Mon, 28 Jan 2008 02:09:07 -0800 (PST)



There is an erroneous belief among Kenyans and the world that our country has been a peaceful country since independence. The belief is so strong that even CNN summed up retired president Moi’s legacy as “peace and poverty”. Nothing could be far from the truth. We are a country that has been at war with itself for too long. How many times did we experience the Rift valley clashes during Moi’s hegemony? How many times did we have police descending on peaceful protesters? Exit Moi enter Kibaki. How many lives did we lose from Mungiki killings? How many lives did we lose to the recent extra judicial killings? Where was peace? Is peace refusing to raffle feathers even when you are burning inside? Strictly speaking peace is not what we have had in the last 40 years. We have been fooling each other that we are peaceful. However, post 27th December, 2007 presented us with the opportunity to be ourselves.

When we look in the mirror we are scared at what we see. That is why the call for peace is actually a cry to revert to life as usual - psychologists call that state: denial. We want life to go back to normal- how can our life go back to normal when a brother has risen against a brother? We want Raila and Kibaki to talk; do we really know what we want them to talk about besides let us go back to life as usual? But what is usual?

Our country remains gravely imbalanced in the access to basic means of life. This imbalance is majorly supported by some socio-political and economic structures that the rich want to maintain at all cost. Graphically, 10% of the population own 90% of the Kenyan resources and over 60% (18,000,000) of Kenya’s citizenry live in extreme poverty (less than a dollar a day) in the same country where some individuals can afford extreme luxuries of life. We are a nation where the masses working in hazardous conditions are underpaid and the general minimum wage is very low. We are a country where one family owns over 300,000 acres of land and yet there are thousands of squatters and landless people. In such circumstances how does one expect people to be at peace? Are these the things we are hoping Raila and Kibaki should make agenda of their talks?

There is no way a jobless, landless, a homeless, or a hungry person can be at peace. Why are we pretending to be so sad at loss of innocent life now when we have been losing innocent lives all along in avoidable hunger, famines, floods, collapsing of buildings, road carnage or lack of medicine?

There is something in our behavior and personality as a country that is terribly wrong and that needs to be checked. How can we have put up with such for over 40 years without to least asking why? That was negative peace! There is something in our behavior and personality as a country that is terribly wrong and that needs to be checked. Doctors insist that there is nothing as important as a patient’s history in medicine. Let us not bury our head in the sand of go back to the usual but examine our history careful, there lies the solution to our problem.

We need truthful answers to historical questions such as how some communities whose ancestral land is in Central Province, emigrated en masse to Rift Valley province or worse still got scattered across the country as has come to fore. Yes, we need to know how our big companies’ in industrial area keeps growing in the stock exchange but the workers can not afford to see a dentist or to give their children three meals a day. Considering that in the leafy suburbs of Nairobi where the inhabitants are from different tribes and different political party affiliations there are no houses burning and no killings going on, it should not escape us to see the economic connection to the trouble in our land.

Peace is not calm or is it absence of war. Peace is an active word. Peace is not switching off our television when the sights are too violent, or altogether avoiding “uncomfortable” topics. In reality peace is the existence of justice and by necessary import, the existence of trust and truth. Kenyans across the divide are united in loud no pretense of negative peace. What we see today is misplaced fights for socio-political and economic justice. We now have opportunity to work on building peace (and not a semblance of it) but it won’t happen overnight.

        - George Nyongesa
          Bunge La Mwananchi Leader
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