We should think as a super-tribe known as Kenya

According to statements attributed to Raila Odinga, the choice will be his own as to whether to seek the presidency again.

I write to congratulate Mr Odinga on his special and unenviable position and on his never-say-die spirit. Not many Kenyans can be so confident that they will again be nominated for the race after so many unsuccessful attempts.

But Mr Odinga’s statement will have caused his legion of countrywide critics to assert that the statement was anti-democratic. Yet in one sense – looked at from the point of view of the whole republic – such critics were correct. You do not keep your possible supporters in such suspense till the last minute.

However, the problem which Mr Odinga’s statement poses is that it is only one of a myriad of definitions of democracy. For the choice as to who will represent the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) in the coming race for State House should be left to the folk themselves – namely, to all members of Mr Odinga’s party.

Yet, as I say, that is only one of the umpteen different ways in which – as members of my generation used to read in one of our primary school series of Oxford primers – a number of blind men might have defined the elephant after the mere touch of different parts of the pachyderm’s body. To most Kenyans, democracy is exactly like the elephant.

The other is point that, even in a country so tightly in the clutch of ethnic small-mindedness, every presidential candidate probably has considerable numbers of supporters among all of our ethnic groups. Mr Odinga probably has considerable followers in President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Central Province and in Vice-President William Ruto’s Rift Valley.

The problem with Kenya’s system of mental upbringing is that it does not conduce to intellectual differing based on individual choices of thought systems but tends to encourage ethnic ganging up, causing what claim to be human beings to group as thoughtlessly, tribally, as a group of birds of passage.

MIRE OF TRIBE

That is a fact which, in the 21st century, should deeply embarrass you if you are an individual committed to using your brain independently.

For to create a thought system conducive to catalysing Kenya’s mental and material development as a single unit should be the declared purpose of Kenya’s leaders, both in education and in politics.

But the only way for Mr Odinga to find it out would be for him to transform himself – through I know not what legerdemain – into a leader of Central Province and the Rift Valley as much as he is the leader of Nyanza. But that is a well-nigh impossible phenomenon in a society in which even the most educated minds are deeply stranded in the mire of tribe.

Yet only through education can all of us unite to solve that problem. Only the educated class can face it directly, and only in the name of republicanism can we begin to slay the dragon that Koigi wa Wamwere once described as “negative tribalism”. For the veteran politician, then, ethnicism always has a positive side.
For, of course, nature is always double-edged. Social history would have created the tribe only if, initially, the tribe also worked positively for mankind. Yet that is why, objectively, social health requires as much inter-ethnic unity as a desert sapling requires rainwater.

Unless, as individuals and as group leaders, we can merge our ethnic, gender, racial and sectarian resources into a single weapon, I do not see how we can wrench ourselves free of the extreme mental under-development which may cause a Luo, for instance, to think of the Luhya next door as his enemies, and vice-versa.
The only way to solve this problem is to revolutionise our minds into thinking as members of a super-tribe called Kenya. How to achieve that should be the preoccupation of our Educational ministry.

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