How do we move towards a truly civilised Kenyan society?

There is a thought that I used to articulate in this column some years back which has come back to haunt me. It is the matter of what a civilised society looks like and whether we Kenyans are actually civilised. If those of us who have been to school — and I mean to school — were put together and asked to discuss the question of whether we as Kenyans are a civilised society or not I am not sure what side many of us would be aligned to. It is quite possible that there would be a struggle between people wondering who has what and who has not. Isn’t that Kenya?

PHILOSOPHICAL

I have been thinking and wondering about issues that we shall always be dealing with. Things such as weddings, funerals, house warming parties — including birthday parties — and so on.

Those things have become part of how people think about their existence. What this means is that we have subjected ourselves to a level that is even below our fore fathers. Our fore fathers did what they did for a philosophical reason.

Some external force came — even in the name of religion — and convinced our people that our fore fathers did not have a philosophy and that is why our current generation and the parents who have brought them up have no philosophical thinking about matters of life.

A friend of mine was telling me two nights ago about a common friend whose body is still lying in the mortuary for over a month. We shall not go into the reasons but when a human being dies there ought to be closure for whoever is closely related. How does it happen if one is holding back?

CORRUPTION

Anyhow, my friend made me laugh when he told me that when he dies — he thinks I shall still be around because he is older than I am — I should tell people there should not be too many shenanigans.

We, therefore, have to ask ourselves what makes a truly civilised society so that perhaps we could start working towards one. In my honest view I really do not think that as we stand, we in Kenya really stand in the community of the international community as an African nation that stands for law and order.

Internally, we have much more to do. Obviously the political class will get quite irritated with what I am saying but the long and short of it is that if people in leadership do not focus on issues that have some philosophical import in them, we shall not get anywhere. Corruption will go on even as government watches.

The day Kenyans will start thinking about issues philosophically and see things in the abstract as opposed to too concretely, we shall get somewhere.

Fr Wamugunda is Dean of Students and a lecturer of Sociology at the University of Nairobi; [email protected]