A fascination with danger and ruin will be country’s undoing

On Thursday I made history. I became the first person I have ever heard of who snored so loudly that he woke himself up. I had woken up early and bright at 5.30am sharpish, did the school run and was back well before 7am.

After a lot of analysis on whether to watch the news, read the news or have some breakfast, I decided that it made sense to “place” myself on the bed for a few more minutes and then get a move on. I don’t know at what point I burrowed back into the warmth of the blankets. I just recall being woken up by stentorious snores and sitting up in wonder. I had just snored myself awake.

I am as vulnerable as the next person. I have children in school, some waiting to sit their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exam. I stand to lose everything I have worked for if the country goes into meltdown. So why am I sleeping so soundly at night?

FATALISM

It’s probably fatalism. I have written, argued, advised and no one has paid attention. When I was young in the mountains, the elephants used to come down and destroy crops in the shambas.

So the men, with palpable resignation, would sharpen their pangas, pick up old sufurias — with which to create a racket and scare off the beasts — and head out for a night of drama and untold horror.

Last week, when I wrote a rather theatrical piece to demonstrate our shared experiences, culture and spiritual connection to our country, which transcend the self-serving and transient tribal politics, I was widely excoriated and corrected. Every Nasa-zone kid with his mum’s phone and Bamba 50 pointed out what damn fool Kikuyu I was. Some pointed out that the things I spoke about only apply to people with money; that peasants couldn’t afford them.

An innocent comment by one young person some weeks ago contributes to my growing gloom. This person said it would be a great thing if Nasa presidential candidate Raila Odinga could start a civil war as a means to force “reforms”.

PROPAGANDA

Reform has become a propaganda g-spot; it is a dirty word. We have been doing reforms since 1991, that’s 26 years ago, when we removed Section 2A.

We are the most reformed country in the world. There is nothing even remotely reformist left to do, in my mind.

If we change the 2010 Constitution to tweak the system of government, we will only be repairing the damage caused by Mr Odinga and his friends in the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Constitution, which retreated to Naivasha and mutilated the constitution we wanted.

Rather than trying to narrate history to this young person, I thought I should point out a few things about a society at war.

First, there would be no mum and dad; they would have been killed. There would be no Instagram, no slaying, no slay queens, no phone, no credit, no road trips, no home, no upcountry estate, no college, no jobs, no bread, no chocolate, no money, no matatus, no series, no movies, no books, no shower, no bed.

HORROR MOVIE

Home would be in a UNHCR tent somewhere in Sudan and food would consist of ground millet and oil. Each would be a horror movie, with the Janjaweed raiding to conduct ritual rape and plunder, while other brutal groups would also occasionally pass by to abduct folks for slavery and slit throats, just to fill the endless hours of a sultry night.

War means the loss of human dignity, unspeakable suffering, a life without hope. But when you hear a professor — an intellectual bereft of humanism — arguing that peasants gave their lives for independence and bled for reforms (that gross word again) and might be called on again to bleed for some more reforms, you realise how far out with the fairies we have flown: the country is drunk with tribalism, foolishness, reckless ambition and autocratic nostalgia.

This week I went to the stalls on Moi Avenue, Nairobi, and one of the salesgirls sent me to one of her colleagues to buy a watch.

“There are people here who also need to eat,” she said. Business is so bad that owners are opening the stalls because they don’t know what else to do. There are many blue chip companies, which are not making enough to pay salaries. If we keep this on for another three months, we will take years, if ever, to recover from the de-growth: Some of those who used to use our ports, hotels and airports may never come back.

POLITICS

The presumption that politics is the only important thing in our lives — not the patients in hospital, the workers in the factories or the children in the schools — is Kenya’s undoing.

We seem to have a fascination with danger and ruin; we have no sense of safety or care. And we are determined to ignore good counsel and launch ourselves headlong unto doom.

I know that when a baby has been carried to term, it has to be welcomed no matter the pangs of childbirth. I only hope, rather foolishly, for that miracle we have been praying for.

But if it does not come, I am resigned to the outcome that my compatriots have created.

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