We must seek ways to manage negative anger among Kenyans

By the time this piece was written, the Supreme Court had not delivered its ruling, but by the time you are reading it, the eminent judges will have had their say, and the atmosphere will have changed considerably.

One thing is certain, though; half the voting public will be delirious with joy while the other half will be seething in anger.

It is always thus after every election in competitive democracies, but we in Kenya seem to take these things so seriously we are often driven to an emotional frenzy.

It does sound trite to say that in every electoral contest there must be winners and losers and that the winners will pour into the streets to celebrate while the losers will often do the same thing to express their displeasure.

COMPLAIN

It is quite human to complain if a cause in which you had invested emotionally goes awry and you are quite helpless to change anything. This is not a Third World thing, by the way.

When, against all expectations, America’s Donald Trump was declared president last November, supporters of his rival, Hillary Clinton, converged on the streets in protest, declaring that he was not, and will never be, their president.

But of course they only carried placards proclaiming so, not crude weapons, and they did not barricade roads with boulders.

As a result, there were no reports of people dying or ill-trained police officers going on an orgy of violence.

Another major difference between our country and the rest of the world is that once these emotions are spent, the protesters just go home and watch their new leaders make asses of themselves in the next four or five years before throwing them out.

CAMPAIGNS

But in our beloved country, the one thing you can bet on is that, regardless of what the Supreme Court has ruled, campaigns for the next election will begin today (Friday).

Are we cursed to suffer five-year cycles of electioneering with no lull in between?

This country has so many problems that it is amazing we can devote as much time as we do in creating utopian dreams and trying to convince gullible, impoverished masses that better times lie ahead if only they elected the “right” people.

We are at our wits’ end how to tackle corruption which has made many despair of ever pulling themselves up from destitution through their own efforts.

We still haven’t sorted out the problems besetting one of the noblest products of the 2010 Constitution — devolution. And then there is our national curse, negative ethnicity, which habitually turns us from thinking beings into fiends.

ELECTED LEADERS

These are some of the problems that our elected leaders should be working on instead of being forced to spend half their tenure defending their decisions and positions.

To coin a phrase, when shall we ever get a life as a nation?

Last week, I had a horrid time reading responses to my column of Saturday, August 26, in which I vehemently opposed the idea of secession as a cure to the country’s problems.

Some of them were actually insightful and made me realise that the fissure in our society keeps widening with each passing year, but a few were merely motivated by hatred.

One of them was particularly spiteful and I’ll quote his message verbatim for there is no way to paraphrase tribal hatred: “Mungiki, can you tell us who lost elections? You are the criminal tribalist who hides behind Nation Media disguised as a journalist.

CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE

Nation Media is full of people like you Mungikis... you want to continue exploiting us in this criminal enterprise called Kenya where the will of the people is not respected. You people loot the economy with impunity and the rest of us are left to pay...”

Of course I did not answer the extremely agitated chap; it would not have done any good. But if I had, I would have told him this: A simple reason why I do not want Kenya dismembered is that I cannot contemplate my grandchildren having to seek a visa to travel to Mombasa or Kisumu.

However, the inescapable fact is that millions of Kenyans are extremely angry because they feel disenfranchised.

They don’t feel like they belong, and our leaders cannot just say ‘tough luck’ and move on. What does the incoming government propose to do about it?

Magesha Ngwiri is a consultant editor. [email protected]