$1 million donation to Japan a genuine expression of sympathy from Kenyans
It’s cool to be anti-Establishment. But there is a way you can go about it you end up being ridiculous.
Take the recent token $1 million donation to Japan by the Kenya Government. Plenty of busybodies have driven themselves berserk over this.
We are supposed to believe we’ll go bankrupt because of the donation. And ... oh! ... aren’t there Kenyans who are starving in Turkana, hospitals that have no drugs, plus an IDP situation?
The ruckus has only succeeded to expose how silly some of us can be. Actually I wouldn’t call it a ruckus.
It is really part of an unending circus driven by idle chatterboxes who like to drive everybody nuts with their constant negativity.
It’s the same brigade that almost split our eardrums heckling Government Spokesman Alfred Mutua during his Nairobi beautification campaign.
Some things bear repeating, if only for the dumb. Japan was hit by a tsunami in which over 11,000 people died suddenly.
It was followed by a meltdown at a couple of nuclear plants whose radioactive effect will haunt the vicinity for years to come.
The world acknowledged it was the most devastating catastrophe to hit any country this year. Everybody offered any help they could. Ours was a mere $1 million.
I want to believe that, like the Jesus parable about the poor woman in the temple who gave only two pennies compared to the loads the Pharisees dished out, Japan was much touched by our gift.
It’s not about the money. It’s about our humanity. Sure, the Asian behemoth ranks among the richest of the rich. $1 million is nothing to them.
But are we so bereft of feeling that we can’t tell the meaning of a genuine expression of sympathy?
If your neighbour got bereaved, will you refuse to contribute something just because he owns a washing machine and you don’t?
Aren’t we becoming a cheap and mean-spirited people?
This attack-everything-that-reeks-official brigade gets lots of air time. It has even captured the media.
Often, these seedy motormouths have a political agenda, which sometimes they inadvertently expose when they brand themselves ‘‘reformist’’ (a badly misused word, if you ask me).
Yet it is easy to read them like a book. They want to paint everything black so that, when the kingdom they root for comes – if ever – then they will grandly declare heaven has come to earth. Spare us, please.
The Maasai group who donated some cows to the US after Osama bin Laden struck New York’s Twin Towers did not do so because they heard Americans were starving.
Nor did Senegal send a $1 million cash donation to Haiti after the country was devastated by the January 2010 earthquake because the Senegalese are rich and indolent like Qataris.
Still, the negativity brigade was not relenting. “Don’t be fooled, these Maasai are angling for American aid,” they muttered of the cattle gift.
“They probably are looking for visas,” came another view. Where will this sterile cynicism take us as a country?
Yes, there is plenty of waste. Like on pointless foreign travel by politicians who spend taxpayer fortunes on six-star hotels.
Or the interminable parliamentary committee sessions where handsome allowances are drawn.
Joining government is now like belonging to an A-list club where you no longer worry about money and where it comes from.
But I reject the notion that spending Sh83 million to show compassion was a bad idea. Who knows, this act of kindness could bring huge dividends later on.
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Really, what was the point of Parliament Speaker Kenneth Marende’s “ruling” prior to the day the Budget was read?
Whether you call it a ‘‘ministerial statement’’ or whatever, what mattered in the end was that the Minister for Finance read out what, for all practical purposes, was this year’s Budget.
Who cares about the pomp of the military honour guard and the briefcase and the after-speech garden party?
The point was that the Budget was read, Mr Marende’s gripes about “unconstitutionalities” notwithstanding.
Let’s not always complicate things.
