How America Became An African Country

Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and host of The Daily Show, a popular late-night news satire and talk show in the US, once described Donald Trump as America’s first African President.  In fact, Americans could do worse than look to the continent in general, and Kenya in particular, for a preview of what life under a Trump administration would be like.

President-elect Trump and Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta have much in common. Both are fabulously wealthy, the children of privilege with questionable success in business, and both have been accused of fanning ethnic and racial hatreds. Both have risen to head their respective countries in the most unlikely of circumstances and in the face of global opprobrium. While many across the world echewed Trump’s xenophobia and reckless approach to international affairs, Kenyatta had faced similar opposition to his candidacy three years earlier. This was a consequence of his -and his running mate’s - indictment at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in relation to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence in which over 1000 people died.

Trump and Kenyatta even have similar ideas about how countries should be governed.

Take their shared suspicion and contempt for the media. Where Trump has called journalists “scum”, “illegitimate” and “horrible people” and declared his aim to make it easier to sue them, Kenyatta regularly derides newspapers as only good or wrapping meat, and his administration has introduced new laws meant to stifle independent reporting. It has arrested and beaten journalists who persist in asking uncomfortable questions, and, leveraging its advertising and regulatory muscle, leaned on media houses to fire them or to pull their stories. Just recently, in response to a spate of corruption stories, Kenyatta declared that the media should be required to prove any allegation of government graft they dared to report on or face the consequences.

When it comes to fighting terrorists, their pronouncements are also remarkably similar. Both prefer to speak in vague and bombastic terms and to demonize Muslim refugees and immigrants rather than offer detailed policy prescriptions. Trump says his plan for defeating ISIS is a secret whose details he won’t be revealing to the public any time soon. One hopes he’ll be sharing them with the generals since he claims to know more about fighting the extremists than they do. The Kenyatta administration, after all, has taken more than three years to come up with a strategy to tackle radicalization and is no closer than Trump to articulating a strategy to defeat the Al Shabaab, the Somali based terror group that has murdered nearly 800 Kenyans, most of them after Kenyatta took office.

There is also the question of whether Trump will follow through on his oft-repeated promised to get Mexico to pay for a wall on the US’ southern border to keep out immigrants (which Mexico has repeatedly vowed not to do). Here too, Kenyatta can offer some guidance. Depending on which of its officials you choose to believe, the Kenyatta government is building a wall to keep out terrorists either along the entire 700km border with Somalia, or just on a small section near the border town of Mandera. It may or may not be a physical barrier (there has been some talk of a human wall) whose construction is either ongoing or has stalled.

In addition to the wall, Trump has vowed to round up and deport illegal immigrants whom he says are gaming and mooching off the system, driving up crime, taking jobs and opportunities away from US citizens and depressing US wages. That little of this is true doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Similarly, the Kenyatta regime has developed a fondness for demonizing refugees from Somalia, blaming them for everything from terrorist attacks to being a drain on the Kenyan economy, as a way of distracting from its own failures. In 2014, under operation Usalama Watch, it begun rounding up and deporting them, and restricting those that remained to the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the desolate north. Then, earlier this year, the government declared it would close the Dadaab camp by the end of November and has been effectively dumping hapless and unwilling refugees back into their war-ravaged country ever since. (That effort has now been suspended following an international outcry).

In September 2013, the prolific Ugandan columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African country”. What he meant was that as the government worked to scuttle the cases against the President and his deputy (and with them any prospect of accountability for the 2008 violence), it had brought the country into closer alignment with authoritarian regimes in vogue across much of the rest of the continent. In similar fashion, it is perhaps not so far off the mark to suggest that with the election of Donald Trump, the US too has become something of an African country.

This piece was first published in the Washington Post.

Kenya's ICC Experience: Few Winners, Many Losers

Now that the remaining Kenyan cases at the International Criminal Court have been terminated (at least for now), there will undoubtedly be much debate on who the winners and losers are. 

President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, were already ahead on that score even before their cases collapsed. It is almost certain that without the ICC indictments they would not be in power today. Now, not only do they not need to worry about the Court for the foreseeable future, they also are, by virtue of their incumbency, in pole position for the next electoral contest in about 16 months’ time. 

However, the picture is not all rosy. The two have laid claim to a spurious exoneration, which conveniently ignores the fact that neither was acquitted. In fact, if one was to consider their oft-repeated desire to “clear their names”, one would have to conclude that they failed pretty badly. That both cases were stopped for a lack of evidence, with the ICC judges citing both the Kenyatta administration’s obstructive behavior and “the troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling”, will continue to cast a pall on the duos reputations.

One must also wonder what will become of their political union which was forged in the heat of the common ICC threat. Will it go the way of the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition, which begun to disintegrate shortly after its victory over the Moi regime? It remains to be seen whether the fruits of victory would be ashes in the Jubilee coalition’s mouth.

The Kenyan government is another entity claiming a dubious victory. “The court itself looking at the evidence and the law has arrived at a judicial decision which vindicates the position taken by the government,” declared Attorney-General Githu Muigai. The court’s citing of the the government for obstruction does not seem to perturb him in the least. Neither, apparently, does the September 2013 Sunday Nation claim to have established the existence of “a shadowy team hunting down witnesses”.  There has since been no evidence of the government doing anything to find and prosecute those involved.

Further, it will not be forgotten that the government expended public resources and much diplomatic capital proclaiming immunity for the Head of State despite the constitution clearly limiting such immunity. The embarrassing scenes of it playing both victim and bully at international fora will also not quickly fade from memory.

While the winners may be somewhat ambiguous, the losers are clear. The ICC has undoubtedly suffered a serious blow to its credibility. The incompetence of its prosecutor, the mud Kenya and her African allies have thrown, and its cruelly exposed impotence when facing a hostile government have all worked to tarnish the Court’s reputation.

The victims too have lost out on what may be the last opportunity to hold someone to account for their plight. The government’s decision to transform “a personal challenge” into what President Kenyatta this week described as “a nightmare for my nation”, coupled with the fact that to date only a handful of people have been prosecuted for the murder of over 1,300 Kenyans and the rape, mutilation and displacement of thousands more, shows that there is little political will to punish those responsible.

But perhaps the biggest loser will be Kenya itself. Elite fear of the ICC was one of the reasons why the last election had low levels of violence. Now as another polarizing poll looms, that fear is fast receding. And with the electoral system in shambles and the Supreme court reeling from corruption scandals, the country is right back where it started: another disputed poll could set the country alight. 

Even worse for both ordinary Kenyans who would bear the brunt and for the ICC, the court would not only not deter, but perhaps even incentivize political violence since it is now clear that taking power is the only guaranteed way to avoid its clutches.

Lying in State: Official Deception In The Jubilee Era

The reactions to the International Criminal Court’s Appeal Chamber’s ruling last week is a good example of the doublespeak that has come to characterize our politics. The Leader of the Majority in the National Assembly, Hon Aden Duale, who for the last two years has been advocating a Kenyan and African withdrawal from the Rome Statute, declared on Twitter that “civil societies and their financiers have been ashamed and the rule of law prevailed”. He even went further to say that “the 14th assembly of state parties resolution on #Rule68 has been upheld” and that the verdict had redeemed “the creditbility (sic) of ICC and respect of the Rome Statue.”

Now, it will come as no surprise to anyone that our political class lies. In its daily sermons, it swears fealty to the rule of law even as its members continue violate both the spirit and letter of it. Few will have forgotten the words of Nandi Hills MP, Alfred Keter, at a weighbridge station in Gilgil: “We are the ones making laws; when we want, we break them.”

But the Jubilee coalition has transformed public insincerity into an art form. And little showcases this better than its shifting stand with regard to the cases against the President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, at the Hague. Their deceptions have been behind the cases mutating from a “personal challenge” as candidate Kenyatta once called them, to a challenge to national sovereignty, which it isn’t, to an example of “race-hunting” on a continental scale, a bare-faced lie.

On local and international fora, the President and his minions have regaled us with tales of “a global standard” on Head of State immunity, conveniently ignoring the standard that our own constitution sets in Article 143 which unambiguously says in subsection 4: “The immunity of the President under this Article shall not extend to a crime for which the President may be prosecuted under any treaty to which Kenya is party and which prohibits such immunity.” The Rome Statute is just such a treaty.

The pattern of deception has inevitably filtered down to discourse on other local issues. “It begins with you” has become the catch-all phrase that absolves the government of any responsibility when it fails to do its job. When corruption flourishes and infects all arms of government, the proffered solutions are not to fix the systems that incentivize and reward such behaviour, and to punish the corrupt. Rather, we are treated to the fiction of a society-wide malaise which will be solved by teaching ethics classes to primary schoolkids.

Similarly, when the government fails in its duty to provide the public good of security, it attempts to socialize this failure and to blame everyone in society. The problem we are told, is that we don’t share information with the state. In reality, the fact that security forces had prior intelligence on local terror attacks does not seem to have made them any more effective in stopping them. Further, a senior police officer pointed to the real problem when he told the Nation: “There was never a review meeting on how we handled incidents”. As a result, the paper goes on to say, “the police service has basically learnt nothing from Westgate, Garissa, Mpeketoni and others.” Many will remember that the President’s promise of an inquiry into security failures surrounding the Westgate atrocity a has similarly failed to materialize, as has his vow to punish those responsible for the them.

A final example of the government’s mendacity is the paucity of public information on the El Adde attack. A month after the Al Shabaab terror group overran an African Union base manned by Kenyan troops in southern Somalia, we are yet to get definitive figures for how many soldiers we lost and how many were captured. Despite promises by CS Raychelle Omamo and the Chief of Defence Forces General Samson Mwathethe to provide a full account, we still only have rumours and unconfirmed reports that put the death toll at above 100, with some sources suggesting up to 130.

Meanwhile, at the funerals going on around the country, the government continues to “honor our fallen heroes” with bugles and gun salutes and flag-draped coffins. Yet the one thing that would truly honour their memory continues to stay hidden: a proper telling of how and why they died, and a learning of lessons have been learnt to ensure the same never happens to their comrades. The reason the authorities remain vague about the details is not to protect national security but rather the backsides of senior officers and officials.

While it may, in a limited number of extreme instances, be in the national interest to temporarily withhold information from the public, across the world it is clear that officials lie mostly to escape censure for mistakes and shortcomings. Just as has been the case with terror attacks on civilians inside Kenya, the silence over El Adde, for example, is intended to keep the Kenyan public, not the Al Shabaab (who already know the scale of the damage they inflicted) in the dark.

Politics is often described as a dirty game. “One must know how to colour one’s actions and to be a great liar and deceiver” wrote Machiavelli of the successful ruler, adding that "men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived."  In a Machiavellian world, where public officials are only concerned with the acquisition and perpetuation of their power, it may be permissible to routinely mislead the citizenry. However, the sovereign is also urged to “not deviate from the good, if that is possible”. Ethics and moral behaviour are thus not entirely outside the purview of politics, even in a dictatorship. And they take on an even more important role when it comes to democracies, where citizens require accurate and sufficient information in order to hold public officials to account.

However, nowadays politicians and public officials also routinely lie, and the public has come to expect that they will do so. This expectation, in turn leads to a debilitating cynicism about the political process and a resignation to the inevitability of deception. When the lies are not just expected but acceptable, when they no longer arouse outrage and when national policies can be built around them, then societies are treading on very dangerous ground. The disastrous 2003 US invasion of Iraq, one of whose consequences is the rise of ISIS, is but one recent example of the havoc deception can wreak.

So when we permit Interior Cabinet Secretary, Gen Joseph Nkaissery, to get away with declaring public scrutiny of his ministry’s questionable spending a threat to national security; or the President to escape censure for inciting mobs into destroying private property via an illegal directive against alcohol; when patently unconstitutional laws are used to punish legal conduct and expression that those in power do not like; then we are putting our liberties, our democracy, our very lives and prosperity in great peril.

The words and sentiments streaming out of the mouths of our public officials should mean something. And the people behind them should be held to account.  We do not pay them to lie and mislead us or to treat us like children who can’t handle the truth. Or worse, to subvert the constitution, the very thing that limits the power they can wield over our lives.

So as we snigger and make fun of the antics of Hon Duale and his friends over the ICC, we should be very careful lest we wake up and find that the joke is on us.

Are Kenyans Ready For The Coming Storm?

"Show me a man's friends, and I'll tell you who he is," said American essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. And this week, the Jubilee administration has shown us who its friends are. 

“Civil society, media and leaders from across our political social spectrum have come together and made their views known and in the hearts of every Kenyan we know that we must win this war [on corruption]” declared President Uhuru Kenyatta when welcoming Pope Francis on his maiden visit to Africa. At The Hague and in New York, however, his minions were using very different language.

At the former, the government, with the support of the entire political establishment, was engaged in an effort to get the Assembly of Parties to the Rome Statute to dictate to the International Criminal Court how it is to interpret the rules of evidence. The fuss was brought on by the Court’s decision to apply rule 68, which allows for the consideration of recanted testimony, to the cases facing Deputy President William Ruto and journalist Joshua Sang.

Setting aside for a moment the merits of the government’s argument that it was assured this wouldn’t happen (for which there appears some justification) and that the use of recanted testimony is inherently unjust (much more dubious), the fact is that this issue is still under active consideration by the court, the accused having appealed the decision of the Trial Chamber. Like the dictators of Kenya’s past, the government wanted to decree the outcome of that appeal.

Now, Kenya’s famously vocal civil society wasn’t about to let this travesty happen without a fight. So, it too sent a team to make representations to the ASP. They were seemingly quite effective as very soon the government side, which was spending over Ksh 100 million in public money on what President Kenyatta in 2013 assured us was “a personal challenge”, slipped back into its old habits of demonization and delegitimization. Talk of “evil society” and threats to brand legitimate Kenyan NGOs as “foreign agents” suddenly resurfaced.

However, this time the regime went a little further. In what has to be an all-time low for Kenyan diplomacy, at the United Nations General Assembly the government teamed up with the likes of North Korea, Myanmar, Iran and Sudan in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to shoot down a UN resolution recognising and protecting the role of human rights defenders. Kenya was among only 14 countries, the vast majority of them brutal dictatorships, to vote against the resolution. It was a thinly disguised attempt to scare local human rights activists, and perhaps to punish them for their opposition to the Uhuru administration’s agenda at the ASP.

By rejecting a resolution adopted by two-thirds of Member States and that calls for accountability for attacks on human rights defenders and their families as well as urging states to release defenders who have been arbitrarily detained, the Uhuru regime has once again let its mask of civility slip. The pretense of tolerance, of fidelity to the constitution and the rule of law had already been badly undermined by unending corruption scandals and the government’s own penchant for scapegoating entire communities, dissenters, media and civil society under the guise of fighting terrorism. But its fangs are only truly bared when it comes to the cases before the ICC.

The government has only ever been interested in getting these cases lifted, not injustice. That much is clear to anyone who cares to look. Its indifference to (and likely collusion in) the disappearance, intimidation and bribery of witnesses as well as its sustained campaign to delegitimize the Court proves as much. Anyone who stands in the way is fair game. Thus it is the civil society groups that were at the forefront of the demands for accountability for the 2008 post-election violence have borne the brunt of the government’s assault.

It is to their eternal credit that the likes of Africog’s Gladwell Otieno have refused to be cowed in the face of this onslaught. However, it is undeniable that the space for dissenting opinion is rapidly shrinking. The vote at the UN, coupled with the recent arrest of journalists for daring to report on queries by the Auditor-General into suspicious procurement at the Interior Ministry as well as the President’s assertion that any media reporting on corruption allegations would be required to provide evidence of the same, illustrate the government’s determination and increasingly brazen attempts to roll back the freedoms guaranteed by the 2010 constitution as well as to crush any prospects for accountability, not only for the deaths, injuries, rapes and displacement of 2008, but also for the continuing looting that impoverishes Kenya.

And given the crowd that their government is now running with, Kenyans would be prudent to prepare for the coming storm.

Being African Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

When the prolific columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African country” he meant that the government’s reaction to the trials had aligned the country more closely with policies in much of the rest of the continent. I think there is another, perhaps more profound, sense in which Kenyans have become Africans.

To begin with, I have always been uncomfortable with the notion of “Africa”. It has not been apparent to me what, apart from an overabundance of pigmentation, I am supposed to possess in common with most of the other billion or so residents of the second-largest continent. And far from simply describing people from a place, the term “African” has come to imply some sort of historical, metaphysical and supra-cultural bond, which is loaded with all sorts of flattering and not-so-flattering stereotypes.

Sadly, many of my fellow Africans have been content to reflect and enact the tropes of Africanness. A favourite one is that of the “African Big Man.” No, I don’t mean of the well-hung variety, but rather the kleptocratic and genocidal tyrant-for-life who nonetheless commands the unquestioning loyalty of his tribal folk because their only goal in life is the extermination of their ethnic rivals.

The African Union has become an unfailing mirror of these reflections. At Its summits, the continent’s Big Men (and few Big Women), regularly get together, it seems, to commit ever more outrages on our common sensibilities. At Kenya’s instigation, last year’s pow-wow in June in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, voted to expand the jurisdiction of the yet-to-be-established African Court of Justice and Human Rights to cover international crimes, with the caveat that the Big Men as well as their senior government pals would be immune from prosecution while they remain in office. The move was meant to deliver Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, from the clutches of the ICC. And it was welcomed by their fellow Big Men who are wont to remain in office for rather longer than their subjects can reasonably expect or tolerate.

Any idea of accountability in this life is an anathema. Kenya today provides an excellent example of the state continually frustrating any attempt to punish either current or former government officials or their misdeeds. The report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which named almost every star in the country’s political firmament, seems to have met its end in the National Assembly where it went to be “improved” by the very people it mentioned adversely.

As a result, Kenya’s two fabulously wealthy and still-breathing ex-presidents, Mwai Kiabaki and Daniel arap Moi continue to live lavishly on the public purse despite widespread reporting, countless commissions of inquiry as well as interminable police investigations concluding that their tenures were characterised by officially sanctioned murder and theft. None of their senior officials have been pursued either. On the contrary, the current administration has simply picked up where they left off. In fact, during the most recent AU summit, the Kenya government maintained its single-minded determination to ensure that African potentates never again have to endure the prospect of facing justice.

And a new crop of leaders is learning just how useful this “Big Man” syndrome can be. Recently, two first-time legislators were caught on camera at a weighbridge trying to throw their weight around and intimidate police. The problem? A truck belonging to one of them had been impounded for not having the necessary paperwork. In less than two years, they have learnt, that in the Big Man tradition, the rules don’t apply to them.

Of course impunity has always been a large part of Kenya’s story. But with our support for the government's exertions at the AU, we appear to have thrown our hat in with that community of nations that defines itself solely in terms of its powerlessness. A site of perpetual victimhood, of constant and exhausting struggle against imperialism and colonisation. A place of contradiction where the foreign-funded AU can, without the slightest appreciation of the irony, declare that the equally foreign-funded ICC, where its members constitute the largest block, with an African prosecutor and judges, is a tool of imperialists.

By becoming Africans, Kenyans have accepted to be faceless, nameless victims. To have a cheap and expendable existence. To live at and for the pleasure of Big Men. To repudiate “foreign” notions of accountability. We have accepted that the continent should first deliver for the powerful, before it delivers for the multitude. If that sounds familiar, it is because it should be. To become an African is to go back to the roots of Africanness. To don the costume of moral and material backwardness spun for the continent by the Big Men from Europe who were determined to subjugate it and who have since been replaced by our home grown varieties. It is, in short, to accept our place at the bottom of the human pile.

The Morning After

If you play with fire you get burned. That was the reaction of many Kenyans to the Jubilee-controlled Parliament's passage of  a draconian law which restricts their advertising and imposes massive penalties for infractions by journalists and media houses. Many think the Kenyan media had it coming.

For some time now the Kenyan press has been in bed with the Jubilee coalition. Before the March election, they were complicit in the delegitimizing of civil society. Their silence over the flaws in the election and the idiotic Supreme Court judgement was a betrayal of the faith most had put in them. And ever since, from the Garissa "anti-terror operation" to the coverage of the Westgate attack, it has been one stumble after another, with journalists exhibiting an extreme reluctance to take on, question and criticize the government.

So the media is now being made to lie in the bed it made for the rest of us. They "slept on the job when vigilance was most needed" wrote one commentator. It is our schadenfreude moment, our turn to have some fun at the expense of our unthinking, celebrity-obsessed, state-worshiping newsmen. But as we do so, we should not lose sight of the fact that this is not just an attack against them. It is part of a sustained campaign by government to clamp down on dissent and roll back the democratic gains of the last twenty years.

The lies and threats that have become the government's preferred way of communicating with citizens are a throwback to the Fuata Nyayo era. Back to 1984, when, as Okech Kendo recently reminded us, President Daniel Arap Moi could declare that we should sing like parrots. "During Mzee Kenyatta’s period, I persistently sang the Kenyatta tune until people said: 'This fellow has nothing to say, except to sing for Kenyatta.' I said I did not have ideas of my own. Who was I to have my own ideas? I was in Kenyatta’s shoes and, therefore, I had to sing whatever Kenyatta wanted. If I had sang another song, do you think Kenyatta would have left me alone? Therefore, you ought to sing the song I sing. If I put a full stop, you should put a full stop. This is how the country will move forward. The day you become a big person, you will have the liberty to sing your own song and everybody will sing it.”

This is the darkness into which Kenya is being dragged. This is not just about an incompetent and sycophantic media getting its comeuppance. We need to look at this in the context of the subversion of the institutions of state to tackle the ruling couple's "personal challenges" at the International Criminal Court; the continuing efforts to crush political and governance minded civil society groups pushing for accountability for the crimes committed during the post-election violence of 2007/8; the rehabilitation of Moi as lovable statesman; and the push to vastly increase the state's surveillance of the people via the introduction of Nyumba Kumi.

We thus must pay particular attention to the proposed amendments to the Public Benefit Organisations Act which seek to curtail NGO's access to foreign funding. While this will cripple civil society organisations across the board, there is little doubt that the legislation targets those working to enhance transparency and accountability in  government. It is they whom Jubilee has consistently sought to demonize -again with the media's complicity- as Western stooges, they who were the backbone of the push for democratic freedoms in the 90s and they who ironically stood up for media freedoms when it was the turn of the Kibaki administration tried to introduce oppressive legislation.

We must be wary when the government says the cure to its bungling at Westgate is getting us to spy on one another. Nyumba Kumi, a concept which dates back to ancient China, has never been about security. It has always been a means to police dissent by turning all  citizens into state intelligence agents.

Now this is not to say that we do not need to reform the media. We do. But, unlike what is being attempted
by the state, we need to make the media more inquisitive and more suspicious of the government. We need to look into the increasing tendency towards media concentration and cross-media ownership; the fact that powerful politicians, including the President, own many of the largest media organisations and outlets. What effect does this have on the editorial policies and the public's access to information? According to Freedom House, many local journalists admitted that their election coverage required self-censorship to accommodate the interests of their respective media houses.We must also consider the effect  of big budget advertisers, including the government. Remember when just before the 2007 election, the state was accused of trying to trickle the Standard by denying it advertising?

The media can itself begin this process. It's howls of outrage sound more than a little hollow when there is little doubt that to date, it has pretty much been used to, in the words of Noam Chomsky, manufacture consent. It has been employed to scare us into silence, to discourage critical inquiry and to slander government critics. It has been a tool for legitimizing oppression, not a check on executive excess. Our journalists and editors now have an opportunity for introspection on their conduct over the last year, and to take a fresh look at those they were embedded with.

It is an opportunity to rediscover and recreate the old alliances with civil society and religious leadership that were so effective in confronting and rolling back the authoritarianism of the past. And that may just be the salve for their burns.

Kenya Reawakened

Sometimes it feels like we can’t catch a break. A bruising election in March has left the country sharply divided and put two indictees of the International Criminal Court at the helm of its leadership. Just over a month after our largest airport went up in flames, and less than two weeks after our Deputy President went on trial for crimes against humanity, Kenya is once again in the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

As terrorists stormed the prestigious Westgate mall in the heart of the city, most Kenyans had been struggling with the implications of the trial of William Ruto at the Hague. He is accused of masterminding the 2007/8 post-election violence that killed over 1,100 people. It was the first time a sitting Deputy Head of State was being tried at the International Criminal Court and there was a tangible sense of humiliation across the country. The first witness, a survivor of a church burning which killed 35 on New Year’s Day, 2008, had taken the stand and almost immediately her testimony begun to reopen old wounds and to rekindle ancient fears.

But in the wake of the almost unimaginable death and horror at the mall, all that seems to have been put to one side as Kenyans have come together in an impressive show of solidarity. The citizenry has literally responded with blood and treasure. When a call went out for blood donors, local hospitals were inundated and some had to turn people away. This morning, long lines of blood donors snaked across the city. Hospitals at one point were running out of blood bags, but not donors, so high was the turn out. An MPESA account set up for the victims has already raised millions of shillings. All over social media, on the streets and on air, the political bitterness of the last 7 months seems to have, at least temporarily, abated.

It is all very reminiscent of the reactions to the 1998 embassy bombings when Kenyans similarly came together. That atrocity, which killed 212 and injured thousands more, also came on the back of another divisive election, one that was accompanied with massive violence and displacement. Yet just 8 months after the vote, the people could come together in an impressive display of unity and fellowship.

Both these attacks have occurred in places in the city where the ethnic diversity is perhaps at its greatest. Since almost everyone knows someone who either was or might have been there, it is easy for it to be perceived as an attack against the whole. It is also, perhaps, an opportunity to externalize the fear and hostility generated by the political contests.

Of course, we must not forget that Westgate is not just a Kenyan, but an international space that hosts people from many different nations. It is not just Kenyans that are dead, wounded and grieving. There is a multiplicity represented there, of classes, races, religions, and we must resist the slide into a nationalistic jingoism.

Still, there is a meaningful lesson here regarding the nature of our polity.  More than anything, it demonstrates the artificialness of our supposedly deeply-entrenched ethnic and class differences, that deep down inside, there is a core at which we identify as Kenyans, not just as tribal rivals.  It shows that though we do have a tendency to retreat to ethnic conclaves every five years, the rest of the time we are Kenyans. And we only discard that Kenyanness when scared by the violence which is authored and perpetrated by our politicians and their militia.

So today Kenyans are Kenyans, all united by the outrage. For perhaps the first time since his controversial election, President Uhuru Kenyatta is President of all. His candid admission that he too lost close family members has shattered the class divide between the political elite who organize violence, and the poor who bear the brunt of it. His defiant statement echoed the defiance we all feel. We have been here before and emerged stronger.

The deluded killers at the Westgate mall may not realize it, but they have given us a chance to rediscover our common nationality. When these events have passed, and attention once again fixates on the cases at the Hague and on our divisive and scary politics, I hope we will not forget this moment, this feeling. It is important that we allow ourselves to remember that those too deal with real Kenyans, to allow ourselves to acknowledge their suffering, as we are acknowledging that at Westgate. That we recognize that by committing to the search for justice and truth, we can once again affirm and consecrate anew the ties that bind us.

Perhaps we just caught a break. One we would rather have not, but a break anyway.

A Time to Remember

"Time heals all wounds" is a proverb I have never been particularly comfortable with. It is one of those sayings that is laden with a supposedly profound but somehow elusive truth. Like having your cake and eating it, which we do all the time. It's elusive because time by itself actually rarely seems to heal. Exes remain irreconcilable and vendettas continue long after memories have faded and the original slights are forgotten. Hot wars cool down, cold wars heat up, but the mere passing of the ages rarely seems to reconcile, to turn enemies into friends.

But what time does is dull memories. And today, less than 6 months after an election that was remarkable for the fear it inspired, Kenyans memories today are notably dulled. Senses are dulled too. We have breathed our sigh of relief and want to move forward. The cases at the ICC are, however, a discomfiting shout from a past we had hoped was dead and buried. Talk of the horrors of Kiambaa, the Facebook pictures of charred and bleeding bodies, are all recalling our forgotten fear.

It is important that we face this fear and that will require the courage and the integrity to do the work of remembering and confessing and resolving and reconciling and forgiving and deterring. A recognition that healing will not come from forgetting. All that will offer is a little temporary ceasefire, a chance to re-arm and sharpen more machetes in preparation for the next round of bloodletting. For while it remains hidden, the fear does not abate. It only festers, rotting away our national soul. Unattended, and Kenya will be a ticking time bomb waiting for the almost inevitable falling out -given our history- between Messrs Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto and the all too common realignments of political and ethnic alliances that leads to the exhuming of buried hatchets and rediscovery of "historical grievances".

We have been here before. After independence, the political classes who had been collaborating with the colonial state appropriated the struggles of the landless. They cast Jomo Kenyatta as the victim. Slowly, all but the most heinous atrocities were edited out along with their victims. And even the ones we were allowed to remember were only trotted out during Jamhuri day ad then promptly forgotten. As a result, the colonial state remained, only with blacks at the helm. And the abuse and dispossession and neglect continued. And the hostilities and fear grew. Trying to forget, to forge ahead, to build the nation, brought little relief. 5 years ago, these unresolved issues were the tinder set alight by the untrammeled ambition and warmongering of the political class.

Many of those same problems remain today. but the state and its mandarins are engaged in a whitewashing exercise. To remove the most visible manifestations of the fear while doing nothing about its causes. So we resettle IDPs without sorting out why they were displaced in the first place. First the President, and then Parliament, seek to gerrymander the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation report to "improve" the testimony of 40,000 Kenyans who have been victims of and witnesses to the atrocities and theft and abuse visited upon Kenyans by their leaders and government. Foreign Secretary, Amina Mohammed goes on TV to say truth commissions should have "nothing to do with justice" and tribalism is not such a bad thing. Despite the fact during the campaigns, candidate Kenyatta had declared that the ICC was "a personal problem" and had nothing to do with the election, his government is pulling out all the stops to get the cases lifted arguing the exact opposite.

All this is part of a campaign to convince us to forget. To tell us that the events of half a decade ago were not as significant as they appeared. There wasn't much harm done. So the victims and their stories are today carefully and systematically edited out of the narratives of the violence. The dead have no one to speak for them. Our permanent representative at the UN, Macharia Kamau, today has the gumption to suggest that the 650,000 IDPs in fact got a great deal out of the 2007/8 post-election violence. After all, most were squatters before. They came out "way ahead". The raped, the scarred, the mutilated remain faceless. They don't matter, they are all lying witnesses. Nothing happened. We have reconciled. Accept and move on. It is Uhuru, Ruto and, to a lesser extent, Sang who are the real victims. Let's pray for them. The real outrage, we are told, is the court case, the attack on impunity, not the killing, raping, hacking, shooting and burning.

Yet the fear remains. We must resist the attempt to rewrite history, to lull us to sleep, to avoid the work of reconciliation. We must not take the easy road of forgetting. If we do, that terror will be nourished by the knowledge that we are all a part of this conspiracy. And we will continue to build the nation during the day and sharpen our machetes by night. For while time may not heal all wounds, it eventually will wound all heels.

The Sin Of Being Female

In the last few days, our airwaves and social media accounts are inundated with opinions on what the verbal and physical abuse perpetrated against a female journalist and a female MP mean. I came across an online discussion where some were suggesting that the public humiliation of Kiss FM presenter Caroline Mutoko and Nairobi Women's Representative Rachel Shebesh at the hands of Nairobi Senator Gideon “Sonko” Mbuvi and Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero, was a ploy to distract attention from the President and his deputy's problems with the ICC.

I personally find it disturbing that some evidently regarded discussing the violence, humiliation, sexism and exploitation that our women suffer daily as a distraction from more important issues.

How we treat our women is a measure of how we regard ourselves as a society. After all, Wanjiku has become a synonym for ordinary folk, both male and female. We speak of the motherland and ascribe a feminine gender to our national collective. Kenya is a “she” and has “her” interests, we say. The disdain we have for women mirrors the contempt our rulers have for us. When Kidero slaps Shebesh and Sonko insults Mutoko, they are not just putting powerful women in their place. They are expressing their contempt and fear of an empowered society, of a populace that dares to question the actions of their betters.

In my view, the problem isn't that people are talking about Sonko and Kidero. It is that they are ONLY talking about Sonko and Kidero. Not about how they are representative of a societal disdain of women. Not that this attitude is responsible for the silence on the rape epidemic in our towns, the horrors beading and FGM and domestic violence, the lack of investment in maternal health which leads women to be beaten by hospital staff after being forced to give birth on the floor.

It is why when we discuss abortion, we are blind to the dangers that pregnancy poses to women. We have one of the highest rates of maternal deaths in the world. Many lose their jobs or have to forgo their schooling for having the temerity to conceive unwanted kids. Many are ostracized by their families and abandoned by their men. Many have no incomes, no education, no support , to take care of the kids we insist they bear.

We refuse to invest in girls education, to protect them, to empower them, to provide sex education and contraception preferring instead to blame them, to call them fornicators and adulterers and murderers, to turn a self-righteous blind eye as they die in their thousands or get maimed for life at the hands of backstreet quacks.

It is never about the men. It is never about the abuse of power.

Accept and move on, we tell women. Suck it up. It's your lot as a woman. You must have done something to deserve it. It is just punishment for your immorality, for the sin of being female.

The parallels between how we speak of the abuse meted out against women and how we speak about the violence meted out against us are hard to ignore. It is always our fault. We drive too fast. We are too tribal or stupid or lazy or ignorant. It is never the fault of those who steal elections or organize and perpetrate the violence. It is never about the brutality, negligence and corruption of officials and officers. It is all our fault for making stupid decisions at the ballot box and we must pay taxes to fund our potentates’ lifestyles as just punishment for our guilt. The poor must forgo drinking milk because the government must have the revenues to build roads for the rich. We do not demand accountability or better because we do not think we deserve such.

Thus the talk on the ICC trials almost completely ignores and excludes the victims. We are only concerned about the safety of the powerful, about what their prosecution means and about whether they are being treated fairly. That 1600 Kenyans died five years ago barely registers. Who cares about them or their stories or their families? Just like the treatment of Mutoko and Shebesh is seen as a distraction, the demand for justice is portrayed as a distraction from the more important pursuit of economic development. Just as Shebesh's husband apparently feels it is he, not his wife, who deserves an apology from Kidero, the powerful see our lives and livelihoods as mere fodder for their ambitions and can stipulate that accords between political leaders can be a substitute for justice.

No. This is not a frivolous issue or a distraction. It is a conversation we should be having but one we are determined to ignore precisely because it is about women. And because it is really about us.

Personal Challenge: Cartooning Post-Election Kenya

Dear Cartoonist,

As you know, Kenya in March underwent its first elections since the disastrous aftermath of the 2007 polls. These were conducted under a new constitution and on the ballot were two politicians indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in relation to their alleged role in the conflagration that followed the previous polls. Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto joined together to form the Jubilee Coalition and have now been elected President and Deputy President of Kenya respectively. The elections, while generally peaceful, were not without controversy with the outcome having to be decided by the country's fledgling Supreme Court. 

Ever since the election, the Kenyan Government has been on a so far unsuccessful crusade to get the ICC charges against its two top leaders, which Uhuru Kenyatta had famously called a "Personal Challenge" during the campaign, dropped. In this effort, it has been rebuffed by the UN Security Council and embraced by the African Union. Despite pre-election threats of isolation, the indicted President has visited with UK premier David Cameron (though away from No. 10 and without the customary photo-op). Coupled with the aggressive campaign by his government, the Kenyan situation is now seen as the greatest threat to the legitimacy -and even existence- of the ICC.

Other casualties of the March elections include Kenyan civil society organisations whom the winning Jubilee coalition sought to paint as stooges of the imperialist West both during and after the election, and the Kenyan media which has been accused of forsaking its traditional vocal watchdog stance and turning a blind eye to malfeasance in the name of preserving the peace.

To further complicate the picture, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission has recently released its report which covers government massacres, rapes and other atrocities against its citizens, illegal land grabs, corruption and larceny. It names over 400 individuals, including Messrs Uhuru and Ruto, and many of their allies and rivals.

The Association of East African Cartoonists is organising an international cartoon exhibition on these and other aspects of the aftermath of the Kenyan Elections. The theme is  "Personal Challenge: Cartooning Post-Election Kenya". The exhibition is open to both professional and amateur cartoonists.

To participate, please send your entries to:

katuni@gmail.com

All entries should be in JPEG format with a resolution of at least 300DPI and should be received by 21 June 2013.

Thanks and I look forward to receiving your works.

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 prefer the compartmentalized view, the trees to 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 its 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.

Uhuru Should Lead or Get Out Of The Way

"Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony." It is a line from the hit movie, The Matrix, that our "Digital Government" should be intimately familiar with. On the day that Uhuru Kenyatta stepped on the plane to London on his maiden visit as President to a Western capital (we had all thought that would be elsewhere), it was reported that his hosts in the British government were finally taking steps to address the impunity surrounding historic crimes perpetrated during the MauMau uprising.

The timing of the visit is, of course, ironic because our dear President himself faces his "personal challenge" across the Channel with regards to his alleged role in funding murderous militias during the 2008 post-election violence. He is expected to receive an invitation to visit there soon, though not necessarily in his illustrious capacity.

However, his trip to the UK is also ironic because of some nasty business he has left undone back home. Last week, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which was created to "establish an accurate, complete and historical record of violations and abuses of human rights, committed between 12 December 1963 and 28 February 2008," took out acres of newspaper space to announce that it had completed its report and was about to hand it over to the President. In fact, it gave the day for the handover as Thursday, 2 May 2013.

Well, it transpires that the President was apparently unable to make the time to receive the report. Now, most of the Kenya media are familiar with his "personal challenge" when it comes to punctuality. However, given the importance of this report, one would have expected more than a few eyebrows to be raised. The TJRC is expected to provide details regarding to abductions, disappearances, detentions, torture, murder, massacres, extra-judicial killings, crimes of sexual nature against female victims and expropriation of property suffered by Kenyans in the last half century. Its report should expose those responsible for gross violations of international human rights law and make recommendations. Further the report will look into historical injustices affecting the irregular and illegal allocation of public land, economic crimes including grand corruption, the perceived economic marginalization of communities and misuse of public institutions for political objectives.

In short, the TJRC will  exhume the ghosts of the past and give the country an opportunity to finally confront them. The need for such a reckoning cannot be gainsaid. The just ended elections exposed deep faults in our body politic, many of which reach all the way down to the foundations of our nation. The presentation of this report was to inaugurate a season of debate and reflection on the report leading to a critical reevaluation of our common history and a new understanding of the basis of our nationhood. Such an outcome would improve prospects for a real peace, real justice, real national unity, real healing, real reconciliation and real dignity for the people of Kenya.

However, with his disappearing act, the President has effectively put off that discussion. TJRC officials, while not speculating on the reasons for the snub, say that they cannot release the report findings until he has officially taken possession of it. Shortly after the handover, they planned to have the entire report posted online, for once circumventing the presidential prerogative of deciding what we could and could not be told about our past and the acts perpetrated by the state in our name.

Perhaps it's too much to expect our feckless journalists to ask about this. After all, they have not seemed overly  concerned over the violations of citizens' rights that we have witnessed in more recent times.  Just a day before the report was to be presented,  the cantakerous and obnoxious COTU boss Francis Atwoli declared before both the President and the Nairobi County Governor, Evans Kidero, that he had his own "army" to deal with troublemakers such as pesky political activists, Nary a question was raised. No one has since asked our dear President why he stayed seated when Atwoli ordered police not to interfere as his goons proceeded to "deal" with Boniface Mwangi. Today, none of them questions why it is the battered and bruised activist who is on trial while Atwoli and his thugs roam the streets free.

Then again we shouldn't be too harsh with the press. Their fear of truth, their propensity to put off till tomorrow the thinking that can be done today, their worship of empty celebrity and their celebration of mediocrity - all these are endemic within our society. Our fake news is a reflection of our fake society. Or is it our society of fakes? After all, many had pledged support for Boniface Mwangi's protest. A few even turned up at Uhuru Park. But when he stood up, he was alone. No one stood up for him when he was assaulted.

All this is reminiscent of the days when we keep ourselves locked in our homes when our neighbours are attacked, hoping we won't be next. Or when we watch impassively as girls are pulled kicking and screaming out of matatus and gang-raped, thinking our own daughters are immune. When we laugh at women being publicly humiliated for "dressing indecently." When we condone the abuses meted out by the authorities in far away places like Garissa.

We must shed this cloak of fear that holds us back from articulating a more useful and confident narrative of citizenship. We should once and for all confront our demons and lay them to rest. The President, who perhaps has more of them to face than most, should either lead the effort or get out of the way. We do not have time to waste and we cannot afford another false start.

Can Uhuru Free Himself? Not Likely.

 The richest man in Kenya is now its leader and in his first address has indicated that he is viewing our problems from a distinctly economic and technological perspective. Throughout the inauguration ceremony, we heard promises of double digit economic growth, free laptops, free maternity health, a fund for women and youth.

But the events of the last month have exposed have exposed deep rifts in the national psyche that cannot be papered over with money alone. President Uhuru Kenyatta, to his credit, recognized that his election has divided the country but said little on how he was planning to undertake the process of reconciliation. He would do well to go a little further. Though he is the lawful President of Kenya, he should acknowledge that the election, in the manner in which it was conducted and adjudicated, has not only alienated a significant proportion of the population, but has harmed the credibility, if not legitimacy, of his victory. There is thus a large disaffected constituency he will need to actively win over, if he is serious in his desire to be the president of all Kenyans.

Vague appeals to national unity, to moving on and working together are not enough. His government must demonstrate the will to reform the flawed electoral system that has brought him to power. As he works to deliver laptops to primary schools, he must also insist on a full and comprehensive audit of why all the systems set up to guard the transparency of the election failed. After all, many were deployed in these very schools.

It was also encouraging to hear him talk of "a permanent peace through which democracy is glorified and not undermined" as opposed to "a perfunctory peace" that is held hostage to the five year election cycle. Than in itself is a valuable acknowledgement of the spell of fear and paranoia that has swept the country over the last month and that is beginning to be buried. I hope he also recognises that this national pathology has deep roots in traumatic historical events and outcomes that the country has avoided confronting for the last five decades. If he truly wants to get rid of it, he must not allow us to move on until we have truly come to grips with it. I hope his administration will begin by lifting the ban on public demonstrations to allow the people opportunity to peacefully vent whatever frustrations they may be harbouring. After all, he did declare his commitment to the protection of fundamental freedoms. I hope he will not seek to roll back the gains won over the last 20 years.

The report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which is expected in less than a month, should provide another perfect opportunity to further this work. However, that will require a commitment to truth and justice. Given how his election campaign has, with more than a little success, sought to disparage and deligitimize civil society organisations that advocate for justice and good governance, as well as the accusations of interference with witnesses at the ICC and the personal cost he would bear if the prosecution were to be successful, many are understandably sceptical about his resolve in this regard. But perhaps with the heat of the electoral battle now fading, and with the case against him at the Hague looking less likely to succeed, he may decide to surprise us all.

Will we now see a let up in the assault on civil society, the bedrock of any democracy? Will we see moves to provide some semblance of local justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims of, not just the violence of 2008, but of the political violence that has accompanied every election since 1992? They, sadly, didn't merit a mention on his speech. Will he be committed to justice for the millions more who have been impoverished by the succession of corrupt and greedy regimes that begun with his father's and whose policies have bequeathed him much of the wealth he enjoys today? Not having mentioned corruption once in his speech, does he consider stamping out the vice a priority and will he be able to resist the vulture "businessmen" associated with his own campaign?

In a very real sense, if President Uhuru Kenyatta is to live up to his promise of working towards "a rich and abiding peace," he will have to confront the very system that has put him where he is. He, perhaps even more than the rest of the country, would need to confront and expose painful realities about the conduct of his family and its old friends. He would have to live up to his name and free himself, and thus his countrymen, from the shackles of the past. If he found the courage to do so, he might just be the best thing that ever happened to Kenya. So, Godspeed to him.

But we all know that this is unlikely to happen. The likelihood is that President Kenyatta will, like his predecessors, have little interest in justice or fighting graft. Instead he will, as he has already done, continue to urge us to get back to work, to build the nation, to forget the election. He will seek to bribe us and buy our loyalty with free goodies and he will continue his campaign to undermine both the ICC and local civil society. Whether he succeeds in this will be up to the rest of us. 

Red Letter Day

KKK Security

You Asked For It!

Joshua arap Sang, who was on Wednesday served with summons to appear at The Hague on April 7, has told Capital News that he has written to the ICC asking for help in meeting expenses for a ticket, accommodation and meals.

I Quit This Bitch!

On my way to work today, I had an epiphany. As I sat in one of the unending traffic jams that have become part of the daily ritual of trying to get to work, fuming as matatus "overlapped" the queue, it occurred to me that it wasn't they who were the stupid ones.

The rule of law, whether we're talking about the highway code, commercial law or criminal statutes, assumes a universal application. So, when I accept to religiously abide by it when others consider it only as a guideline, to be discarded whenever it is convenient to do so, then it is I who is refusing to see the reality as it truly is.

This notion was reinforced when I finally got to my office and read in the papers that Rift Valley MPs were planning to ditch the National Accord in a bid to replace Raila Odinga as the Prime Minister with William Ruto. According to The Standard, the plot is an attempt to shield Ruto from potentially facing charges at the International Criminal Court relating to the 2008 post-election violence. "If it means repealing the Accord, then we will act and move with speed to replace the PM, ," the paper quotes the chairman of the Rift Valley Parliamentary Group, Dr. Julius Kones, as saying.

Putting aside for one minute the questionable wisdom of the move (after all, Omar al-Bashir's position as President of Sudan didn't save him from similar indictments), the statements simply emphasize the fact that there is one law for some and another for the rest. Just like the enlightened matatu drivers, our politicians believe that the rules do not apply to them and can be discarded whenever one of them gets into trouble.

Our whole system of governance aids and abets this logic. So when Cabinet Ministers are forced out of office after being caught with their hands in the till, the government creates a new taxonomy in which those who "step aside" are allowed to keep their fat salaries and allowances without actually having to work for them. That, they tell us, is how we will win the war on corruption!

I now believe that it is the ordinary, hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding Kenyan who is stupid. We agree to faithfully pay our taxes, even celebrating when the government exceeds its revenue collection targets, while those who actually pass our tax laws do not feel obliged to live under the same regime. We pay salaries to policemen and civil servants and then agree to supplement these with bribes. We accept that the leaders of the same government supposed to ensure roads are properly built to cater for the booming numbers of vehicles and that traffic rules are obeyed, should not themselves be inconvenienced when they fail to do their jobs. We allow them to provide our children with a failing education system -at our expense, naturally- while they take their kids to private schools and elite universities in the West. We acquiesce when they tell us all is well with our public hospitals but they fly abroad at the slightest sign of illness.

We are the fools when we insist on believing that a new constitution will somehow magically apply the law to them. Our politicians, like our matatu drivers, are not Kenyans. The fact is, Kenya is their creation, not ours. Its policies, rules and laws only apply to Kenyans, the wananchi (the people of the nation), not to the wenye nchi (those who own the nation). They are designed to perpetuate the power and wealth of the latter, to transfer resources and dignity from the former. It explains why none of our systems work, for the wenye nchi have no interest in us spending our money on ourselves. It is why no one goes to jail when they steal maize while a third of the country is starving, why no one is punished when people are sold contaminated food and when public funds go missing. It is the sole reason that the fate of 6 of them is of more import than the deaths of 1,500 Kenyans.

I, for one, am tired of this charade we call Kenya. I am tired of countless commissions that only produce paper; of a Parliament that only represents itself. I am tired of the cycle of prosecutions that produce no convictions and reforms that generate no change. I am tired of being poor and having to work hard to fund the excesses of a wealthy few. I am tired of carrying a leadership, a state, a country, that is nothing more than a parasitic infection.

I am tired of being a Kenyan. I am tired of being stupid.

In 2008, after being treated like crap for years, Inetta the Mood-Setter, a part-time DJ in the US, refused to take it anymore. Her parting words to the radio station, delivered live on air: "I QUIT THIS BITCH!"

So do I.