We will grow only if personal mistakes are not communalised

What you need to know:

  • Isn’t there any constitutional mechanism by which this perennial blame game can be arrested and effectively tamed once and for all?
  • Maybe the Nyachae commission can devise a method by which to force all our political partisans to pack it in?

Let me say it again. It helps neither you, nor your party, nor your ethnic community, nor yet your whole nation for you – once and for all the so-called leaders – to keep hurling words like a pingpong ball against one another, especially on such vexed questions as public security and corruption.

Take Lamu. It is just the latest of a long list of tragedies about which the government and the opposition leaders are perennially at daggers-drawn. I say “leaders” because, although our politics is basically ethnic, there are social levels at which only the ethnic leaders are at war with one another.

For instance, to assert that, as a whole ethnic people, either the Kikuyu or the Luo are the instigators of the terrorism, land grabbing and other crimes which have befallen Lamu and other Mijikenda areas since independence is to utter a falsehood as dangerous as “hate speech”.

Were it true, the whole of Central Province itself would now be a Lassallean continuum of rich individuals, and we would not hear any teeth-gnashing from individuals robbed by their own relatives of whole swathes of land or realty — a phenomenon now widespread nationwide.

If ethnic Robin Hoods exist in Kenya — if certain individuals organise big-time robbery of the rich to help the poor — I have never heard of them. What I have heard of are only individuals who, although identifiable with a certain tribe, commit these crimes only for themselves as individuals, and do it in the cruellest possible fashion.

What’s more, only in the years immediately on both sides of independence in 1963 was it possible to identify these inhumanities with a particular single community. Since then, crime has not only spiralled but also invaded the upper classes even of the smallest tribal, racial and other communities in Kenya.

OWN THIRST

In short, although some Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, Kamba and even Mijikenda individuals might have masterminded the present terrorism and land robbery in Lamu, the point is that they did it in pursuit of their own thirst for individual wealth. They have never done it for their political parties or their ethnic communities.

That is why it is the height of irresponsibility to accuse individuals by name — like the respective Lands ministers James Orengo, Amos Kimunya and Charity Ngilu — in contexts which imply that they did it with the approval of their respective political parties and on behalf of their respective tribal communities.

That is the tragedy of the present table-tennis exchanges between Jubilee (seen as a Kikuyu party) and Cord (seen as a Luo party) on security, corruption and other forms of crime and dereliction of duty. For it makes crime an ethnic characteristic, whereas these are attributes only of individual members of a class — attributes which transcend tribes, races, religions and genders.

The officials cited would not have done it for their tribes or parties. They would have done it only for themselves as individuals. So do not cite Mr Orengo as if he could have done it only as a Luo or Cord leader, Mr Kimunya only as a Kikuyu or TNA official and Ms Ngilu only as a Kamba or Jubilee Cabinet Secretary.

The problem, then, is straightforward. The Executive and Legislative branches of government have become major and habitual participants in this tribe-based table tennis game of accusations and counter-accusations.

So the question sticks out like Kilindini (near Lamu): Isn’t there any constitutional mechanism by which this perennial blame game can be arrested and effectively tamed once and for all?

Maybe the Nyachae commission — the body created to implement the Constitution — can devise a method by which to force all our political partisans to pack it in?

The idea would be to instil in all those vying for political power to drum up such a sense of responsibility as to reject all temptation to bear false witness against their rivals.