Uhuru treatment of Jaramogi short-sighted and unwise

Words matter. When Barack Obama ran for president for the first time, the Hillary Clinton campaign dismissed him as an empty poet who was just using flowery speechmaking to advance his career.

Obama replied that words can change the course of history and make a difference in real life. He cited speeches that had rallied Americans to action in the aid of progressive causes.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter!” he said. “I have a dream’ just words? We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words? Just speeches?”

Obama was right that when a leader addresses an audience, they should be aware their words can have a significant effect in shaping the actions and perceptions of listeners. On Thursday, President Uhuru Kenyatta had the attention of the whole nation when he made his Mashujaa Day address.

He rattled off a predictable list of what he sees as the achievements of his government. But, since he seems obsessed with social media outlets such as Twitter, he will know the issue that has dominated conversations since the speech was the decision to entirely omit Jaramogi Oginga Odinga from the list of national heroes that he read out and to include figures whose claim to inclusion in that roll is of dubious merit such as lawyer Mutula Kilonzo.

Uhuru’s address leaves you asking the question: Just who advises these people? How short-sighted can they be? How cheap and ethnically blinded are the decision-makers at State House?

Kenya is a bitterly divided country mainly because Uhuru’s father, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, could not find a way to accommodate the leaders that differed with him such as Jaramogi, Bildad Kaggia and Achieng’ Oneko.

This group was left-leaning and felt that the Mau Mau cause had been betrayed by the new government’s acquisitive and capitalist outlook. But the divisions in Kenyan society had been carefully cultivated by the British colonialists well before independence.

Because the settlers primarily grabbed land in the central highlands that were primarily settled by the Kikuyu people, they worked very hard to make sure that the rebellion against colonialism did not spread beyond central Kenya.

Jaramogi writes about this in Not Yet Uhuru: “Throughout the Emergency years the nightmare of the government was that the revolt would spread to other tribes.

Immediate steps were taken to seal off the Kikuyu reserves and to subject the rest of the country to a continuous barrage of propaganda to inflame anti-Kikuyu feeling. Government and settler tactics seemed designed at little less than the extinction of the Kikuyu and to win over the Luo, the second largest tribe in Kenya, as an army of loyalists.”

He continued: “My primary objective was to block this government offensive to enrol the Luo as pro-government belligerents, and thus fatally to divide the African people of our country.”

Jaramogi succeeded and went ahead to strongly support the demands for Kenyatta’s release from prison and for him to be the first president of the newly independent republic. The two bitterly fell out after independence. Jaramogi was removed from government and sent into opposition.

Relations between the Kikuyu and Luo elite took a sharp nosedive after the other main Luo leader remaining in the Kenyatta administration (widely seen as a future president) Tom Mboya was gunned down in what was an obvious hit by a government-sponsored assassin.

That period sowed the seeds of the bitter divisions that remain between the two most politically engaged ethnic groups in Kenya. Uhuru Kenyatta, as a son of the first president, should be acutely conscious of this history and understand the need to build national cohesion and unity between different groups in Kenya. His primary opponent is Raila Odinga, son of Jaramogi.

So why would he, at a national holiday that is dedicated to celebrating the heroes that built Kenya, omit the likes of Jaramogi and Mboya from the list of nationalists that built the nation?

True, maybe Uhuru did not write the speech himself. But is it the case that he is surrounded by such deep Kikuyu nationalists that they continue to prosecute these divisions in this age?

Are they aware of the words of Sir Charles Markham, a settler MP who asked Jaramogi why he was supporting the Mau Mau yet they were not his voters, drawing a defiant response from Jaramogi that one did not need to take a principled stand simply to get votes?

There is no question that Jaramogi is a national hero. By omitting him from his address, Uhuru deepened the divisions in Kenya. That is unwise and petty. Words, sir, matter.

[email protected] @mutigam