FROM LAMENTATIONS 4:2 TO ACTS 101

From: Orina Nyamwamu

The Message: Never blame politicians, Blame intelligent Kenyans who only live to cheer their enemies like fools.

The quality of passengers can not determine the direction and speed of our bus and journey. It is the driver who determines the direction and speed of the journey. This is the key message Owino Magana of e-kazi delivered to the inaugural youth agenda sponsored political café in March 2007.

The quality and efforts of Kenyan civil society leaders, professors, doctors, Manufacturers, entrepreneurs etc. does not seem to bring about change to Kenya’s political, economic and social cultural structures. The quality of the drivers of Kenya remains the central factor to change and reforms in Kenya.

The lazy and easy option for many Kenyans is to blame politicians and civil society leaders for the failed Kenyan dream. This option is just that- lazy and easy. The option that we must chose is the difficult and significant route.

Politicians know that they are the only actors. Civil society and Kenyans are not actors in the power arrangement in this country. The political elite have learnt to eat their cake and have it. This is because Kenyans are not actors. We have accepted to remain cheer leaders and praise singers for politicians. The common characteristics between ICPAK, KEPSA, KAM, NGO Council, Political parties, Catholics, NCCK, ACK, TI, APSEA, COTU, Matatu welfare Association etc. is that they are all cheer leaders for politicians. The constituents of these forums hope that by speaking close to government they may lobby for their issues and their benefit. This is a lie. Cheer leading does not change the fact that Parliament and other institutions of government even in their current state of disrepair makes decisions. The strategy should be how to make these institutions accountable and pro-people and pro-business, pro-workers etc.

This culture of cheer leading is what has preserved the politicians and the Donor Development Group (DDD) alone as actors in our society. We have by design or default rendered every other citizen mere spectator or non important helper. So you hear of calls even by church leaders that all Kenyans should help the government deliver on its promises. This because it has emerged that it is only government and the DDD which are actors while the rest of us are observers if not helpers. Look at how vicious the church, young people on discussion forums, university students or COTU is when it is attacking civil society or political parties in the opposition for criticizing president Kibaki’s failed policies. The question often asked is, who do you represent?

By so doing we de-legitimize people’s organizations, initiatives that seek to empower the society and our people and in the process we legitimize a corrupt, unaccountable, alien and insensitive, inhuman state, MPs (not political parties), DDD and state officials as being the keepers of national interest even as evidence is abound that the government, politicians and DDD are acting against national interest strategically by surrendering or undermining our sovereignty, economically by adopting a policy of Foreign direct investment (FDI) for economic growth not national investments mobilization for social and economic development; socially by commercializing, privatizing, personalizing, hoarding and rent seeking from our education, healthcare, resources, government departments etc.

So in the Kenyan story, passengers are fighting each other as the driver and the conductor continue to off-load our luggage from the booth to their co-pirates on the road side as we continue to squabble loudly on the way to misery. We are not monitoring whether the driver is a sleep which endangers our lives as a collective but we keep asking why the ODM passenger has been insulted by the NARC Kenya passenger. Our identities and not national values are at the centre of the squabble as we miss the point of whether we are traveling in the right direction? For us any direction is fine so long us we are in the bus and the driver is a fellow tribesman. We condone all the driver’s felonies because he is ‘ours’. In the end we realize that we have spent nearly 100,000 on fuel for the bus as it was traveling to Sidindi when we all set out to travel to Marsabit.

What should be our agenda?
Intelligent Kenyans are the supporters of Kibaki’s re-election. If any body is convinced that Kibaki and his old guard clique is what Kenya needs to make the steps forward then we are a lost country. If anyone supports any presidential candidate from the ODM then again we have lost it. Kenya continues to be interested “in personalities, circumstances and events without engaging on the issues, ideas and strategies that our country needs”[1] to deal with poverty, bad governance, fix our politics, establish a developing just and equitable social and economic system and put in place structures for excellence in all fields of social life in Kenya.

It should be expected that Intelligent Kenyans should instead be coming out to demand for a new popular and just constitutional order as soon as possible. Instead intelligent Kenyans are busy muttering words like, we can not trust politicians or civil society or the government. So what? What we should be doing is to mobilize university students, Matatu touts, peasant farmers of Kenya, the millions of Kenyan workers all over the republic to consciously define the Kenyan problems, develop a Kenya Tuitakayo Manifesto, set the agenda for reforms and deliver the new constitution, organize ideologically clear political parties, take over land that belongs to the people and settle the landless, throw out the Njenga Karumes, Nyachaes, Angwenyis, Odhiambo Omambas Kalonzos, Rutos, Raila Odingas, G.G. Kariukis, Kiunjuris, Mungatanas, Mudavadis, Saitotis, Ntimamas, Shakombos, Dzoros, Kituyis, Kibwanas, Kosgeys, Seruts, and many other fraudsters, rapists, criminals and infidels of this country.

What or who is our enemy?
We should unite to fight our common enemies. We should stop hurting each other and focus looking for solutions to the many challenges our country is faced with. We must understand that we have common enemies and these enemies do not want us to unite because we will be strong and they will be weak. We will become actors!

The strategies of our enemies
They do not want us to unite because we will learn and seek for information together about what the enemy has been doing against us for many decades.

The enemy does not want us to organize, they want us to agonize and mourn about the problems they have inflicted on us. So they have ensured that the workers can not organize. They divide workers along trade unions and along ethnic identities and put in place constitutional and legal barriers to meaningful organizing. They have bribed most of our trade union leaders by entrenching them into the culture of rhetoric and sale out and into a lifestyle of comfort and riches.

The youth can not organize. They have been barred from organizing thanks to stupid handouts such as a ministry of youth affairs and youth funds. These are diversions from the youth organizing and identifying who the enemies of our country are. The women can not organize because they have been divided between women in the rural and urban and women married to rich husbands and those married to poor husband.

Yet our common enemies are very well known. Our enemies are the few hundreds who make up the political and business elite in Kenya. They do not want accountable power. They want unaccountable power. They do not want Kenya to hold them accountable as servants. They want to be our masters, tyrants, dictators and rapists so long us they continue to be our MPs and tribal chiefs. And like blackmailed wives we continue to accept that the only reason why we can’t walk out of this marriage is because the husband pays school fees for the children, that the society will condemn us for divorcing our abusive and adulterous husbands. Yet the community has failed to discipline the rogue husbands who are our political and business elite. The business elite is lazy, adulterous and incestuous. It goes to bed with thieves of our money in ministries so that they can make some money while the workers of Kenya starve. They have sex with the minister for labour so that the minister can declare the lecturers or workers strike illegal and therefore allow the business elite to continue depriving, oppressing, pauperizing and exploiting the poor masses and workers.

They do not want the end to corruption. How can they end corruption their lifestyle, their pipe for siphoning billions to their accounts? That will be suicide. Yet intelligent Kenyans are in coalition with the Business elite and the political elite to fight corruption. These political games we play with criminals themselves!

They want to own businesses and use government to enhance their business; as Kenyans continue to die from hunger, landlessness, joblessness, bloody civil wars that are called tribal and clan clashes as the police continue to offer security to the banks and residences of the rich in leafy sub urban estates.

They want to keep interest rates high to continue exploiting Kenyans and use those profits to build themselves palaces and live in opulence as many more of intelligent citizens continue to quarrel over ethnic and tribal identities. What a pity that we can not see that it is the political, economic and social structures that have been designed by the elite to sustain the Deprivation, oppression, pauperization and exploitation (DOPE) of the masses!

They want to steal public coffers and ensure that terrible road networks justify the next round of illegal tendering and inflated prices and costs for road works?

They don’t want health insurance for all Kenyans because that way Kenyans will become healthier as their private insurance companies and healthcare outfits miss the lucrative Billions.

Yet we are united with our tyrants and will support them like idiots. We do not ask any questions. We think that by playing games with each other we shall be given a few drops from the table and therefore become rich and successful. We end up betraying the nation and the vision for the Kenya Tuitakayo. We destroy solidarity and therefore endorse and legitimize the Kenyatta-Moi-Kibaki rule by dividing us. We become a country of fools who spend Kshs. 20 B in the pursuit of a new constitution and then accept to go into a foolish referendum that only strengthens the arm of our dictators. Why didn’t we stop the referendum from happening until we have a constitution we have made from consensus? Is it not because we see the actors to be only our tyrants while we see ourselves as helpless creatures who just want to wait and see the outcomes of the referendum will help our ODM or NAK tyrants? We, so much like the deprived and abused wives who stick to abusive husbands convince ourselves that you know we have already given birth to many children together with our husband Raila, Nyachae, Mudavadi, Kibaki, Kalonzo, Kiraitu, Saitoti, Ntimama so there is nowhere to go. We can only pray that they change their ways. We have never fathomed alive away from our husbands. We are powerless. We are ruled by fear. That we ever raise a voice against our husband, he will beat us senseless so we better survive under these structures rather than break from the yoke and live with our children even if in a single marriage of dignity until husbands accept to be governed by rules of participatory governance, accountability, integrity, productive and distributive justice etc.

Our enemy is the dangerous piranha international business elite which has captured our government and is using the political and business elite to deprive Kenyans of our land, wealth, resources and profits. These piranhas operate through structures that are called MNCs. MNCs according to Anyang’ and Mwai Kibaki shall deliver foreign Direct Investments (FDI). The story goes that these structures will also create jobs and put food on tables of families in Kenya. I have known any country which developed courtesy of MNCs.

Development strategies that work
All developed countries either colonized other economies, exploited them using their labour and resources, accumulated capital that they made available to their own entrepreneurs for as little as 4% so that they finance research and development, educated their people, established democratic structures of governance, ensured the dignity of every one single citizens and reproduced the accumulated through stock exchanges and bigger investment where there were greater returns.

New economies which were built after the colonial occupations imperialism like Malaysia relied on capital accumulation through savings and the curbing of corruption, modernization of industries, just reward to work, a strong culture and ethic in entrepreneurship and efficient and effective support systems.

Long term planning must be done. This can only work if there is a nationalist, bold, capable and reliable leadership in Business, politics and the social fields. The leadership is what guarantees that this plan is implemented in the greatest objective interest of the nation. Politics that doesn’t operate within democratic institutions is tyranny. Business that doesn’t operate through effective and efficient institutions is robbery and social pursuit that are conducted through mediocre social institutions are merely a reproduction of exploitation and deprivation.

So now do you think your enemy is Kibaki, Raila, Mudavadi, Foreign Banks, MNCs and World Bank? Are you ready to organize for the liberation of our country or still too scared to think differently.

My Reflections

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[1] Kepta Ombati in his introductory remarks to the inaugural forum of the Political café of the Youth Agenda/FES, March 2007

[1]

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