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. 

Not Yet Uhuru

In the run up to last year's election, I argued (to vociferous protest from some of my readers) that not only was the Mwai Kibaki administration a beneficiary, and not the instigator, of democratic reform, but was (and still is) engaged in the process of rolling back our hard won freedoms. After at least four attempts to muzzle the media (and now civil society) through brute force and legislation, countless unresolved corruption scandals and a stolen election, I wonder how many still think the President is interested in democracy.

Iraqi Journalist Shows Kenyan Counterparts The Way

I hope Nyambane and Fredrick Odhiambo are watching. This is how it should be done! During a press conference on his final tour of Iraq, George W. Bush was ducking more than questions after an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at him shouting, "This is a farewell kiss, you dog!" 

Perhaps a new report which describes the US effort to rebuild Iraq as a $100 billion failure is what had the gentleman, identified as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, so riled up. The report lays bare the general incompetence of those tasked with the effort and their attempts to cover up their failures by resorting to Saddamist tactics (The document has former secretary of state Colin Powell complaining that after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces -- the number would jump 20,000 a week! We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.'")

Whatever his grievance, the reporter was beaten up and arrested by security agents. If the Kenyan example of how we deal with those who disrespect our big men (as Internal Security Minister George Saitoti described the Jamhuri Day protests) is anything to go by, I think the Iraqi journalist deserves all our prayers.