Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:27:12  (GMT)



WaKenya wenzangu,

Such unmoderated internet fora are a very dangerous opportunity to create far-reaching divisions rather than striving to minimise whatever already exists. I say so having participated in quite a few of them in the hope they would 'keep me in touch with home' during my years of acedemic exile in UK. In Kiseru, Kenyans Abroad (KCA), etc., the invariable starting point was 'development of home'; yet the inevitable direction was exchanges that I would not never have allowed (my) child or mther to see - if you get what I mean.

I have seen Matunda Nyanchama's name mentioned here - he whose connection to a very ugly contribution to a KCA discussion -even as he held its presidency - greatly embarassed 'sober minds' therein. I recall a purely intellectual disagreement which led to my being threatened with physical violence by some London-based urban planner. And so I quit such fora.

I am highly skeptical about all the 'development' and 'poverty reduction' talk I have seen on this forum since Mwizi wa Kura did the deed, precipitating violence of varied motives across the country. Development will not come through discussions on such fora: but private 'economic growth' could. Indeed, I recall a late 1990s exercise to collect computers for schools in Nyanza at the end of which - as I understood it - one good man opened an ICT college!!! Thus in spite of some quite earnest discussions on development, computers apparently never got to Nyanza schools.

Yet, even as we discussed computers to Nyanza schools, I kept asking the forum: where will the computers be housed securely (from theft as well as the elements - rain, dust, etc), when many schools did not even have substantive structures? One key promoter of the project returned from Nyakach (?) with a fundraising appeal to help a primary school he had visited whose children played football all day because there was no chalk in classrooms: yet he was championing taking PCs to such areas!!! These are isolated but nonetheless substatntive illustrations of internet-based development initiatives.

A key factor that distinguishes marginalised from 'developed' parts of Kenya is the status of physical infrastructure (roads and utilities) and insecurity, in instances such as North Eastern province. The rural electirification project reached my Uranga School, yet over a year later, it has not entred my home which is two kilometeres down the road, despite at least 20 visits to KPLC in Kisumu and Nairobi. I do not know what the figures are today, but an early 1990s KCB study determined that for every Kshs 1 paid to the lakeside fishermen, Kshs 8 went to the rest of the value chain up to Nairobi. With exports to EU markets, the expropriation rate must be much worse or the simple reason that the fisherfolk must get rid of their catch immediately on landing as there is no refrigerated storage!! We could tour marginalised communities countrywide and determine similar anomalies that perpetuate their disenfranchisement.

So much for that aspect of the anti-poverty debate... Of course the immediate crisis facing the country is the stolen election... which we leave in the hands of the Annan team for the time being. However, this country needs to ask itself serious questions on the genesis of the tensions that have led us to current blood-letting. Different people have different ideas: persistent attempts to couch the violence in terms of a Luo/Kikuyu struggle - just because of the respective ethnicities of the presidential candidates - must surely have floundered on the rocks except for the very thickest amongst us. The Kikuyus who have suffered in Eldoret, for example, need to understand who their real enemy is!!!

For an understanding of what is happening, we must conveniently start from one among the many instances of betrayal in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat. On the eve of independence, the MP - I forget his name - is collecting money from Kikuyu peasants to buy out settler Barton (?) who insists on being paid all his money before he leaves. When the peasants fail to raise the required amount, the MP gets money from a bank and takes over the whole of farm, failing to share it with the peasants on a pro rata basis. In this story, Ngugi presages the conduct of Kenyatta vis a vis the expectations of the Mau Mau freedom fighters and the Kikuyu peasantry.

In a sense, the MP ushers in a new settler class-ism: you either buy from departing white settlers, or you use your political correctness (proximity to Jomo) to further expropriate the Kikuyu peasantry to become a new large scale amidst the ancestral land os the peasants. If you doubt this analysis, then find out how Gatundu peasants who had never heard of Lamu ended up in Lake Kenyatta Settlement Scheme!!! It is the same agenda which drove the second wave of Kikuyu peasants into western and northern Rift Valley, after colonial settlerism drove the earlier waves into eastern Rift Valley. When the Nandi Declaration of the late 1960s questioned growing new arrivals, the likes of Jean Marie Seroney and Ms Chelagat Mutai became unwitting guests of the Kenyatta state.

A pre-eminent agenda of the Kikuyu elite has been the need to keep a lid on the injustices it has visited upon its kith and kin, as well as on the potential rebellion among indigenes of the Rift Valley. 'Defending our own' (from the Odinga bogey) blinded the Kikuyu peasantry from understanding their objective circumstances; which is why Kenyatta hated Ngugi's writings and experiments with popular theatre with a passion. Kenyatta's appointment of Moi as vice president was a strategy directed at the latter concern, giving the Kalenjin a hope that their grievances would be resolved when he became president. The problem for the Rift Valley peasants is that Moi got hooked into land grabbing, making it impossible for him to address their land grievances.

While the Kibaki's Democratic Party (DP) - for me, the Kenyatta Yekka (Kenyatta Only) party - was cognisant of Moi's patronage of land grabbing, it was also apprehensive that moi's excesses could cause leadership to be wedged out of his hands. This could have exposed the Kikuyu elite to questions from Kikuyus in the Kenyan diaspora, were a new regime to address the vexed land question which in now tormenting Kenyans so much! Therefore Kibaki's accession to the presidency in 2003 was a god-sent opportunity to keep the lid on land injustices in the hands of the very elite for whom its status means life and death. That the Kikuyu elite should not want to relinquish power is therefore self explaining: it is critical that the Kikuyu peasant is perpetually inundated with the Luo boogey even as the objective conditions show that no such threat exists to them. But, in turn, Luos, and indeed all bona fide Kenyans must avoid falling into this self-destructing pit-fall.

ODM invoked the provisions of the Bomas Draft in campaigning on the devolution platform. Rthaer than a question of repatriation, devolution was going to make it impossible for Kimunya to deny Mandera or Kwale their rightful share of the budget allocated by Parliament. At the onset of this commentary, I spoke about infrastructure: how many kilometres of tarmac has North Eastern province, for example? What could tarmacking of roads to for the province, such as for enhancement of security? And can anyone tell me why my home district Siaya has only fifteen (15) kms of tarmac in 40-odd years of independence, Luanda Busia being an international trunk road? Compare this to the data at http://www.krb.go.ke/downloads/central.pdf or at http://www.krb.go.ke/downloads/coast.pdf It might not be obvious to the national elites; but those adverse roads conditions impoverish the indigenes as well as all other people who might go there to do business.

Wenzangu, this is just a sampling of the objective conditions we need to understand if we are to address the kind of problem facing this country, rather than to expend our energies in directions that might take us further away from what I imagine we all consider to be our 'holy grail', the nationhood reflected in the comng together in December 2002, November 2005 and december 2007, nothwithstanding the pockets of wasaliti in our midst who are trying to ensure the Kenyan state fails.

        - Othieno Nyanjom