Give us hope and we will shout that indeed Project Kenya has a future

A section of the crowd during the Jamhuri Day Celebrations at Nyayo National Stadium on November 12,2015. PHOTO | EVANS HABIL | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Hope makes today bearable, suggesting that the pain we experience now will lessen tomorrow.
  • Nations are built on hope; hope that we can enjoy togetherness, bound by aspirations of a shared future and of collective dreams.
  • Nations are built on various affinities cemented by feelings of togetherness.

Hope is the glue that binds nations; it holds the promise of the future and lulls minds to the possibility of a better tomorrow. Hope makes today bearable, suggesting that the pain we experience now will lessen tomorrow.

Hope is what people live on when they have nothing else.

Nations are, above everything else, built on hope; hope that we can enjoy togetherness, bound by aspirations of a shared future and of collective dreams. Nations are built on various affinities cemented by feelings of togetherness. These are intangible things that can only be felt.

Mutuality is, therefore, central to the being of nations, but it cannot be won in media debates. Matters are worsened if those who terminate debate before it begins and enforce silence also own that media. Remember Yvonne Owuor’s statement in Dust, that Kenya’s national languages are English, Kiswahili and silence?

When you have the power to control speech but ironically also proclaim to defend freedom of speech, you make the assumption that I am a fool; that I cannot see what you are doing.

When you impose silence, you create an alternative conversation where the silence itself speaks and speaks louder. The only difference is that you neither hear nor understand what I am ‘saying’ in my silence. You cannot tell what I feel about you. Silence is upheaval in the making.

A mutuality that builds nations cannot be based on threats. Mutuality disappears when you are scornful of my culture or political persuasions.

So what if you are circumcised and I am not? Is your blood golden and mine loam soil? Do I give birth to a monkey and you to a princess? Do you not bleed when pierced? Doesn’t any act that makes us bleed hurt both of us?

If I write something you do not like, and you immediately paint me a radical who is worse than Al-Shabaab, accusing me of treason, doesn’t this confirm your cowardice? Can’t you appreciate your failure even in the basic exercise of categorising?

MURDERED FELLOW KENYANS

Am I allowed to wonder which school you went to? You equate free speech and creative imagination to Al-Shabaab. Isn’t this the stuff of trashy talk, that of ideologues whose only quest is to attract the nodding eye of power?

Let’s not cheat ourselves. We lack a sense of togetherness in Kenya. What we have is a fancy-dress parade. We act togetherness, pretending we are Kenyan until our tribes show up. Let’s leave the ‘burying-head-in-sand’ antics to the ostrich.

We knew Project Kenya had been on slow puncture for a while. We tried to fix it in 1997 but failed. We tried again in 2002 with minimal success. Come 2007, we went on steroids, murdered at least 1,100 fellow Kenyans. It is almost as if post-election violence never happened, as if no one died or was displaced. This week, we moved a step closer to erasing victims from judicial memory.

We were so hopeful in 2003 we even arrested corrupt policemen. But by that very fact, we also committed a cardinal sin against the logic of the Westphalian state, which is constructed and maintained by violence. It centralises all forms of ‘legitimate violence’ in the State. Kenya is held together by violence; the kind meted out against university students this week.

The only thing that would keep Project Kenya is hope. Instead, we are now engulfed by silenced hopelessness. The silence is enforced by the daily — empty — promises for a hopeful tomorrow.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, while addressing the top brass of state in Tanzania once asked: “Do you really expect to rule … through coercion, when there is no hope, and then expect that (people) will sit quiet in peace? Peace is born of hope, when hope is gone there will be social upheavals.” He was never Al-Shabaab.

Godwin R. Murunga is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi.