National silence on law-breaking MPs tells much about us

If a whole MP is not ashamed to utter it publicly, we are in a parlous state.

According to Nandi Hills MP Alfred Keter, this week, the laws Parliament makes are meant only for ordinary human beings, not for MPs.

What fills one with trepidation is that the present Parliament is composed of relatively young Kenyans.

Therefore, Parliament’s knowledge of Kenya’s objective needs should be much greater than mine. Yet, evidently, it isn’t.

The MPs’ attitude remains that, because they make the laws, they should be free to break them.

If that opinion reflects the minds of our law-makers, then it reflects also the thinking of the entire rika that elected them as legislative representatives.

Otherwise the perennially pugnacious MP’s statement would have occasioned overwhelming national uproar, especially from the legislators’ own generational peers.

Is the national silence the proof that the Kenyan voters have given up on the politician — just as they appear to have given up on the police — as agents of civilised and progressive social living?

Since four years ago, when President Mwai Kibaki — that personification of gentlemanliness and civilised behaviour — inaugurated a new Constitution for us, there has emerged from that document a new parameter for latching onto and isolating for punitive measures all individuals who seek to drag Kenya back to Stone Age ethnicity.

We call it hate speech. The person who makes a statement to question my manual, mental and social abilities, just because I was ethnically constrained to retain the foreskin of my male organ, is engaged in hate speech every bit as dangerous as the person who doubts somebody else’s ability on account that he has all his lower teeth intact or has mutilated his ears.

MALE SEXIST EVIL

Why can’t we campaign against female circumcision for the clear male sexist evil that it is without implying that something is congenitally wrong with the brains of the ethnic communities that practise it? As recently as the 1960s, my Luo community thought of teeth extraction as the deity’s own injunction.

But greater scientific understanding and the exigencies of modernity have recently forced my ethnic people to quietly drop mutilation of the mouth without yielding to Luo detractors even a single inch of ethnic pride and even arrogance.

Just as the Western Suffragettes have recently forced all denizens of the male pigsty to recognise the female’s ability in political, scientific and technological leadership, so a time is coming when Kikuyu women will force such ethnic chauvinists as Moses Kuria out of their stinking male cocoons into recognising women — circumcised or not — as generally capable of every task that a man can discharge.

That is the answer to the mentality that, if you are not circumcised, then you are either a child or a woman and cannot lead — an incredibly backward Stone Age mindset which would cause nothing but uproarious laughter among our Corazon Aquinos, Indira Gandhis, Christina Kirschners, Angela Merkels, Dilma Rousseffs, Margaret Thatchers and Africa’s own Joyce Bandas and Ellen Sirleaf Johnsons.

That is why Kikuyu women should, once and for all, publicly reject their Kurias. Wangu wa Makeri showed that the ability to lead is not owed to the male organ, cut or uncut.

We owe it only to the brain, and many Kikuyu women (and many Luo men) have amounts much greater than Moses Kuria displays.

Nowadays, only a Palaeolithic man can stand in the agora to shout that his pudenda is his organ of thought and that it thinks best when it is cut a tad. The inhumanity and pain of female circumcision is a fact now admitted by all properly educated Kikuyu men and women.

Indeed, a time is coming — “and now is” — when the mutilation of the female’s pudenda will be quietly allowed to disappear from the human landscape as completely as tooth extraction has vanished in Luoland.

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