Mergers of political parties an effort to buy silence

In national politics, we should draw a clear line between strategic policies and what are merely tactical ones. By strategy, I mean the long-term collective goal(s) of any grouping of human beings and, by tactics, I refer to the various shorter-term steps that any ruling group might take to hasten the struggle for its strategic goalpost.

Concerning it, however, I hold no illusion whatsoever about any of the political mergers that are proposed in our country from time to time, including now. Why not? Because none of our present political parties has published any genuine set of statements concerning what it hopes to do to lead the people of Kenya out of their present Sodom and Gomorrah.

Only when two or more of the parties can show the people that they have such a strategic set of policies in common – and only when we can see them trying genuinely to sell that set of ideas to as many Kenyans as possible nationwide – only then will the leaders convince thinking Kenyans that the leaders are genuinely concerned to salvage this country from its present ethico-material abyss.

It is only on that basis, too, that I can encourage two parties to merge. For, only when two or more parties are genuinely driven by the people’s really material conditions – including rasping poverty and the tribal divisiveness in which the consumer class seeks to maintain them in order to prevent any true inter-tribal unity – only then can I ever hurrah over it.

Only then will I support any one of Kenya’s umpteen political parties. But without such a basis, a merger of such parties never works out as a unity of strategically and materially productive ideas. Such a merger can at present be only a swelling of numbers of the kind that the elites of Third World countries, especially Africa’s, now parade to the Western donors as constituting “democracy”.

ANY CHARADE

Submerged in its own self-righteousness as the world’s God-given example of “Christian charity” and “Christian democracy”, the donor community will accept any charade from the Third World as long as it is characterised by whatever looks like an election and is called “democracy” – as long as it is draped in such psychedelic dresses as polling, regime change and everything else that looks to the donor world’s news “observer” like a successful attempt to imitate the donor world in terms merely of political practice.

At present, our apparent party “mergers” – or attempts at them – consist merely in the ruling leaders (all of them from one or two large ethnic groups) trying to buy silence from individual leaders of the other large but sidelined and disgruntled ethnic groups. How heavenly Kenya would become if you could buy into silence all or most of the hot-headed “spokesmen” and “spokeswomen” for the Kamba, Kisii, Luhya, Luo and Mijikenda!

MAJOR CONCERN

If to prevent such an eventuality does not soon become the major concern of our educators – namely, our developers of thought and skill and our planners and implementers of policy (including the abounding and eloquent priestly salesmen and saleswomen of the path to heavenly bliss once paved for us by colonial Europe) – our country will continue to drift apace to the situation in which Jewry’s own Sodom and Gomorrah reportedly found themselves once upon a time.

Horrifying privileges characterise our society in most walks of life. Indeed, the situation is such that even the leaders of our religious institutions have long been admitted into the position of consumer privilege. Time is coming apace – and (as the gospels are wont to put it) – now is when the consumer class will no longer know even how to pretend about these such practices.

As the New Testament warns, a time is coming when Kenya’s consumer class can no longer pretentiously utter holy words from the Bible with which to beguile the unsuspecting churchgoer.

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