Where do we go to when we ‘accept’ and ‘move on’?

Every time something horrible happens in Kenya, politicians will enthusiastically urge us to “accept it and move on”. For example, through a page 2 headline in the Daily Nation on Monday, Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru urged Ms Martha Karua to “accept” her situation and “move on”.

Such a declaration always poses one question: Where and how can we “move on” after we have besmirched every square kilometre of the social road with negative ethnic and anti-social material? It always poses the question: If what happened was socially bad, for what good reason should we “just accept” it?

GENDERISM

Even in the medium run, how can we “move on” after we have filled our country to overflowing with ethnicism, genderism, individualism and racism? Even more importantly, to what place can we then “move on” after we have doused every square kilometre with such political poison and made it difficult to live in? Indeed, to what collective avail?

Our national tragedy is that the politician takes that attitude much more frequently than does the ordinary Kenyan. That is why it is so worrying. For the politician is the individual we have elected to help us to solve such problems. Yet, no politician ever poses that question, especially so as to give it a solid answer.

The politician poses it only unconsciously or only so as to mystify the very Kenyans who elected him or her to help the nation to solve such problems. Not one politician I know of ever poses that question positively. Politicians seem to pose it collectively and only in the course of “politicking”, in the narrowest and most negative sense of the word “politicking”.

BESMIRCHED

They never pose it as a means of discharging any social responsibility. They never pose it in an attempt to supply any answer to the myriad of social questions that beset our country. In other words, the very same individuals whom we elected precisely with the mission of helping to supply the country with suitable answers to all such questions are the ones who then most noisily pose and even re-pose such questions.

They probably consciously make such questions perennial precisely in order to appear to all unwary Kenyans that the culprits are busy thinking about Kenya’s social happiness. Let me pose it again to Ms Waiguru’s parliamentary colleagues: After we have so dangerously besmirched every square inch of our country with the poison of “politics”, where can we “move on”?

In other words, where exactly is situated this place called “on”? Indeed, how can we move to that place when every avenue has been besmirched, endangered and even blocked with the anti-national and anti-social poison that we claim to be politics? Why doesn’t it ever appear to any politician that his or her kind of politics is what often brings our country to the brink of implosion?

SMALLNESS

When ethnic and racial suspicions and tensions are what have detained our country in its tendency towards disunity and chaos, what can we do about it but to genuinely fight both the mental smallnesses called racism and tribalism? If there is such a thing as what Koigi wa Wamwere used to call “negative ethnicism”, there must also exist its opposite, namely, positive ethnicism.

In other words, yes, such feelings as gender, race and ethnicity can be held positively. They become negative and wrong only in practice. In other words, as practices, ethnicism and racism are wrong only because they become in some way anti-human and against nationhood. For one thing only, ethnicism is negative when it blocks unity as the vital means of development. The negative ethnic activities called tribalism become socially dangerous only when those in political power allow their ethnic grouping to use the power against all of a country’s other such groups in the allocation of cultural, economic, employment, mental and such other socially vital goods.

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