Don’t be fooled, it’s not your tribe in the dock
In Kenya, whenever the man in the dock is from your ethnic community, that community is “the target”.
So any Kenyan could have predicted the hullabaloo that followed President Kibaki’s suspension of William Ruto from the Cabinet: “Our tribe is being finished.”
Yet the same notorious Kalenjin individuals went completely silent when somebody bundled Geophrey Majiwa out of his City Hall office and dumped him in police custody. By the same logic, somebody must been “targeting” the Luo community.
Greater indignity
How? Well, Majiwa is a Luo and he was treated with much greater indignity. No, I am not complaining about the city mayor’s arrest. Nevertheless, the question is inevitable: In Mr Majiwa’s case, who exactly is the enemy of the Luo?
In Mr Ruto case, the blame was not hurled at the President – though he was the protagonist – but at Raila Odinga. No, I do not put it past Mr Odinga to conspire with Mr Kibaki against Mr Ruto. It would, after all, be quite natural. Mr Ruto has continually embarrassed both for a very long time.
But, in Mr Majiwa’s case, who can this enemy of the Luo be? Who authorised the mayor’s arrest? It can only be Mr Odinga. If, in Mr Ruto’s case, Mr Odinga took the blame from his position as the Prime Minister, the same must apply in Mr Majiwa’s case. Mr Odinga must at least have been privy to the arrest.
What is more, the authority that arrested Mr Majiwa – the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) is led by a man called Otieno Lumumba. The logic of the day constrains us to conclude that the Prime Minister and the anti-corruption “czar” are the Luo enemies in the government.
No, it is not inconceivable for a “tribesman” to undermine his tribe. Our own Mau Mau “home guards” remind us that every situation has its Vidkun Quisling. But, if Mr Kibaki’s action against Mr Ruto amounts to anti-Kalenjin tribalism, what should we call it whenever a Luo official takes a punitive action against another Luo official?
Yet the pinheads who put forward such arguments include those who perennially accuse the two Coalition principals of impunity. Take the politicos who defend Mr Ruto. Evidently, they would like action against anybody else but a Kalenjin individual.
They would be happy if the principals acted against only their own respective Kikuyu and Luo individuals. Indeed, in a country choking with tribalism, a sensitive statesman must think twice before punishing the leader of an ethnic community as important, numerically, as the Kalenjin.
But over-sensitivity has terrible consequences. It contributes directly to impunity.
Culpable individuals
The two leaders cannot fight crime effectively if they do not enjoy the mandate to punish culpable individuals even if they come from the same tribe. If the principals cannot punish an individual simply because the individual is ethnically popular, the war on crime is a waste of time.
No individual has ever consulted his tribe before he steals or robs. Moreover, no individual has ever forged a document or emptied his ministry’s coffers to benefit his tribe. He is an extremely individualist. He perpetrates these crimes only for himself.
That is why the individual is not averse to spoiling his tribe’s name by claiming that the tribe is the target whenever the individual is apprehended. In this way, he seeks to conceal his heinous crime in the tribe in its anonymity as a legal person.
If William Ruto, Geoffrey Majiwa and Moses Wetangula committed crimes, they committed them as individuals, not as members of tribes. Anybody who claims that to bring them to book is to target certain tribes should himself answer court charges of criminal incitement.
