We must reclaim our African values of honesty, hard work

A few weeks ago a mechanic test-driving a car that he had been fixing rolled several times and landed in a ditch in a Nairobi suburb.

The first people on the scene were the guards at a mobile security response car that was parked nearby.

You would think that the first step would be to rescue the driver and take him to hospital.

But alas, that wasn’t what the guards did. Instead they broke a window ransacked whatever they could lay their hands on, including a cell phone, some cash and some tools.

Were it not for the quick reaction of other guards stationed at some of the nearby houses, who rushed the driver to hospital and admonished the standby guards, I am not sure the driver would have lived.

I wish we could say that the actions of the standby askaris were an aberration and an oddity.

Sadly, they were not. In fact, the surprise was the Good Samaritan actions of the other guards, who helped the injured mechanic instead of looting.

For in the Kenya that is here and now, we have become obsessed with grabbing, with taking, and with conning for personal gain, no matter who gets hurt.

In the Kenya we have, hustling is not just using our wits to survive legally and compassionately.

Hustling in today’s Kenya is taking whatever one can take, especially illegally as long as you don’t get caught, or if you do, as long as you can get away with it.

We have lost our values in today’s Kenya.

We have lost the moral compass that defines our humanity and nationhood, and which motivates us to thrive in our differences for the common good.

Instead we revel in a universe that is about “me, me and me!”

MORAL DECAY
Now this is not about that fake morality that a bureaucrat is peddling illegally in some warped sense of Christian fundamentalism, under the guise of censorship.

No, those actions and outbursts exhibit an intolerance and arrogance we thought we had seen the back of with the end of the Soviet Union, with its intrusive censors, who thought they — and their higher-up benefactors — were the only intelligent, sensible adults who then had to decide for the rest of society, which they treated as children to be told what to do.

What this is about is well-captured by Mr Uhuru Kenyatta’s recent salivating and eating meat idiom.

Even if we were to accept that he was not referring to actual eating of our taxes in corruption and wasteful spending, the most charitable perspective would be that he was promoting discrimination against those who opposed him.

This is exactly what the Constitution sought to cure, the idea that development would only follow those in power.

And when people who claim to be committed Christians endorse this sort of discrimination then you know that somehow the wrong Christianity is with us!

Jesus would have chased these Pharisees out of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The decay of our value system has transcended the very public shows of our Christianity and Islam.

In fact, it seems that those who declare and exhibit their religiosity the most are the ones we should watch out for the most.

When I was at the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, I took it as a rule of thumb that the person who insisted and offered to pray before meetings was the biggest crook of all, especially when the meetings were attended by Cabinet ministers and Permanent Secretaries!

RECLAIMING LOST GLORY

Yet we have, deep inside us, a value system that we could be proud of, some of it based on our traditional society.

For instance, in our African cultures no one was allowed to go hungry and the poor and marginalised could eat at any shamba to their fill, as long as they did not take it away with them.

That was our compassion for the poor and the unfortunate and the marginalised.

We respected hard work, courage and fortitude, not thieves, crooks and tenderpreneurs.

And we valued honesty, wisdom and fairness, tolerating differences, and learning from them.

Can we ever reclaim our values or are we irredeemable now that we have surpassed Nigeria in corruption?

[email protected]