Religion is the Opium of the People

Karl Marx wasn’t kidding. Police in the Parisian suburb of La Verriere failed find a trace of any other hallucinogenic drug after a family of 12 leapt from their second floor balcony claiming to be fleeing Beelzebub. According to police, the incident occurred when a wife awoke to find her husband moving about naked in the room. She began screaming 'It's the devil! It's the devil!' and the man ran into the next room where the others were watching TV. One woman grabbed a knife and stabbed him before others pushed him out through the front door. When he forced his way back in, the terrified lot leapt from the balcony screaming 'Jesus! Jesus!' Inexplicably, the nudist also leapt from the balcony. Detectives are treating it as a case of mistaken identity.


Zimbabwe’s Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gideon Gono, likes to portray himself as very religious. He is apt to quote the Bible in his speeches, sometimes adding a few revelations of his own, such when he divulged God’s advice to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: "My Son, take it like a man …" Last week, however, it was reported that Sabina Mugabe, the younger sister of octagenarian president Robert Mugabe, had had a revelation of her own to make regarding Gono. Shortly before she died three months ago, she reportedly told her brother that Gono and Mugabe’s wife of 14 years, Grace, had been making a cuckold of him. Though the President is said to be "ready to go to war," things might still turn out OK for the former tea-boy. As one intelligence official put it, "once Mugabe hears something like that, I think someone will go and meet God."

Many self-declared religious types abhor any discussion of sex outside the home. In keeping with this, an Australian church has kicked out a woman who dared to act in an impotence treatment ad. Libby Ashby told the Melbourne-based radio station, 3AW, that she had been “disfellowshipped” from her local congregation, following her starring role in a commercial where seems to use her husband’s erect penis as a stepping stone to higher things. In the ad, after she asks for his help to reach a container above the fridge, he opens up his dressing gown to reveal a sight which the viewer can’t see – but which she is clearly happy about. Ashby then steps onto the hidden prop and gets the jar. The single mother said she knew the advert would be controversial with church-goers but a lack of funds left her with little option. “My Visa was calling out for mercy,” she revealed. The church is unlikely to be so charitable. “They have said I will not be reinstated until the advert comes off air,” Ashby said.

In a bid to restore morality and fight the vice of sexual harassment, the mayor of the Italian sea-side town of Castellammare di Stabia, south of Naples, has ordered his police to fine women who wear 'very short' miniskirts or tops that display too much cleavage. Luigi Bobbio, who was elected on Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party ticket, won a council vote to ban anything that doesn’t fully cover underwear. Police, who now have the authority to hand out fines of up to $450, were however cautioned against being too zealous identifying offenders. "They won't need to carry out checks up close. One glance will be enough to judge," said mayor Bobbio, who also wishes to criminalize blasphemy and playing football in public parks.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s sermons about the evils of corruption have a decidedly hollow ring to them. While campaigning for re-election three years ago, he promised to run a clean government. Now, barely a week after he and Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, were forced to suspended William Ruto, a cabinet minister facing graft charges, another, Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula has resigned (or in the parlance of the day, stepped aside to allow for investigations) after he was named in a parliamentary report looking into shenanigans surrounding the acquisition of property by Kenyan embassies abroad. And that may not be the end of it. Other members of the “clean” cabinet with the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads include Kiraitu Murungi (under whose watch $100 million worth of oil disappeared in the Triton Oil scandal), Prof. Sam Ongeri (in charge when another $100 million in free education funds went missing) and Naomi Shaaban (whose ministry was blamed for the loss of $2.5 million meant of resettling the internally displaced).

A-Maize-ing Grace

A friend of mine once observed that no nation with a free press ever suffered a famine. He was obviously paraphrasing Amartya Sen's famous declaration that "no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy". However this powerful dictum seems lost on our leaders and our people. We still blame Mother Nature's stinginess with rain for the starvation that stalks us with depressing regularity.

Fact is famine is not an act of nature. Famine is always caused by government. It is the result, not of a deficit of food, but of a deficit of democracy. In his Democracy as a Universal Value Sen states:

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. 

And further, in Development as Freedom, he argues that "a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have". And on both counts, Kenya fares extremely poorly. 

Ever since the political class blackmailed us into accepting the coalition government as part of a ceasefire to end the carnage of early 2008, we have had no political opposition to speak of. The parties in government together have an overwhelming majority in Parliament and Cabinet ministers and their assistants actually outnumber backbenchers. And while the latter have been vocal in trying to keep the Executive on its toes, the recent reappointment of Amos Kimunya to Cabinet has shown just how little clout they actually have.

Government attacks on media freedom have also become a defining feature of the President Kibaki's tenure. No less the 4 Bills have been crafted and introduced in Parliament seeking to muzzle the Press. Two have passed and one has been signed into law. In addition, arrests of journalists and raids of media houses by hooded police and by the First Lady create an air of intimidation. So much so that even the largest media house in East Africa is afraid to broadcast its own footage of a Cabinet minister apparently confessing to orchestrating the murder of 600 people.

And when we starve we still blame God and the elements, flock to churches to beg for forgiveness for sins we neither admit nor comprehend. It is a sadly typically Kenyan reaction to avoidable disaster: when tens died in a fire less than 500m from the Fire Station, in a building full of combustible material where the fire exits were boarded up and which lacks any discernible automatic fire suppresson equipment; when over a hundred people perish while looting petrol and two days later the same thing is happening 30 km away; when 10 million go hungry because the very politicians proclaiming national emergencies have been busy looting the national granary.

Think about that next time you ask God why these things keep happening to us.

UPDATE

Today KISS FM and their sister radio stations have announced a new initiative to get more food to starving families. It's called 24 hours for Kenya and aims to, in their words, solve the hunger problem in one day so we can get on with other things. While I applaud their intentions, it is exactly this kind of thinking (or non-thinking) that guarantees famines will be with us for the foreseeable future. Not only is it plainly ridiculous to suggest that the crisis can be resolved in a matter of hours by the donation of a few basic food items, the message inherent in their ad for the campaign (every moment spent thinking about the famine costs lives) actually urges us not to concern ourselves with issues like where the maize in the Strategic Grain Reserve went, or who's to blame for the lack of preparation. By demanding that we provide emergency relief (which we should) and ignore the governance reasons that led to this crisis (which we shouldn't), such well-intentioned initiatives end up providing a salve for our national conscience while doing little to alleviate, and in the long term actually guaranteeing, the continued suffering of millions. 

Kenya Vision 2007

Any illusions we might have had that the Kenya Vision 2030 programme, which was launched by President Kibaki yesterday, had nothing to do with next year's elections were firmly dispelled by El Presidente himself. According to the Daily Nation:

"Although President Kibaki said he was optimistic that the development goal would be achieved, it will depend on how the country manages its affairs in the next five years."

The next five years? Could it be mere coincidence that that would cover most of a second term? Sounds very like a plug for reelection. Gone is "A Working Nation", from now till he renews his lease at State House it'll be "Kenya Vision 2030". And then I predict a deafening silence regarding implementation.

The Nutty Professor

Prof. Makau Mutua, writing in the Nation, once again demonstrates the folly of seeing a new constitution as a panacea for all that ails Kenya. He correctly characterises the current machinations for miimum reforms as "an ideologically empty battle for raw political power" and goes to great lengths to demonstrate why the proposed reforms would neither deliver a democratised state nor address the critical problems at the heart of our disfunctional democracy. His proposed magic pill? "Holistic and comprehensive constitutional reform" of the sort that we have been chasing for the last twenty years.

In arguing against the minimum changes, he mistakes constitutionalism for a constitution and assumes that our ethnic-based political system is a liability that can be solved through legislative means. He also leads us into a political and intellectual cul-de-sac by implying that the imperial presidency, which is the main obstacle to reform, can be done away with in one fell blow by the enactment of a new constitution.

According to Joel Ngugi, an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington, "a constitution does not mythically solve contested political problems. It provides a shared framework to rework, re-organise, re-funnel, re-think and re-frame these political problems. It is a product of political compromise." The tribal nature of our politics is not something that can be legislated into oblivion. It is a function of our diversity. While our political parties may be ideologically bereft, they do have real ethnic constituencies. The contest for political power is also a struggle by these constituencies for their rightful share of the national cake. Any good constitution would only provide a level playing field for that struggle not change the terms of it. In the light of this, any attempts to regulate the competition for power and make it a fair contest should be welcomed. While recognising that the IPPG compromise was instrumental in ejecting the KANU kleptocrats from State House, Prof. Mutua, by opposing electoral reform, sets the stage for the perpetuation of the equally kleptocratic Kibaki regime in power and further dilution of the prospect of real reform.

Secondly, Prof Mutua states that "the reason for Mr Kibaki’s failure to reform the state is that he inherited an imperial presidency" (a poor choice of words as one would think that an "imperial presidency" would afford, rather than deny, Kibaki an opportunity to change the system, if he so wished). The kind Professor does not, however, burden us with his views on how we would go about dismantling that institution before embarking on constitutional reform considering that the presidency would itself be the main target of those reforms. It is a classic catch 22: we have to remove the powers of the president, so we can have the necessary reforms to remove the powers of the president. I see things differently. The overaching presidency is the product of numerous constitutional amendments. Why not use the same process to cut it down? The sorry history of constitutional reform in Kenya has demonstrated that no incumbent will willingly cede the power of his office, literally at the stroke of a pen, by promulgating a new constitution. However, the same history shows that it is possible to extract a series of minimal compromises that when put together have the effect of instituting a new constitutional order. The ODM's (or LDP's or whatever-meaningless-acronym-they-chose-to-be-known-by's) clamour for minimum changes before the elections, while undoudtedly sef-serving, provides an opprtunity to do just that.