Tribalism is the reason Kenya limps helplessly

Kenya is an artificial entity. Britain created it through colonial coercion by lumping together scores of hitherto independent ethnic peoples.

Yet I doubt whether, because of it, too many Kenyans are unhappy with the reality called Kenya.

Notwithstanding such complaints as the Mijikenda make against “upcountry” communities, and other ethnic Kenyans against “Mount Kenya”, nobody who has come face-to-face with history can demand Kenya’s disintegration into ethnic republics.

Our founding fathers gave us a good reason.

At the formation of the Organisation of African Unity, they all rejected a demand, by small-headed fellow nationalists, that Africa’s colonially delineated Berlin boundary system be dismantled altogether.

Such redoubtable pan-Africanists as Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Nasser, Jomo Kenyatta, Milton Obote, Sekou Toure and Julius Nyerere argued that to redraw the international boundaries in accordance with ethnic affinities would logically culminate in thousands of unviable tribal republics.

That is a powerful reason we need to conserve Kenya as one country and to cement its ethnic, racial, religious, sectarian and gender seams even more tightly.

I can tell you that this is precisely why I want to belong to Kenya much more than to Luoland.

For, it is only by committing ourselves to Kenya – much more than to our ethnic parishes – that we can create a granary as spacious as possible into which to pour as many strategic resources as possible hitherto scattered (and often in disuse) in our tiny parochial storages.

Human capacity is by far the most important of such resources. A network of human hands, brains and tongues is the key factor of development.

From biology, we know that such conflation – including of ethnic and racial genes – is what can strengthen us from a mere collection of human beings into a powerful nation.

In Kenya, we are endowed with every kind of ethnic and racial raw material.

Yet, day in and day out, our own leaders – the educated class – work tirelessly to frustrate every one of our efforts to transform ourselves from a society of sharp ethnic and racial conflicts to a united nation to catalyse our development.

If – as is the case – every ethnic and racial community has talent and skill, it follows that, in a collectivity of ethnic and racial communities, the number of such talents and skills multiply.

But they will remain scattered and may lie fallow unless deliberately deployed into a common crucible.

The chief task of a serious development-minded political system should be to constantly identify talents and skills from all those communities, tap and sharpen those talents and skills and then deploy them together into a common national development cause.

From the nation’s objective point of view, the deadliest evil of what Koigi wa Wamwere calls “Negative Ethnicity” is that it seeks to confine leadership – in politics as well as in business and even in God’s church – to a single ethnic community (or race or gender).

In this way, the straitjacket of social chauvinism condemns to permanent disuse the talents and skills of all other tribes, races, religions, sects and gender.

Through mental incest, tribalism condemns to a permanent standstill all our attempts to march together to nationhood.

Since the dawn of civilisation, politics has been the mode of existence of all human societies.

Originally, both “civilisation” and “politics” referred to the unity and orderliness with which a society governed the production, appropriation and distribution of its collective wherewithal.

Yet Kenya’s whole politics – especially parliamentary – is characterised by the most uncivilised, most appalling, juvenile disorder, driven by the most primitive appeal to the tribe.

Doesn’t it deeply embarrass you that, on certain familiar issues, Kikuyu and Luo MPs are sure to vote on opposite sides?

On Governor Njuguna Ndung’u of the Central Bank, for instance, no MP voted for Kenya.

They voted only in the most parochial ethnic interest. As a result, Kenya continues to limp along completely helplessly.

ochie[email protected]