Raila, Uhuru are merely two sides of the same organism

President Uhuru Kenyatta (left) greets ODM leader Raila Odinga. Between Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga, there is always another side, a relationship of mutual respect. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Between Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga, there is always (there should always be) another side – namely, a relationship of mutual respect.
  • In short, a wisely governed society always consciously tries officially to minimise and even to eliminate such social contradictions.

Clearly, some of our daily newspaper editors know how redeeming – how mentally liberating – it is for the media to give priority of space to those political and other activities and voices with a message of national unity and justice.

But, in a Third World country like Kenya, which frequently totters on the edge of inter-ethnic Armageddon, if the news media were fully conscious of their national responsibility and potential, all our newspaper editors would struggle more than anything else to report our politicians only in a manner that encourages inter-personal, inter-ethnic, inter-party, inter-racial and inter-sectarian respect, friendship and even mutual assistance.

Yet it is the print media themselves that – by giving huge headlines on prime pages to the many mean-minded activities that divide us along ethnic and such other puny lines – encourage the looseness of tongue that characterises party politics in a colonially tribalised country like Kenya.

The question, then, is stark and staring: Why is it so difficult for Kenyans of different age-groups, ethnicities, genders, races and sectarian persuasions to sell ideas which, while freely competing with one another, are expressed in a national atmosphere governed by consciousness of mutual respect and a vital common goal?

Perhaps the ungodly jealousies and tragedies that have always existed between the different religious and sectarian groups – as we know these through the pages of history, especially of the monotheistic Western religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism – are what do restrict most of their priests to preaching, as opposed to leadership through really useful actions.

But, quite clearly, whenever it is expressed between President Kenyatta and Mr Odinga – as The Standard helped them to do on page one of its March 29 number, where the newspaper described such friendship merely as “The other side of Uhuru and Raila” – the newspapers mean us to see this “other side” (the one of friendship) as the less important one or, in Kenya’s politics, the more unlikely one.

COMRADESHIP

And it is easy to imagine the newspapers and other media doing it quite deliberately, namely, so as merely to provoke a reaction leading to another clash between Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga in order to exhilarate an even better-selling headline.

The point to make, then, is that, between Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga, there is always (there should always be) another side – namely, a relationship of mutual respect and even personal comradeship.

To their credit, the President and the Opposition leader often make this quite manifest.

They frequently act like real statesmen, rather than like mere politicians.

Yet the huge picture which accompanied The Standard’s page-one headline was the proof of the fact that both the political “proposition” (President Kenyatta) and the political opposition (Mr Odinga) are conscious that they are merely two sides of the same organism, the two sides that make manifest our self-chosen political system to proceed smoothly towards our community of national goals.

In all societies, objective oppositions exist in a myriad of other forms – such as between the sexes, between the age groups, between the socio-economic classes and – as in Kenya and other African and Third World societies created by European colonialism – between the races and the ethnic entities.

In short, a wisely governed society always consciously tries officially to minimise and even to eliminate such social contradictions in order to avoid the negative effects of any consequent clashes of the kind that Kenya experienced in the days following certain national elections a few years ago.