Why do we see our political future only in terms of tribe?

This week’s manner of speaking by Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga reminded me of one political characteristic of a developed society.

It is that, having the same econo-material interests, the ruling party and the official opposition co-operate very closely all the time.

That is the open secret of the socio-political stability which Western Europe and North America have enjoyed ever since the end of the two centuries of liberal revolution — from 1688 in England to the 1870s in Germany and Italy — that put paid to feudal tyranny for all time.

Keen awareness of this community of long-term interests is why the two parties never hit to kill or dangerously maim each other. In England, the opposition is even officially called “the Queen’s”. This emphasises its commitment to behaviour that never poses any vital threat to the system.

Why, then, do African and other Third World countries — those upon which England, France, Holland, Italy and other colonising European states have tried to impose this expression of Western liberalism — continue to find it almost impossible to put that system into practice?

The answer, I think, is that, in Europe, North America and Japan, the inter-party struggle is no longer basically ethnic. To be sure, the tribal content is extant. The Tories are still recognisably English and the Labourites recognisably Welsh, and the Scottish party is just that — Scottish.

WEALTH

But, upon the whole, what political analysts call class struggle has long begun to be shorn of all classical ethnic characteristics. Wealth remains the only essential distinction.

Even in the Third World, the basic conflict now is between an increasingly smaller number of the really affluent and an increasingly larger mass of paupers.

In the Third World, however, the affluent have completely refused to learn this lesson: That their long-term interests lie only in “nationalising” their economic holdings — making them really nationwide.

Only when those holdings have moved beyond all ethnic boundaries can we say the Western experience has taught us a lesson.

Only when the workers of, say, the Migori branch of a company owned by a Kalenjin or Kamba or Kikuyu or Luhya or Swahili or Ismaili individual begin to ignore the tribe or race of its owner and to see their interests only in that company — can we say we are about to become a nation.

For a nation can be described as a political mass of human beings in whom the collective interests have begun to vitally override those of the ethnic elements composing it. In Western Europe, the national forces have nearly won their protracted war with the ethnic forces. But the struggle has taken centuries.

Therefore, given the speed at which mankind is moving in terms of technology and ideas, the Third World cannot afford to wait for history, as it happened in the West, to repeat itself step by slow step. We must bypass many of the steps.

We cannot wait for a single century for the blind forces of history to condemn for us all the destructive aspects of the tribe. To become a viable nation immediately, Kenya must take deliberate steps to defeat all the forces that condemn us into seeing our political future only in terms of tribe.

IDENTICAL ECONOMIC INTERESTS

That was why I felt short-changed when Uhuru Kenyatta offered to co-operate with Raila Odinga, the perennial gadfly in the President’s face.

Being in a certain class, the two have identical economic interests. What separates them is only the reactionary thought-habit that they can achieve those interests only separately, only through an ethnic political machine.

To attract the Cord mass to Jubilee’s side, the President must make concrete offers to them through their leaders.

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