What Aden Duale should expect from Jubilee’s ‘wenyewe’

From every election, our Parliament is invaded by a breed of talking machines quite incapable of learning anything from the near-tragedies of their predecessors. Shouldn’t the mouths of Danson Mungatana, Mwangi Kiunjuri, Rachel Shebesh and Boni Khalwale have taught Aden Duale any lesson in mouth control?

If they did, would that worthy ever try to outspeak even those who sponsored him into Parliament? In the days of Kanu, President Moi would have shown him – in a manner not too pleasant – who the party’s wenyewe were. No, I don’t yearn for a return to that regime, when to speak even slightly out of turn would have earned you immediate expulsion.

I don’t advocate a situation where the party chief makes every decision and – like women once were – the rank-and-file are merely to be seen and must keep their mouths permanently shut. What I advocate is system. How can anything call itself a party when, in it, every Tom, Dick and Duale can expectorate the most disgusting stench in the party’s name?

A clear-minded party strives to strike a good balance between unity of voice over a set of social values and goals and how to pursue them, on the one hand, and, within that ambit, freedom of all members to disagree with one another and duty to consult at all levels whenever you feel you need to publicly express any fundamentally different opinion.

For libertarian licentiousness just will not do. For the outer world’s consumption, it is absolutely important for a party to seem to speak with one coherent voice on all fundamental issues. Otherwise, even a centrally placed leader may, legitimately, disagree with the manner in which the UhuRuto government is handling the security crisis. Such an issue is the spate with which Somali citizens enter Kenya illegally.

TERRORIST PARADISE

Somalia has never recovered from the Shifta war (with Kenya and Ethiopia). After the donkeys’ years of destructive misrule by the Siad Barre clique, that country has completely disintegrated socio-economically to become a paradise for terrorist groups.

Many Somali intellectuals – admirers of Italy’s erstwhile il duce – have nursed the idea of Somalia Irredenta. And Kenya is home to a large number of ethnic Somali.

The aim has been to unite all the ethnic Somalis under a single state composed of north-eastern Kenya (known in colonial times as Northern Frontier District), south-eastern Ethiopia (known as Ogaden), Djibouti (known in colonial times as French Somaliland) and the Italian and British Somalilands that united to fight for independence and formed the present republic.

But, in the post-Barre inability to unite in this cause, disparate clans have aligned themselves under certain warlords with two strategically tragic consequences: (a) Internecine internal skirmishing has put paid to all order and all production; and (b) serious terrorist infiltrations into Kenya and other neighbouring states has reduced the Horn of Africa to a permanent bloodbath.

However, Somalia Irredenta fully contradicts a 1963 resolution by which what is now the African Union committed itself to the colonial boundaries drawn by the Berlin Treaty of 1885. The argument was that to redraw those boundaries according to ethnic affinities would logically result in totally unviable ethnic states. Kenya’s persistence in that policy is what seems to rile Aden Duale, an ethnic Somali, into hurling devil-may-care oral missiles.

How, then, can UhuRuto prosecute its anti-terrorist war without appearing to aim at certain communities? If Al-Shabaab is an ethnic Somali organisation, how else can Kenya face it other than by screening its Somali population to separate genuine Kenyans (and deal with them as such) from illegal aliens (and, if necessary, deport or jail them)?

That policy is what every clear-headed ethnic Somali citizen should support, especially if he owes his House membership to the ruling party. That is why Mr Duale can expect much worse from Jubilee’s wenyewe unless he tames his mouth.

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