US visa ban on graft lords easier said than done

I learned from a page one pointer headline of the June 19 number of Nairobi’s Daily Nation newspaper that there would be no more American visas for Kenyans who have reportedly been judicially convicted of corruption. Hunky-dory. The question is: Why did I not celebrate? Because the story did not tell me what crime anybody had been convicted for and where the crime had taken place.

MYRIAD PROBLEMS

The writer thus raised another question: Why should such a new rule be confined to “corruption”? Nay, what exactly is corruption? In both the United States and Kenya, has any socio-governmental authority ever defined “corruption” in a manner that satisfied you as a being equipped with medulla oblongata?

Why, moreover, is our government silent on other crimes that Kenyans (and their visitors, including Americans) are prone to committing in Kenya and everywhere else on this planet? In a country like the United States, where corruption is widespread, how will anybody decide who are to be denied visas to visit, say, Kenya?

I found that question compelling because of the headline above the [page-one] masthead of the Daily Nation on June 19. It announced: ‘No American visa for corruption convicts’. Yet, if your aim were to help the authorities in Kenya and the United States wage an effective war on that international crime, you would not base it so squarely on a commodity that is not at all your own.

To remind you, the American visa is the property of the DC. Otherwise called Washington, it is the seat of Government of a superpower known as the United States of America (USA). Therefore, just as only the Nairobi government can give you the Kenyan visa, so only Washington DC can give you the American visa.

What’s more, being a protractedly controverted superpower with a hundred and one issues concerning just about every other world state, the DC is in an unenviable position. It cannot begin to help solve any such international problem effectively without immediately raising for itself a myriad of other problems.

FORM OF INJUSTICE

Once upon a time, the United States shared such a situation with the Soviet Union (which, by its claim to be erecting a communist human society, powerfully attracted the world’s young minds). That is among the definitions of a human “superpower”. As a superpower, you are automatically involved in a myriad of life-and-death world problems with a myriad of convolutions.

As Europe’s male chauvinists used to allege, using a book self-described as “holy”, after God had created the world, he rested. After he had created mankind, he rested. But after he had created womankind, neither God nor mankind has rested. It is thus that both God and male chauvinists have chosen to blame on the female gender all of the human world’s godly creation and other defects.

Ultimately, it is a form of injustice that can be righted only when the female gender itself fights to the end all of humanity’s long-established sex-based male chauvinist prejudices – including the ones which imply that, of both sexes, the creator God was much fonder of the male one.

However, all that I personally can commit myself to doing is to be in the forefront among those human beings who are dedicated to righting this world so that we can enjoy its benefits in a manner that wholly ignores your gender. In telling the human story, the battle to put things right is ultimately as inevitable as Armageddon once was in the minds of certain classical Mediterranean communities. Those communities included our own Nilotic ancestors of ancient Arabia, Canaan, Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Sudan and Syria.

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