Tribalism has killed politics of principles, ideas

In our country, the frequent high-powered threat to sack corrupt public officials looks designed to give the impression that the government is at last seriously fighting corruption in the public service. Yet it looks like nothing but a threat.  Why does anybody in the government think that it is useful to habitually issue threats? Probably because it assumes that to threaten people with job losses is serious enough because job losses will give chances to unemployed individuals who belong to other parties and, therefore, other ethnic groups. And why don’t Kenya’s newspapers and other public information media regularly inform the people of such dismissals? I find that question inevitable because, as I knew when I was a civil servant, both underperformance and misconduct are common in Kenya’s long corridors of power.

DETERRENT

Public reportage of such occurrences might serve as a deterrent. Why? For the very simple reason that no normal human being rejoices to see his or her name mentioned publicly in any unflattering context. One day, when I worked in Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s, the Tanzanian government ordered the newspapers to publish the names of public service individuals caught in corruption and other activities deemed to be anti-UJAMAA (the Kiswahili word for what was alleged to be socialism).

Socially speaking, this practice was probably very positively aimed. Quite often, however, the manner in which you do things as a government may be much more important — indeed, much more productive — than even the purpose for which you initiate them. In my opinion, that was the whole significance of what many Kenyan intellectuals contemptuously dismissed as “Nyerereism” immediately to the south of Kenya.

In the thinking of such Kenyan intellectuals, “Nyerereism” was aimed merely to reduce materially successful Tanzanians to the level of lazybones and ne’er-do-wells. No, I do not deny it. Nyerereism, since it was not scientific, probably often led to a great deal of such negativisms. Many high-powered individuals probably became fatter and fatter as a result merely of pretending by mouth to be more committed than thou.

If, in Kenya, there has been such a systematic social thought as Jomoism or Uhuruism or Kenyattaism (or, in waiting, Rutoism and Railaism), I have never read anywhere how you are supposed to summarise and define it. Clearly, no political party in Kenya has any clear-minded ideological summariser or evangelist among its members.

REDEMPTION

Yet it is clear to me that, if — as a politician — you have any policy of redemption for our people of Kenya, you must promulgate it pronto because Kenyans are desperately gasping for such a policy of redemption not only from material poverty but also from a socially dangerous goalmouth. Kenyans are gasping from absence of any clear gospel of earthly redemption.

No, it need not be known by any high falutin name. Depending on whose words convince the majority of Kenyans, Uhuruism or Rutoism or Odingaism might do. There was a discernible ideological line between Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Odinga. Kenyatta was the more right-wing and Odinga’s the more left-wing.

But clear ideologies have long ago ceased to play any important role in our country’s political struggles. Like Europe’s colonial racism, tribalism has long ago driven ideological idealism to nothingness.

The only occasion on which ideology appeared to divide our nationalists, it was between two Luo giants – Jaramogi Odinga to the left and Tom Mboya to the right. Since then, right-wingism has been the only name of politics in our country.

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