Where is Kenya's middle class in the struggle for freedom?

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Where is Kenya’s middle class in the struggle for freedom?
Images of the victims of Kenya’s post-election violence are beamed into homes around the globe by television cameras, reshaping the world’s view of Kenya as the latest member of Africa’s failing states.
Video images of Kenyan civilians chasing fellow civilians, ready to kill each other with machetes and rungus (clubs), are particularly chilling. They rekindle memories of Rwanda, 1994.
Some of the victims suffer their fate when hundreds of protestors answer a call from the leaders of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) to take to the streets and voice their opposition to Kibaki’s coup.
These Kenyans are met by armed Kenyan “police” in military fatigues who beat, tear-gas and shoot them in an orgy of deadly violence that erases old images of Kenya as a tranquil paradise perpetually beckoning moneyed tourists to its shores.
More Kenyans die, prompting a ceasefire of sorts, with the opposition leaders calling off the protest rallies, to be replaced with the less risky economic boycotts. 
But even before one sits down to think about the prospects for reduced violence, the opposition leaders reverse themselves and call for another “peace rally”, to be held next Thursday.
They know that their call will be heeded by throngs of loyal supporters who have already braved bullets and gas canisters and the risk of arrest, to vent their anger on the streets and paths in the slums of Kenya’s cities.
And so the BBC and CNN will soon bring us new images of more blood and guts flowing in the slums of Kenya.
The astute observer will have already noted that Kenya’s injured and dead have mostly come from the ranks of the poor and the unemployed or under-employed, with hardly any representation from the middle and upper classes of the land.
Yes, Tingasiga, it is the wretched of the earth who have dominated the ranks of the direct victims of the violence.  Impoverished Gikuyu have killed impoverished  Luos. Indigent Luos have massacred indigent Gikuyu. Destitute Kalenjin have killed destitute Gikuyu.  Poor Kenyan upon poor Kenyan.  Yet these are the people whose stake in Kenya’s government is very tenuous at best.
They are Kenyans of course. They hold strong political views. They fly the flag, so to speak, of their ethnic nationality with a pride that defies logic. If needs be, they are willing to die for their man, their “tribesman” or “tribal ally” – be it Mwai Kibaki or Raila Odinga.  Yet they stand to gain very little, if anything, whether the president is Kibaki or Raila.
It was the case during the rule of Jomo Kenyatta and that of his successor, Daniel arap Moi.  The extreme poverty that still prevails among Kenyatta’s Gikuyu people and Moi’s Kalenjin kinsmen is no different from that under which Kenyans from elsewhere labour today.
The fruits of the current struggle for political and economic power will be harvested by members of the middle and upper classes of Kenya, from all ethnic nationalities, not by the miserable lot who are joined at the navel by a permanent bond of abject poverty.
And so we must ask a few questions of the middle and upper classes of Kenya: How come we do not see you among the protestors who are struggling for YOUR rights?
Where are you when Kenyan police are raining bullets and tear gas on your fellow Kenyans? What are you doing to salvage your country’s derailed democracy?
Will you join the masses from the slums of Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, Eldoret and elsewhere in the peace rallies that will be held this week?  Or are you content to sit in the safety of your houses and offices to watch your compatriots felled and scattered on your behalf by Kenyan government bullets and tear gas?
Vaclav Havel stood side by side with his people in the 1989 Velvet Revolution that saved Czechoslovakia from the clutches of communism.
Boris Yeltsin did not leave the struggle for freedom in August 1991 to the drunken poor of Moscow. He climbed atop a Soviet military tank in front of the Russian Parliament, and changed Russian history.
Mikheil Saakashvilli personally led his supporters in their march on the Georgian parliament in Tbilisi, launching the Rose Revolution that tossed Eduard Shevardnadze from power in 2003.
Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine personally led the masses on the streets of Kiev in the Orange Revolution of 2004, in response to a stolen election that was eerily similar to that which has robbed Kenya’s ODM of its victory.
Pakistani lawyers and judges courageously faced Gen. Parvez Musharraff’s violent military in 2007 and were willing to be beaten and imprisoned in the defence of their freedom.
Likewise, the leaders of Kenya’s opposition groups and their privileged supporters have a right to call for peaceful demonstrations.  But their commitment to justice and peaceful change must not be demonstrated by proxy, but by direct, courageous involvement in marches alongside their impoverished compatriots from the slums of Kenya.
However, if their judgment is that street demonstrations are not worth the risk, then they must not encourage their impoverished supporters to represent them in the killing fields of Kenya in the name of freedom.
The lives of the slum-dwellers are as precious as those of the well-to-do of Kenya who are the ones that stand to gain from a Raila presidency.

- Sent by Patrick
Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:05:10 -0800 (PST)