Uproot thorn of ethnic prejudices in our social flesh

The social law of probability obliges me to believe that individuals exist who can rule our country better and more effectively than heretofore.

But anything more than that I just cannot assert. Much less can I tell Kenyans that only members of my age-group, my atheism, my gender, my race and my tribe can rule Kenya well.

Yet that is what all our political movements – strictly based on tribes since they are – are telling us every day that the sun rises in the east.

Why do we allow our elites to sell to us the divisive and extremely cheap lie that only they – as ethnic leaders – can rule a multi-ethnic entity like Kenya to every citizen’s satisfaction?

As leaders, we commit vile and extremely dangerous subjectivism by promising Kenyans that only a male Kalenjin, Kamba, Luo, Kikuyu, Luhya, suchlike, can rule them with justice and compassion and effectively.

That – I can report – is the most important reason I am not a member of any one of the plethora of political parties that perennially vie for power in our country.

First, all of them are led by individuals who hinge their hopes of coming to power totally on the numbers of their ethnic groups (when it comes to the vote).

None of our myriad of parties has ever offered me any cogent and sustainable reason why a member of a group as small as the Kalasinga, the Kuria and the Taveta cannot rule us compassionately, productively and with justice.

ETHNIC CONTENT

And the utter absence of a precedent obliges me to strongly refuse to accept the statement – made through the plurality and ethnic content of our political parties – that, in this task, an individual can lead Kenya effectively only if the individual is a he and a Luo.

Every adult age-group, community, ethnicity, race, religion, sporting discipline, what-have-you – has such individuals.

The task facing our constitutional guardians is to come up with a water-proof method of latching onto such an individual without yielding an inch to any of our negative ethnic, gender, racial and religious smallnesses of the mind.

A time is coming when somebody in the forefront of leadership just has to put his or her foot down to insist on it.

How to remove this thorn of ethnic, gender, racial and sectarian prejudices from our social flesh – how to uproot what Koigi wa Wamwere condemns as “negative ethnicism” – is the most important task facing all of Kenya’s social planners today – though our ministry of planning doesn’t even seem to have ever heard of it.

Is it really impossible for our social planners to ensure that pivotal jobs go only to individuals who can perform them to the nation’s objective wishes – notwithstanding the genders, races, religions and tribes of such individuals?

Why have we succumbed to the tribe-driven and terribly restrictive straitjackets and pigeonholes through which all potential employees are now forced into both sectors?

If our national leaders really can see the social ruts into which such practices have led those sectors (public and even private), dangers which not even our most outspoken trade union Atwolis ever seem to see the need to tackle – isn’t Kenya headed for what science fiction in astronomy calls a “free fall” into the abyss?

Isn’t it a scandal of national and historic proportions that negative tribalism – one of our most stubborn objective enemies – does not appear directly and systematically in the national agendas and programmes of any of our political parties?

All of them speak glibly of “unity”. It is as if unity will fall into theirs laps like manna once allegedly did into Exodus Israel’s kiosks.

Five decades since we defeated colonialism, what can we parade as our most brilliant achievement in what we claim to be “nation-building”?

Isn’t it a contradiction in terms for mutually hostile tribes to call themselves a nation?

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