Why we can’t take lightly claims of assassination

Exactly who is plotting to assassinate Mr Ahmednasir Abdullahi? I take seriously the Nairobi lawyer’s claim because, throughout my country’s post-colonial experience, assassins have cut down a great number of world-class minds, including Josiah Mwangi Kariuki and Thomas Joseph Mboya.

That alone is enough reason we just cannot take lightly any claim by a lawyer-politician that “… my life is in danger …” For what that usually means is that some other person has given up on all the constitutionally sanctioned methods of political competition and has decided to defeat an opponent only by organising to murder him or her.

The question then is: How can we, as a society that claims membership in the comity of nations, tolerate any form of political competition that includes the dastardly killing of rivals? I ask because, to my mind, such a crime can be committed only by desperados — only by those who have given up on all the socially sanctioned, all the civilised, methods of competition for power.

IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFEAT

Kenyans can legitimately assume that an individual or group of individuals will decide to cut short another person’s life only because the culprit has found it impossible to defeat the other person by all the socially sanctioned methods of competition – a statement which we can certainly make with regard to the assassinations of Mboya and Kariuki.

In a country beleaguered by big-tribe atavism, powerful individual members of the political class appear to assume that, as individuals, they can ascend to the Kilimanjaro of power only by appealing to the lowest feelings of their tribes.

So they try hard to bend the minds of those tribes into helping them to commit the most heinous political crimes by going against the objective aspirations of the whole national society.

But whether or not any individual Kenyan is aware of it, the objective aspiration of Kenyans as a whole is to unite their minds and their hands in one whole effort of the kind that Jomo Kenyatta – the founding father of our nation – called Harambee.

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

For, said he, our objective social problems were so huge that, as single individuals or tribes or races, we just could not tackle them effectively.

That, then, is the crime that we commit in the allocation of the benefits of national production – economic as well as intellectual.

Whoever entertains and practises tribalism, racism, religious bigotry and gender atavism actually opposes and frustrates our aspiration to develop together as soon as can be into a single and happy national people whatever our gentile origins may be.

The point, then, is that personal ability – or inability or disability – knows no gender or race or religion or tribe. It resides in certain individuals in all our ethnic, gender, national, racial and religious communities.

That is why it is nationally suicidal to erect any rigidly disabling barriers against any individual just because of his or her gender, tribe or race.

NARROW WORK PREMISES

Whenever we do so in our own narrow work premises, we deny ourselves a great deal of talent that might otherwise help to add momentum to our haste to reach our goals.

The same is true of personal needs. That is why all leaders with properly educated minds demand that each individual be allowed to contribute to the national kitty wholly according to his or her ability and to benefit from that kitty according to his or her needs.

As many social scientists comment, not absence of talented and experienced hands – but only a terrible mal-distribution of these – is the most effective barrier to Kenya’s development.

And tribalism is the most important reason that so many of Kenya’s best brains and hands are rotting on the peripheries of policy-making and of production and cannot contribute effectively to national development. That, to my mind, is the only relevance of Mr Abdullahi’s allegation.

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