Kenya’s other viruses: Prayer, pestilence and blatant hypocrisy

I recently argued that we must turn to science – not just prayer – to combat the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

I was responding to the declaration by Jubilee’s Uhuru Kenyatta of a national day of prayer. Little did I know that “Christians” would come down on me like a tonne of bricks.

Even respectable professors and public intellectuals publicly frothed and gagged on their own anger. A rancorous national debate ensued.

The cacophony of voices, like the Tower of Babel, produced more heat than light. You would’ve been forgiven for thinking that I had single-handedly caused the Rapture of the Church, popularly known as the Second Coming of Christ.

I was amused, and then flabbergasted. Let me restore sanity. I thought some of my detractors – like Dr Ezekiel Mutua (no relation), Kenya’s self-anointed Christian moral policeman and censor — would go throw themselves at crocodiles in Lake Victoria.

My comrade, the esteemed human rights champion Rev Timothy Njoya, took a personal shot at me.

Former CJ Willy Mutunga, one of my most influential mentors, suggested I should allow for the combination of science, Christianity, Kamba kamuti (spirituality), and ancestral spirits to combat the pandemic.

HYPOCRISY

Prof Ruth Oniang’o, a public thinker, implied I had lost my wisdom. On social media, “children of lesser gods” denounced me with vigour, invective, and vitriol while others vowed to defend me to the death. I had gotten our nation thinking and debating.

The uproar reminded me of a moment in the Democratic primary elections in 2008 pitting candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In an unguarded moment, Mr Obama had told the truth about guns and religion in America’s small-town industrial Midwest.

Mr Obama said that voters in the region, which had been economically ravaged by globalisation and job losses, are “bitter, cling to guns or religion”, and hate immigrants or non-white people as “a way to explain their frustrations”.

Mr Obama was of course right, but Ms Clinton seized on the remarks to mercilessly pillory him. There’s a word for what she did – hypocrisy.

But she knew her attacks on Mr Obama would play well with the peanut gallery. There are more agnostics and atheists than Kenyans like to admit.

Kenya’s founding fathers, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, were either agnostic or atheist.

CORRUPTION

In a declassified British intelligence taped phone call, the two leaders “seemed to agree that only fools believe in God”.

Both thought it important “to keep this view secret to avoid losing popularity”. In reality, many Kenyans are Christian in name only.

They are fakers. These are the same people who genuflected to, and sanctified, Daniel Moi, Kenya’s worst dictator, when he passed away recently.

Let me remind you – Moi was implicated in assassinations, torture, grave abuses, and massive looting of our treasury. What sort of a Christian does such evil things?

I thought I was watching a satanic cult ritual as Kenyan Christians bowed to Moi. If that’s not hypocrisy, what is?

Kenya is a nation of thieves and looters, big and small. Our children learn how to steal before they master the alphabet.

Top politicians give gobs of stolen money every Sunday to churches where men and women of cloth gluttonously receive the loot with glee.

CLEAN-UP

How can this be true if Kenya is a God-fearing nation? “Christian” leaders impose on society religious tyranny as cover for looting with impunity.

Mr Kenyatta implied I was wrong to attack last Saturday’s national day of prayer, but he knows the thieving “Christian” hypocrites sitting next to him in power.

As a young man in Kitui, I was taught in the Catholic Church that you don’t steal, cheat, or lie.

But most of Kenya’s Christians today can’t sit next to Pope Francis, a man so humble and totally devoid of hubris that they can’t – even if they tried for a million years – understand his fidelity, compassion and humanity.

His ministry has been defined by attempts to bring the Catholic Church to basic humanity without greed, discrimination, hate and pogroms.

Rather than rail at me, Kenya’s sanctimonious Christians should try to clean up their act and remove the huge logs in their eyes.

Unlike one senior politician who tweets about God every day, I don’t wear religion on my sleeve.

RESEARCH

Kenya is a secular state without a state religion. You don’t have to be religious to be a Kenyan. Praying is a basic human right and part of the fundamental rights to religion, belief and conscience.

Those who’d rather pray than use science to combat coronavirus are free to do so, but the state shouldn’t be the conduit for their prayers.

We can’t impose on every Kenyan an unthinking, uninterrogated orthodoxy under the guise of religion. That’s why we have schools and universities.

This isn’t the age of the crusades or jihads. Nor can we abolish individual conscience, both cardinal constitutional tenets.

We will defeat coronavirus and all pestilences through science, not fake prayers and hypocrisy.

See also: ‘God can be found in both the cathedral and the laboratory’.

Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School and Chair of KHRC. @makaumutua.