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We fail when we sacrifice skills on the altar of tribe
What you need to know:
- Kenyans should appreciate better than other countries the saying that you can harvest only what you sowed.
- What rubric of the Constitution had the President flouted in his drastic personnel reshuffle the other day?
Being a farming nation, Kenyans should appreciate better than other countries the saying that you can harvest only what you sowed.
That was why the newspaper reports that a public outcry had greeted the latest musical chairs by State House were so astonishing.
What rubric of the Constitution had the President flouted in his drastic personnel reshuffle the other day?
I ask because, after it, what persistently hit my eardrums was the charge that the new beneficiaries were aging members of certain tribes.
Whenever the twin problem of tribes and age-groups is raised, it puts me in a dilemma.
Ideally, I dislike and have always strongly condemned negative tribalism, racism, sectarianism and sexism.
But, in practice, I have never been absolutely sure that it is absolutely evil to discriminate in certain terms, including age-groups.
There are occasions when, both objectively and subjectively, tribalism, racism, sectarianism and “genderism” are evils — objectively because these practices deny some of the most capable individuals — our Albert Einsteins and Mohandas Gandhis — the chance to contribute their knowledge and skills to a society which desperately needs such possessions.
And subjectively, because — in the universal comity of sentient beings — any bigoted thought and practice can serve only to remove us, both as individuals and as groups, from that nature-given pool of gregariousness which is what makes manifest our humanity and raises mankind above all other species on earth.
But you wouldn’t know it by looking casually at the earth’s political and economic landscape.
With the inward binoculars of crude race-based corporate greed, the Western liberal intelligentsia has long ago declared that all of the earth’s hideous nation-based econo-intellectual and politico-military Everests and Rift Valleys constitute “the best of all possible worlds”.
Human upbringing is like that. Arrogant thoughtlessness has been characteristic of all hegemonic classes, genders, nations, races, religions and tribes throughout post-gentile mankind’s history.
Blinded against all the objective forces of history, the privileged nation or race of the moment may name itself “God’s chosen people”.
TRAGIC EXPERIENCE
From “the chosen people’s” own Bible, we know, too, that pride of that kind almost always leads to tragedy.
Khazari Jewry’s own tragic experience in the hands of Euro-Teutonic bigotry is fresh in our minds. Historian Edward Gibbon testifies that Rome collapsed as a logical consequence of its own “immoderate greatness”.
More recently, Britain took a perpendicular downfall in economic, military and moral terms right after — at the end of the 19th century — the British intelligentsia had bragged immoderately that the sun would never set on “Rule Britannia”. Examples of such specific conceit abound throughout the extraordinarily short history of our species.
The question is: Why is such a brainy animal so short-sighted that it cannot see the dangers that it brings upon itself by pitting individual, racial, ethnic and religious groups against one another?
No other species is known for our readiness to fight such costly and catastrophic intra-specific wars for needs which the species can satisfy much more readily, much more thriftily, through specific co-operation.
Why does Kenya’s ruling class allow great intellectual talents and expensively produced skills to languish on the peripheries of decision-making and implementation? Why do we condemn such talents to complete waste just because they do not belong to “our tribe”? How will Kenya grow under the guidance of such narrowness of the mind?
Which brings us back to the question we began with. Isn’t it high time Parliament devised a water-tight legal instrument by which to ensure that all brains and all skills from all ethnic and racial communities and both genders are channelled fully into the most appropriate hubs of policy-making and policy-implementation?
But one thing is self-evident. We can inject into the body politic that fillip for which Kenya’s economy is gasping, and make a rapid take-off, only when we stop sacrificing knowledge and skill on the altar of tribe.
