Shun clan and tribal politics

What you need to know:

  • Let us not allow small minds to stifle Kenya’s growth and progress in the name of supporting them as “one of our own”.

  • Regardless of our tribes and clans, we all share the same challenges and are equally bound by common dreams and aspirations.

  • Therefore, when the menu for choosing leaders is presented to us, come August 8 when this year's General Election will be held, we should rise above tribe or clan-based politics and throw our weight behind only those who truly deserve a first or second chance to lead.

There are less than 50 days left before Kenyans go the polls to pick the people to serve them on the six elective seats, namely, President, governor, member of Parliament, senator, woman representative and member of county assembly. Apart from the President and MP posts, the rest are newly created positions in the people-centric Constitution of Kenya 2010.

The voters need to do their homework properly on candidates’ suitability for the posts they are gunning for. Voters should, particularly, avoid being influenced by the deeply entrenched political culture of basing leadership on tribes or clans, instead of high political principles.

SERVICE DELIVERY

Leadership is about service delivery to the people, thus it matters little what tribe or clan a candidate belongs to as long as they have the credibility, the vision and a clear, participatory plan on how to uplift you and improve your life as an ordinary citizen, who is struggling to achieve a better life.

For the sake of development and strengthening our democracy, we should shift our focus from looking at the lineage of candidates to instead check their believability and weigh the raft of policies they are selling during the election campaigns against the challenges we are grappling with, such as unemployment, insecurity, inflation and poor infrastructure before we can make the choice of one of them to be our representative on any of the six slots.

Sadly, there are politicians both at the county and national levels who are known experts in the negative art of manipulating the clan and tribal backgrounds to climb up the political ladder. They explicitly employ the divide and rule colonial policy to reach their selfish, elitist ambitions.

These leaders don’t give a hoot on the repercussions of creating animosity between clans or tribes. That’s why some of them are recklessly reopening the painful history of the 2007-2008 post-election violence as a 2017 campaign agenda, when we know that Kenya is still delicately on a healing plateau.

BARACK OBAMA

During his visit to Kenya in July 2015, United States President Barack Obama discredited this kind of politics when he said: “I want to be very clear here. A politics that’s based solely on tribe and ethnicity is a politics that’s doomed to tear a country apart. It is a failure – a failure of imagination”.

What surprises me most in our political obsession with clans and tribes is how even some young people are willing to do anything and everything under the sun to please these politicians, who only harbour the intention of using and dumping them.

How much longer are they going to agree to be used as pawns on the political chessboard? When will they begin to scour the political landscape for a hand-up in life rather than wasting their prime age doing some dirty work for politicians for handouts?

BE MATURE

Fifty-three years after independence, Kenyans should be mature enough to pursue competitive politics where election seasons would no longer be viewed with anxiety over tensions between various clans and tribes, but instead make it a process to look forward to with a calming eagerness for issue-based politics and for boldly stamping our unity in diversity.

Let us not allow small minds to stifle the country’s growth and progress in the name of supporting them as “one of our own”. Regardless of our tribes and clans, we all share the same challenges and are equally bound by common dreams and aspirations.

Therefore, when the menu for choosing leaders is presented to us, come August 8 when this year's General Election will be held, we should rise above tribe or clan-based politics and throw our weight behind only those who truly deserve a first or second chance to lead.

Hassan Malik Mohamed is a ‘Nation' correspondent in Garissa Town; [email protected]