the CEO of Nation Media Group, you are more than the son of your ‘village’ soil. One needs therefore to worry about how, at the individual level, you can be associated with more than your village and truly make other ‘villages’ claim their rightful share of this son.
In conversations with lots of friends, I have come to the conclusion that the ethnic question will need to be answered at the individual level and it’s you and me who need to take the first step to help integrate Kenya.
Here is the suggestion; for all those charity things we do with our village school, church, health centres etcetera, suppose each of us deliberately chooses a village at least 350km from where each was born. You go, introduce yourself and simply tell the folks that you want to be associated with their project by joining the development committee.
I promise that you will be very well received even by the local MP who will not see any immediate threat to your presence. This is because 350 km in any direction will put you right at the heart of another tribe.
I actually did this recently. My 350 km landed me in a place called Ugenya (I come from Nyeri). I identified an institution called Ndenga Secondary school, met with the parents and board of governors and I am now a ‘patron’ of the school.
We have identified our priorities and we are already advancing plans for a major funds drive to help meet our goals. In the process, I have met Luo people in their homes and what a wonderful experience to see that they have the same hopes, fears and anxieties as the folks in my village.
I intend to buy a plot next to the school and build two or three teachers’ houses which will be purely commercial as teachers get house allowance so they can afford to pay rent. This will help to attract even better teachers to the ‘new found’ school. Will those houses be burnt whenever we have chaos? I am very confident that the answer is No!
This is because the whole thing is interwoven with the community’s goals and hopefully, they will always see me for what I hope to be…one of them.
Suppose all of you folks reading this blog come up and get deeply involved with a village 350 km away from your home and really integrate with the village by championing solutions to their needs. If 10,000 of us did that, we would have 10,000 villages looking at the whole tribe thing differently, positively.
I do not in any way suggest that this is the only solution, but it is definitely something you and me can do to offer a more acceptable engagement with communities outside those into which we were born and, most importantly, through our actions, begin credibly preach a gospel of a country called Kenya.