We must abandon the matatu culture

By Koigi wa Wamwere

“Where there is no vision, people perish.” — Proverbs 29 – 18.

In the last 50 years, Kenya has largely been sick and poor. Everywhere you look people are dying.

At this 50th birthday, we must seriously think about what we can do to heal the nation.  

In Kenya’s 50 years, nightmares have dominated my life.  As a small boy growing up in a colonial village, in my sleep, a leopard would chase me up a steep roadside until I woke up before it caught me.

In my 30s, failing exams terrorised me until I woke up and realised I had long passed those exams. In my struggle for freedom, police hunted me down until I woke up in some jail or detention somewhere.

Despite the meaning of my name Koigi — Speaker — the government never allowed me to think or speak. When I did, I ended up in detention.

The Kenyan journey has been long and arduous. It was also the journey of my parents and children.

Kenya’s Exodus however, started 120 years ago in the 1890s when Kenyans left Egypt of colonialism to go to Canaan, their land before conquest, in their rebellion against foreign rule.

In 1963, the journey bore fruit when Kenya became independent and in boundless joy Kenyans believed they would be free and no longer slaves, would be in heaven and no longer in the colonial hell and would from then on be in the Promised Land and never again in Egypt.

When founding father Jomo Kenyatta died, however, like Moses of the Israelis, he left most Kenyans in the desert of poverty, where the majority still languish. Only his family, friends and Kikuyu elite found their way into Canaan.

When Moi became president, I asked him at his Kabarak home whether he could be the Joshua of Kenya and take Kenyans to the promised land. He refused and concentrated on taking the Kalenjin elite into Canaan.

When Kenyatta and Moi abandoned the dream of taking the majority of Kenyans to Canaan, they built them a jungle society in the desert where Canaan was so near, yet so far.

As the dream of Canaan was abandoned, so was freedom, making independence self-rule without democracy. Without freedom, independence came with dictatorship, opening the way for a struggle of second liberation to actualise democracy and Mau Mau revolution that had fought for land and freedom.

After settling for dictatorship, Kenyatta announced that his government would concentrate on fighting poverty, disease and ignorance. But in fighting the three, Kenyatta left out other problems that were crucial to the elimination of the first three problems.

Immediately after independence there was a fierce debate whether Kenya’s economic system would be capitalism or socialism. Though African socialism was identified, it was never to be followed. In practice it was substituted with capitalism that became our greatest impoverisher to date.

Alongside capitalism, we also settled for one-party dictatorship and both were championed by Mwai Kibaki, Tom Mboya and Charles Njonjo, not as tools of development but weapons of fighting communism in the Cold War.

Capitalism and dictatorship gave us limping leaders whose consequence was: “when the lead sheep limps, the flock does not reach pastures.”

When we debated whether to have integrity or corruption, we picked graft which we have agreed to live with, as a necessary evil, as long as it gives us wealth and power.

After legitimising corruption we could not resist impunity. We actualise greed with corruption and protect its wealth with impunity.

For our ideology, we have picked negative ethnicity with which leaders divide, rule and exploit masses of all communities. To date, negative ethnicity is the king of everything we think and do.

Undermined by these unaddressed problems, instead of eradicating poverty, disease and ignorance, the government created a class apartheid where a few became millionaires and billionaires who go to private hospitals because public ones hardly work and take their children to private schools because public ones leave most Kenyans blind with ignorance.

Kenyatta and Moi had no vision to take Kenyans farther than the desert. When they compared Kenya with Somalia and Idi Amin’s Uganda, it was doing very well.

They never bothered to compare it with its Asian peers like Singapore and never wanted to catch up with them. That is why we are where we are today.

Inevitably, unresolved problems gave birth to the Second Liberation. Like the Mau Mau before them, those who took part in the Second Liberation gave all they could — life, blood, sweat and tears to a better future.

DREAM OF HEAVEN

Finally they restored multiparty democracy but other problems remained intact, separating Kenyans from their dream of heaven and the First World.

Once more at 50, Kenya is again at a crossroads. Under some Kora or pharaoh disguised as saviour, Kenya can be led back to the Egypt of slavery. Kenya can also continue to stay in the desert of poverty.

And she can decide to retrace her steps to where she lost the way and restart her journey to the Promised Land that is the First World. These are the stark options before Kenya. Which one will she choose?

Kenyans who have done well and are in Canaan say we are on the right track. They say Vision 2030 — that was conceived and sold to us by some western company – will take Kenya to heaven, to the First World. But will it?

Former MP Koigi wa Wamwere was a political detainee in both the Kenyatta and Moi presidencies.