Focus on quality life and stop revelling in tribe

Development is always a question of production and accumulation. Quality in goods and refinement in consumption may follow. But, as we know from the consumer crudities of North America, not necessarily.

Thus whether Kenya is developing depends on whether, as the clock ticks, we are progressively producing more and better means of life and more and better ideas for all members.

In particular, does Kenya enjoy the kind of political machinery necessary for implementing such an ideal? Since independence in 1963, have Kenyans cultivated progressively better lives in terms of quality goods, quality governance and civilised inter-ethnic and inter-personal conduct?

If not, what can our political leaders since 1963 show for the independence struggle in which so many gallant Kenyans lost their lives?

How would Dedan Kimathi, for one, judge us if he rose from his grave tomorrow? How is it that, today, our leaders — the very lot who should serve as the guarantors of our national oneness — are the chief instigators of that same ethnic pin-headedness which the colonialists implanted into us as a means of keeping us permanently divided and permanently unable to confront that colonial behemoth and to tackle our vital development problems with one solid hand?

That is the thing about what Koigi wa Wamwere condemns as “negative ethnicity”. For, in all human situations, the tribe is an objective reality.

The wisdom or not of each human situation is to be judged by how it exploits the talents of each tribal community and invests them in the conscious development of one national whole. “Negative tribalism” must be condemned precisely because it always frustrates the roots of such a nation-in-the-making.

It is to be deprecated because of its inability to benefit even the tribe itself to which the perpetrator belongs. Both in politics and in business, tribalism is among the most important vehicles of that same negative individualist greed which always moors to the ground all our efforts at nation-building.

For, self-evidently, the individual — not his or her tribe — is the only beneficiary of whoever uses the tribe as a ladder to self-aggrandisement.

EASILY CORRUPTIBLE

The tribe as whole never really benefits from this form of corruption. At the grassroots, the Kikuyu remain among the poorest Kenyans, even though, concerning ethnic rapacity and graft, the Kikuyu elite remains the nigger-in-the-woodpile in the minds of other ethnic communities.

Yet there is nothing of that kind. Corruption of the mind is characteristic of Kenya’s entire elite composed of all ethnic groups and races.

Notwithstanding one’s ethnicity or race, the educated class of all of Kenya’s ethnic and racial communities are amazingly easily corruptible. Let us put it this way.

The corruptibility of our elite is rooted in our colonial upbringing and has nothing to do with one’s tribe. If the Kikuyu elite looks more corruptible, the explanation is not his or her Kikuyuness but only in the way the whole Kikuyu community was situated when Europe was imposing capitalist market relations on Kenya.

But, a century on, the colonially imposed mentality of individualism has produced a Digo, Embu, Luo, Maasai, Samia, Somali and Taveta every bit as go-getting as any a Paris, London and Chicago merchant. But whether all this copy-catting amounts to development is the question.

A famous Kenyan newspaper editor once defined freedom as including our “liberty” to walk stark naked in a Nairobi street.

It is, of course, a “liberty”. But is it freedom? Because, to be socially useful, freedom must be subjected to a few prohibitions.

It must ban such individual liberties as rapes and robberies which negate collective wellbeing. The difference is that, for the libertarian, the noun “freedom” takes the preposition “of”, whereas, for the objective liberator, it takes the preposition “from”.

Thus the liberal fights only for freedom OF opinion, whereas the objective liberator fights for freedom FROM disease, hunger, ignorance and nakedness.

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