Splitting up won’t solve our problems

What you need to know:

  • People cannot talk of ethnic inclusion in governments composed by ethnic leaders who believe they are in power thanks to ethnic support and that leaders from other communities are not fit to be president.
  • Negative ethnicity has transformed communities into ethnic kingdoms and their leaders into ethnic kings who convince their people to fear other groups.
  • During elections, communities are not concerned about good leadership for themselves and the country but want to conquer their own people and subject other communities to exploitation, discrimination, and oppression.
  • President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga can help to avert the predicted Armageddon after the next elections if they work together and take the gospel of national unity to the whole country before the polls. Kenya does not need to become a victim of balkanisation.

People are preaching national dissolution, rotational presidency, ethnic war, and secession as a solution to ethnic discrimination, corruption, unequal development, and you destroy a nation to gain equality, self-destruct to solve problems, or commit suicide to end life’s problems?

We have been here before. And though we swore “never again”, we seem hypnotised by a death wish.

Then, as now, we were driven to contemplate suicide by negative ethnicity as an ideology that fights nationalism, divides and kills the nation spiritually before annihilating it physically.

Negative ethnicity also prescribes destruction and genocide of “enemy” communities as the quinine of our problems.

When people are beset by problems, can separation from and elimination of others be a solution? From history, the Holocaust of Jews did not solve the problems of the German people.

Religious intolerance and separation of Pakistan from India did not solve the problems of the citizens.

Ethnic genocide did not end the problems of the Yugoslavian, Rwandan, or Nigerian people.

If anything, where genocide succeeds in creating tiny ethnic states, their people are usually worse off than before.

NEGATIVE ETHNICITY

In Kenya, are the problems of negative ethnicity real or just imagined?

Undoubtedly, governments made by ethnic parties and coalitions of two or three communities engender exclusion, discrimination, and marginalisation from power, resources, and development.

People cannot talk of ethnic inclusion in governments composed by ethnic leaders who believe they are in power thanks to ethnic support and that leaders from other communities are not fit to be president.

Negative ethnicity has transformed communities into ethnic kingdoms and their leaders into ethnic kings who convince their people to fear other groups.

During elections, communities are not concerned about good leadership for themselves and the country but want to conquer their own people and subject other communities to exploitation, discrimination, and oppression.

When ethnic problems pile up, should we destroy the country to solve them?

Since all national problems, including negative ethnicity, grow from bad leadership, their remedy must lie in replacing bad leaders with good ones during elections.

However, when elections fail to remove bad leaders, we should not cut off our nose to spite our face by destroying the country.

Instead, we should seek more effective means of removing bad leaders.

These means can include courts, mobilising voters inter-ethnically, and demonstrating in the streets to force the government to resign.

After all, killing a nation is more painful than seeking a change of government.

People who seek to solve national problems should seek to eradicate negative ethnicity and ethnic leadership.

As long as people are motivated and led by negative ethnicity, they can never elect good leaders.

If we agree that Kenya’s resources and power belong to all her people, we shall not need to end Project Kenya in order to solve our problems.

President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga can help to avert the predicted Armageddon after the next elections if they work together and take the gospel of national unity to the whole country before the polls. Kenya does not need to become a victim of balkanisation.

"TYRANNY OF PEACE"

We are all embarrassed when people bastardise democracy with the “tyranny of numbers” that Jubilee MPs chant with such insensitive pride.

However, it chills one to read Dr David Ndii preach “tyranny of peace” as a call to arms. But then there is no birth of good or bad without blood.

The ethnic kingdoms that Dr Ndii envisions will not materialise without war, blood, and pain.  

When Mr Mwai Kibaki and Mr Odinga united to liberate the country in 2002, the elections were free and fair and peace reigned.

However, when the two failed to preach peace and took the nation to the elections in 2007 with everybody spitting fire and brimstone, the inevitable post-election violence happened.

Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga must learn from history and preach peace now.

Whatever problems we now have, we must not give up on Kenya. Before we pronounce reke tumanwo (let us part ways), we must try reke twendane (let us love one another).

Just as divorce does not solve the problems of a marriage but only ends it, dissolving a nation does not solve her problems. It can only end it.

Mr Wamwere is a former member of Parliament for Subukia. [email protected]