Back To The Future

Every once in a while, just when you think you've figured them out, Kenyans can surprise you and give you an almighty kick up the backside. Yesterday was one of those days. And it was an almighty welcome kick.

Those who've been following this blog over the last few months will have been treated to fulminations on the fear and apathy of our nation in the face of monumental iniquity by those in government. I have held forth and pontificated on the myopia, incompetence and laziness of our journalists and the demise of our civil society. I believe much of that still to be true. However, on the streets of Nairobi, I think we may have witnessed the stirrings of a nation starting to awaken from a deep slumber.

For over ten years now, our famously greedy parliamentarians have been used to hiking their pay at will, and ignoring the loud protests made in press conferences held in five-star hotels. No more. Today the fight was moved away from sanitized conference rooms and back into the streets where we had taught the KANU government a thing or two about people power 2 decades ago. And that fact is more significant than a straightforward struggle over MP salaries.

Yesterday was all about going back to the future. It was exciting to see the campaigners old mixing it up with the new upstarts. Having lived through the mass action of the 90s, to see Rev. Timothy Njoya, Maina Kiai, Davinder Lamba and Yash Pal Ghai once more marching through the streets of Nairobi  in support of a new generation of activists led by the likes of Boniface Mwangi and Okiya Omtata brought a lump to my throat. After Boniface shamed us on Labour Day, here was the old guard stepping in to teach the new dog some old tricks of the trade. But the young puppy showed that he too had some aces up his sleeve.

There were also glimpses of the old alliances that had been so effective in pushing the reform agenda. Churchmen, activists and, belatedly, media. Even the police seemed determined to recreate the nineties atmosphere, charging at the unarmed and peaceful protesters with their rungus and tear gas and water cannon.

There are, however, crucial differences. This was not a mass protest against the government. It was, in fact, just a few hundred demonstrators advocating the government line against an intransigent Parliament. Secondly, one of the main pillars of that old alliance was missing -the opportunistic opposition politicians. It is they in the 90s who mobilized the people. Many, however, have since either been co-opted into the lootocracy or are still licking their wounds following defeat at the polls. Further, we were not fighting to get a new constitution, but to defend the new one we have from gerrymandering MPigs.

Still, the moment was significant. For the first time since the election, a group of people publicly and loudly refused to "accept and move on." For once, they refused the logic that it was better to keep the peace even when they were being screwed. They drew a line in the tarmac and stood by it. The moment was also significant because for once, the government let its mask of civility slip. The reaction we saw on TV was far removed from the polished and rehearsed State House presentations. It was the raw brutality that lies behind that facade. This was a government unleashed from the strictures imposed by media consultants intent on winning elections.

With a core of determined, bloodied but now blooded, activists and a government that may have overplayed its hand, the scene my be set for a rather quick end to the Uhuru's administration's honeymoon. Of course, there is still some ways to go. The people still need to be won over. Those who voted for President Uhuru will need to be convinced that they can hold the government to account without betraying their communities or being humiliated. Those who didn't, and particularly those who weren't entirely convinced that he won fairly, will also need to be convinced that continuing to participate in the process is still worth it.

The activists will need to make allies out of progressive politicians both within and without the legislature. To do so the activists must begin to articulate an agenda, one that might conceivably form a platform for a future electoral run. Finally, they will need to partner with the media. Here, they will be faced with persons just like themselves, newbies with limited experience of the 90s struggle and whose careers have been made in a relatively open era for the press. Most journalists today seem inclined, strange as it may seem, to give officialdom the benefit of the doubt, to be wowed by its propaganda. They will need to be shown the bigger picture, pointed in certain directions, brought up to speed on the issues and pressed into digging deeper.

All that will take time. In the meantime, if yesterday's protest proves to inaugurate a season of more intense questioning of official conduct and policy, then the protesters will have achieved a much greater victory than simply expressing public displeasure at the thieving ways of legislators. They will have given the nation the beginnings of a real voice and a real boot. If I were Uhuru, I'd be watching my backside.

Are We Trying To Fake It Till We Make It?

There is an interesting scene in one of those dreary, black and white independence era TV documentaries that the media trots out every national holiday. A colonial settler expresses his shock and outrage at the brutality of the Mau Mau uprising. He seems genuinely outraged that a man to whom you have been kind enough to offer employment, whose kids play with yours and who you have even allowed to live on and farm a small corner of your land, could steal into your house in the dead of night and massacre your entire family.

Of course, what makes the statement so unbelievably cretinous is the idea that the Africans should have been grateful for getting back a tiny fraction of what had been stolen from them. It seems that the colonials had come to believe their own hype, that the country's bounty was theirs as of right. Today, I can't help feeling that we , inheritors of the artificial country and systems they created, have been similarly lying to ourselves, and have become victims of our own hubris.

The problem with fake societies is their people do not feel anything more than a superficial duty to them.

Consider the recent elections. We invested a great deal of money in technology meant to safeguard its credibility and disregarded all concerns about its efficacy. When it all failed, we were unwilling to even consider that the results might be fraudulent. Despite all our earnest protestations, we were not really interested in democracy or the will of the people or justice. We were, on the contrary, quite content to fake a free and fair poll. Like the settler, we were careful not to give it too much thought lest we discover what lay under our seemingly honest exterior.

Similarly we celebrate our new and improved constitution even when it seems to do nothing to regulate the behaviour of our famously avaricious politicians. We speak reverently of a reformed judiciary though it still seems incapable of delivering justice. We have a penchant to compare the young(ish) duo in Statehouse with US President Barrack Obama,  all the while pretending that it is normal to have an ICC-indicted president who has to be whisked through the cargo terminals of international airports, hidden from the press and whose hosts are camera-shy when he's around.

Today the carpet of economic growth covers many ills. On the back of GDP figures and the number of kilometres of tarmac and fibre optic cable, we are taught to believe that things are improving, the country is moving forward, that we should just sit back and enjoy the ride. As a result, buoyed by narratives of a rising Africa and blinded by the gleaming towers of our cities, we forget that we live in one of the most unequal countries on earth, where wealth is concentrated in the top ten percent. On a per capita basis, the biggest economy in East Africa, as we like to refer to ourselves, ranks only a mediocre 24th out of 48 sub-Saharan economies. One survey of the income distribution of workers in the formal sector found that the top 10 percent lived off monthly wages that were more than 6 times those of the bottom 90 percent. In fact, another study found that the top 10 percent of households control nearly half of total income while the bottom 10 percent take home nearly nothing.

We have little inkling of the country that lies beyond those numbers which is still very much a Hobbesian one. Where men live without security and in constant fear of a violent death; where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." It is a place where people are set alight while crowds cheer and where young girls can be pulled kicking and screaming from crowded commuter buses to be gang-raped without anybody intervening.

We are also like to see things in isolation, to see the trees but not the wood. Thus we periodically rotate the thieves in government without tackling the systemic attitudes that incentivize bad behaviour. Like turning a blind eye to the rip-off that is the presidential retirement package while at the same time berating Mps for trying to get in on the enrichment act. We reach for legal bans as a quick fix to social problems even when we know that the laws are rarely enforced and even when they are, provide avenues for graft, can be ineffective and can even create worse problems. We thus celebrate traffic rules that fill the government coffers without doing anything about the anarchy on our roads and abortion bans whose only effect is to kill and maim our women and girls.

One would think it would be the job of the media to disabuse us of such inaccurate notions. But the fact is, the Kenyan media long ago shirked its duty to expose truth and to challenge our assumptions. In fact, it is itself a mirror of the society it serves. Famed across the globe as one of the most vibrant on the continent, it has produced award winning journalists by the dozen, many of whom have been snapped up by international networks. Yet back home,  they are not given to critical scrutiny and revel in sensational tales of superstition and sex. For our comfort and pleasure, they provide us with a smattering of sanitized news bulletins conservatively sprinkled atop a diet of entertainment and advertising.

Though loudly proclaiming their independence and objectivity, they nonetheless seem almost as ignorant as those they are supposed to inform. As I was writing this, the news anchor on TV was saying something about the Mandera clashes. She declared, with little apparent embarrassment, that the fighting had been going on "unreported" for 3 months. It was unclear whose job she thought it was to do the reporting.

It seems that we are a nation that is determined to fake our way through the world. That we believe we can continue to pretend to be virtuous or successful and all will be well. However, at the end of that road lies an inevitable and painful collision with reality. Like the colonial settlers, we will eventually discover that we cannot paper over the truth indefinitely.

On the Bench