53 Years A Colony

Every nation has its foundation myths. The Koreans, for example, have Tan'gun, the scion of a son of the gods and a bear-turned-into-woman who became the first human king of the people of the peninsula. Kenyans are not to be left out. Whenever national holidays roll around, the air is always thick with talk of forefathers and tales of the dreams that supposedly drove them to found the nation. Believing it has always required a little suspension of disbelief.

This past week was no different. President Uhuru Kenyatta used his Jamhuri day address to remind us about “the unity our fathers believed in, and enjoyed, unity without which they would not have won the independence war.”  Never mind that the Mau Mau actually lost the “independence war” and our “fathers”, and his father particularly, were hardly paragons of solidarity.

If we are called “to honour the heroism of those who won our liberty” as the President asserts, we must begin by being honest about what came before, how the past gave birth to the present and what we must change in order to create a better future for ourselves and for generations to come.

Being honest requires accepting some uncomfortable truths. Our “forefathers” did not found Kenya. It was created and built by the British. Here’s the rub. The state and its institutions were specifically designed to oppress and to extract from the local population and to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an elite few.

The Mau Mau uprising was the culmination of resistance against this system that dates back to the dawn of colonialism. It is this system the many who went to the forest to fight, and the many who helped them, were committed to overthrowing. However, and this is a second uncomfortable truth, they lost. And though their efforts did expedite the grant of independence, it was not they who would inherit the state. Rather, it was handed over to a new, black elite that had little interest in reforming it.

"Will the elite which has inherited power from the colonialists use that power to bring about the necessary social and economic changes or will they succumb to the lure of wealth, comfort and status and thereby become part of the Old Establishment," future President Mwai Kibaki asked in 1964. In fact, as the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission confirmed, the "Old Establishment" was never overthrown and the colonial state endured.

So a third uncomfortable truth is that independence did not translate to liberty. President Kenyatta was lying when he spoke of “first age of heores” who “joined hands to overthrow the colonial order.” The oppressive colonial state persists to this day and has subverted almost every sincere effort to reform it. The first attempt was via the 1962 Constitution. A paper written 30 years later by the current Attorney-General spoke of a “misguided attempt to harmonise the operations of a democratic constitution with an undemocratic and authoritarian administrative structure. Unhappily instead of the latter being amended to fit the former, the former was altered to fit the latter with the result that the constitution was effectively downgraded."

After decades of struggle, six years ago we embarked on yet another attempt to reform the state.  And, perhaps predictably, the heirs of the “Old Establishment” are again at work trying to do to the 2010 constitution what their fathers did to its predecessor. They have maintained the authoritarian structures, such as the provincial administration, and introduced laws meant to curtail constitutional rights and have consistently operated in ways that either disregard the document or actively undermine it.

Being honest about our past will allow us to appreciate that the struggle against subjugation that begun in the last decade of the 19^th century continues to this day.  It will open our eyes to the fact that while our oppressors may have changed color, their methods and aims remain largely the same. It will also allow us to choose which of our “fathers” we wish to emulate. Those who stood up for the rights of the people, or those who became part of the Old Establishment? On that choice, our future will hang. 

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.