FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR -
THE YOUTH: THIS IS OUR TIME.

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:04:17 -0800 (PST)

Dear Kenyans,

  As we prepare to make a youthful transition this time round we as young people of Kenya should not just think about ourselves as age-obssessed individuals but as a people with a heart for their beloved country.

  As we all celebrate our youth, as Kenyans we ought to rethink about roles that we are to play in society before reaching democratic menopause as some of our leaders have. Politics like poetry has rhythm, prose, theme, metaphor, imagery, symbols and its adherents. Blaming a Kenyans for not being one would be criminal to those humming ‘Najivunia kuwa Mkenya’ epithets.

  Unfortunately we have chosen to be civilians to be breast fed by old leadership for survival rather than to be citizens that have a responsibility of dying for our beloved and only country.

  But being really a Kenyan youth is interesting. We imitate the old guards by crushing the bones of our neighbors’ hearts because they are Luhya, Taita and Samburu. We sould not try to bring down a Mugumo tree as we flirt with tribalism like the way wildebeests do with wild animals while food is just a crocodile mouth away in the rivers.

  Again like the Variant Creutzfeldt-Jackob disease that spreads through blood transfusion and which cannot be treated, we choose to be transfused with tribalism and hatred.

  The time is nigh to offload these deadwoods just as sunset is reflected in the spring before we widen further apace.

  We would rather we had fresh bread as providential before stale worries become our forte. Civilians are the ones to fear pesky-little-mumbling threats and not true citizens as we have struggled to be.

  As Cicero , a Roman Scholar once reiterated that ‘if we are not as hammed to think, we should not be ashamed to say it’. A real whiff and an after taste of it.

  Setting the pace for us comes Litvinenko, a Russian spy that died in London  a month ago after receiving a lethal dose of radioactive polonium 210 for revealing an eight-page ‘Githongo-like’ corruption related dossier. Unluckily he swallowed the bitterest pill but his legacy should live deep within our souls. We ought to change and fritter our fears away by taking challenge that does not kill a country but makes her strong. A challenge of true soulful citizenship for the sake of unity and strength of a nation.

  We have all along been accepting emolument cash cows as politicians  cream off more of our money using our ethnicity, personal greed and bad politics that end up with official corruption as a pseudo-product. Matter of factly, we have been painting our politicians red, black, white and green;our country’s flag colors. It is time that we as youth of Kenyans redeemed our purity as citizens by swallowing our sectarian pride, as Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe once advised that ‘if one has to swallow a toad he or she has to go for the largest of all’.

  As history reminds us, many of us have become sadists by making and protecting generational beasts that are in our current social and political wings. The ‘rapists’ that take away the already hard earned pride from our motherland and natural resources though what we now do is only to complain ,blame and ostracize them with words alone, only to have them back in office after receiving gratuities for our ever elastic electoral pockets.

  We should not choose to get self gratification by paralyzing the same society that is bloody ours with the speed of rabbits and strength of bulls. Intimate as we have been with our own loopholes that create politics of leadership and parliamentary seats for those who deserve not to have them, our superficial penetration on issues and ideologies have since become thrust-less for a nation. This is the time to act right.

  We should not be obsessed with swallowing any offensive and sour bills passed in parliament when we help excrete and flush away sensitive and intriguing laws that touch on a common mwananchi. Our courts of law at times choose to sentence to imprisonment the same laws that legitimately institutionalize them due to external influences. This only makes us embrace more tertiary matters that are against societal conformities while inhaling the exhausted fumes of deceit to our own people.

  Hitherto, our current trans-historical transition that has been serving our previous and current leadership and economic polity still becomes a creation of our own wrong choices. From our local authorities, municipalities, corporate, public institutions and surprisingly successive parliaments, much is left to be desired.

  Ever since, we as youth have cried out loud and whined as men in leadership dance with the strength of Viagra at the same time pretending that all is well with our mundane dilemmas and for the generations to come.

  We are treated worse than tissue paper and made to accept with limited options to be victims of manipulations and extortion during any campaign and electoral participation. Bribes are given to obtain food as donation, jobs and other evil services like prostitution. Later than not, we put the blame on politicians and the police.

  The youth, as I had started before, politics has a taste of poetry. So let us flow together as we touch the corners of our deficiencies as part of society and as a nation. Our responsibilities to society have to become frequent and intense but in the right direction. Our citizenship has turned out to be mentalistic and materialistic as we validate wrong leadership choices.

  Our impulsive instincts should not fall by the sidewalk of our roads with us as we go for elusive political, socio-economic and leadership fantasies that easily become detached by our own realities as per our needs. Our inner self-hatred laced with fear and suspicion over others only fatigue our already bright but malnourished ideologies and hope for a better tomorrow. Our engagement in objective relationships with our neighbors, tribesmen and as a people united by the same independence from the hands of colonialists that only unsatisfied our already ungratified nationhood as we deceivingly bury our soul’s worth and esteem deep in cement.

  On the other hand we easily adapt to the lifestyles of wildebeests that follow the crocodile infested rivers of our leadership only to be gobbled up again and again.

  We experience prolonged repression from those in charge and become immune to social abuse and sins that are official corruption and cronyism.

   We make politicians and leaders powerful as we let them deprive off the worth of our balls as citizens when we choose to fantasize and ululate to their ‘pumbavu’ epithets that sulkily weaken our human right defenses and freedom of speech.

  We go to the extent of refusing to accept our weaknesses by attending to the Goldenberg and Anglo-leasing hearings to be seen on TV and the print media. We also praise the defunct commissions of enquiries for swallowing our coffers of irregularities.

  As a youth we never learn to separate the grain from the chaff within ourselves no matter what worship places we attend to for inner solace and purity of change.

  We then uproot the best in society, trashing them leaving the weeds to nurture as ‘bags of desperation’ wait to be collected.

  We also lack the interpretation of our life goals as a nation as we praise socialism with one eye and observe its shadow with the other. Certainly we never make the unconscious phenomena in our expectations conscious.

  By and large, we metamorphosize not like a snake that rattles hard but that which refuses to cleanse out the old skin.

  Lacking and again we reify rather than verify responsibility to persons, neighbors, duty, institutions and constitutional constituencies. Never to stop to define and classify our citizenship that has varied responsibilities. Though we emphasize most on criminalizing our history, traditional values, culture an ethnicity than choosing to understand their positive significance to society.

  Thus as true Kenyan youth and citizens let us allow political and leadership activism have strong defenses and actions for better change of governance with a pronouncement of dialogue than interlocking monologues.

  Come 2007 our stupefaction as civilians would only doom and water down our history and future. This is our time to take leadership though the Police Commissioner should not blame our activism on our youthfulness.

  Regards,
  Mundia Mundia Jnr.