Let’s remain vigilant to maintain democratic gains

Last week’s confrontations in parliament concerning amendments to laws in the name of improving ‘national security’, and the arrest of a blogger for allegedly undermining the authority of the president, demonstrate just how close we are to a return to an autocratic police state that controls even how we think.

This is of course reminiscent of the Kanu kleptocracy at its peak, when certain thoughts were forbidden and could lead to the death sentence.

Whenever this concern is raised, many middle class Kenyans are quick to dismiss any fears with the statement that Kenya has come too far to slide back into autocracy.

Many argue that Kenyans are too enlightened to allow a government to run roughshod on constitutionally guaranteed rights.

They opine it is impossible for Kenya to become a police state for the same reasons.

In my opinion, such arguments, while quite comforting, are condescending and insulting to citizens of dictatorships. The implication is that these citizens are unenlightened, backward, and unable to argue away or shake off the shackles of oppression.

Those arguing thus are saying we, as a population, are better than those living under autocratic kleptocracies.

Indeed, they suggest the present generation is far better than their forebears, who were foolish enough to allow past leaders to oppress them and run the country as though it were private property.
An examination of past dictatorships will suffice as an example.

THE NAZI

In Nazi Germany, it took almost a decade before the full scale of Hitler’s ambitions was appreciated.

The march towards irrational autocracy, while definitely resolute, was sufficiently subtle and slow to the extent that it took a high index of suspicion to notice it.

This was particularly difficult for those that were kept busy by their daily needs, and the Nazi state was highly efficient in ensuring everybody was kept too busy to think of anything but the task at hand.

Similarly, the madness that engulfed Rwanda 20 years ago did not suddenly drop upon the country by surprise.

Small steps, amplified stereotypes, things taken for granted, and a state that kept citizens too busy to think were key ingredients in the development of a society that could not only be intolerant, but actually carry out a genocide.

In Kenya, over the past few weeks the country has been beset about threats to national security. I think the intention is to get us to a point where oppression by the state is more acceptable than enduring threats from ‘internal and external enemies’

REMAIN VIGILANT

Finally, many students of Kenya’s history of ethnopolitical violence have reached the conclusion that these conflagrations are never spontaneous except in a few cases, but are the result of what is now famously known as ‘historical injustices’.

Accusing the people living that reality of being foolish or unenlightened is not only unhelpful, but also prevents us from seeing things as they really are.

The point of this piece is that citizens must remain vigilant if we are to maintain the democratic gains that have been painstakingly clawed away from a state that was from inception designed to oppress the majority.

And a state that prosecutes one for holding and expressing an opinion, however obnoxious, about a public official is well on its way into that deep dark abyss inhabited by the presumably unenlightened ones.

Dr Lukoye Atwoli is Consultant Psychiatrist and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]