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. 

Lessons From Our Burning Schools

The wave of unrest afflicting secondary schools in Kenya has understandably elicited much public concern. Many have chimed in with their take on what is causing it, with most blaming panic over exams, drug abuse, an oppressive school environment, wayward parenting and incompetent government officials. Some have even suggested that the abolition of corporal punishment is to blame.

Given that this problem is not new, it is rather curious that there seems to be such confusion over its causes. According to a 1996 PhD thesis by Margaret Wangeci Gatimu of Portland University, disruptive unrest in the form of class boycotts and riots in secondary schools had by then been steadily increasing in Kenya since the mid-1970s. The study highlighted many of the same issues that are cited today.

So perhaps it is better to ask not just why unrest happens, but also why the problems said to cause it have been allowed to fester across generations of students. In a media interview earlier this week, the Cabinet Secretary for Education bemoaned the fact that recommendations from at least two task forces appointed by his predecessors as well as from many independent researchers, remain unimplemented.

This failure to effectively address the issue, despite the existence of such reports, is a manifestation of a wider systemic reluctance to employ evidence-based measures to solve problems. And this goes beyond schools. In tackling security and terrorism, Kenya has seemed to prefer knee-jerk solutions to what are complex and historical challenges. The desire has seemed to be to address the immediate crisis and move on rather than to proactively tackle the underlying and fundamental causes.

An example of this is the reaction to last week’s bombing of Elram village in Mandera by Kenya Defence Forces planes which killed at least 4 children. There have been few calls for the incident to be exhaustively investigated, for people to be held to account and, more importantly, for lessons to be learnt to ensure this never happens again. Similarly, the circumstances surrounding the January overrunning of a KDF base by the Al Shabaab group at El Adde in Somalia and consequent massacre of at least 141 soldiers are similarly shrouded in mystery. 

To these we could add the many terrorist incidents that have killed hundreds of citizens since 2012, including the attacks on the Westgate shopping mall and on Garissa University College. The many failures that allowed the atrocities to happen and that hindered effective response, appear to have been swept under the carpet. On the contrary, a Presidential promise to set up a public inquiry into Westgate failed to materialize and, as a senior police officer told The Nation last July, “there was never a review meeting on how we handled incidents”.

Earlier this week, in reaction to a terrorist attack on the Ataturk airport in the Turkish capital, Istanbul, which reportedly killed 41 people and injured more than 230, Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet ordered the beefing up of security at all Kenyan airports. But there have been few queries about what this actually means and even fewer indications that Kenyan security agencies are learning from and adapting to previous incidents. We rarely hear of our security agencies sending teams abroad to study how such attacks happened and how they are investigated. Meanwhile, domestic incidents are similarly studiously ignored. For example, reports on the August 2013 fire which razed the arrivals terminal at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and on the improvised explosive device that went off at the same airport 5 months later, have yet to be made public. It is unclear whether they have led to any changes.

A similar dynamic is at work when it comes to addressing the root causes of post-election violence. Three years after it was handed over to the President, the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission continues to gather dust in Parliament. The report exposed many of the deep-seated maladies that have fuelled blood-letting at election time but even as we approach another polarizing poll, there is little mention of it, let alone of implementing its recommendations.  The focus of the political class is on the urgent and important but largely superficial task of reconstituting the electoral commission.

This, more than anything, highlights the fact that as a country, we are obsessed with the problems of politicians, and not those of the people. In the end, this obsession is the real reason why the problems at our schools and the state of insecurity across the country will continue to fester once the immediate crisis has passed.

The Price Of A Good Kenyan Name

Kenyan media is going through a torrid time. Once described as one of the most vibrant and critical on the continent, it is today looking like little more than a shadow of its former self. From the firing, reportedly at the behest of the state, of editors and journalists at the country’s two leading newspapers, The Daily Nation and The Standard, to the anodyne and superficial coverage of governmental malfeasance, media in Kenya appears to have raised the white flag of surrender.

It must be particularly humiliating for our veteran journalists, many of whom cut their teeth standing up to and exposing the ills of the dictatorship of Daniel Arap Moi only to see their publications succumb to the supposedly more democratic regimes that succeeded it. It is a sign that despite all the reforms that have been enacted, including the adoption of a new progressive constitution, little has changed in the fundamental dynamic between the rulers and the ruled. Kenya still very much remains a country of wenyenchi and wananchi.

And every so often, when one peers behind the timid headlines, one is reminded of this.

This week, the newspapers reported on the now “retired” Mr Moi apparently “breaking his long silence” to warn that corruption under the Uhuru Kenyatta administration was “getting out of hand” and to “urge Kenyans to help the government to wage the war on graft.” Now, the irony will not be lost on many Kenyans: the man who presided over a 24-year kleptocracy, and who is still allowed to enjoy the illicit fruit undisturbed, today calls corruption “this bad thing”. Talk about glass houses and throwing stones!

However underneath the comical rubbish that is Mr Moi’s condemnation of graft, lies a gem. For the aging kleptocrat unwittingly offers valuable insight into how Kenya’s ruling and still thieving elite sees its own corruption. And why so little has changed since he left power.

“You know corruption is bad . . . I am appealing to all Christians to help the government eliminate this bad thing… If you are [a] senior government [official] anywhere, please help in stopping this bad thing that is giving the government a bad image,” he is reported as saying.

Notice that Mr Moi is not particularly distressed by the misery graft has visited on Kenyans. The fact that corruption has destroyed lives and livelihoods, robbed kids of their future and impoverished millions pales into significance compared with the fact that it has given "the government a bad image". Further, the talk of it "getting out of hand" appears to imply that some level of abuse of public office for private gain is fine. Graft, it seems, is only bad when many officials do it, causing government to get blamed. Mr Moi appears to pine for the good old days when the eating was "in control".

In his eyes, corruption is not a vice to be eliminated. It is a resource to be managed lest over-exploitation causes disaffection, either among the people or, more likely given his history, among the donors. Thus the problem is not that corruption kills or impoverishes. The real crime is in exposing it and giving government "a bad image".

One only has to compare this to the prevailing rhetoric from the Kenyatta administration and its communications minions, to appreciate that it is the prevalent view among our ruling elite. Late last year, Kenyans loudly demanding a proper accounting of the Kshs 200b the government had borrowed via a Eurobond were warned that their questions, not the government’s inability to provide convincing answers, were sabotaging the economy. On social media sites, criticism of government is being equated with a destructive negativity, and the media is constantly being urged to opt for “positive” news.

Thus coverage of the plunder of Kenya’s wildlife is more likely to steer clear of the government’s role in protecting poachers and to focus attention on the fact that President Kenyatta has invited A-list Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio to witness the burning of Kenya’s ivory stockpile.

Similarly, GoK has tended to deal with insecurity and terrorism primarily as threats to its image, not as threats to the lives of Kenyans. The failure to institute a promised public inquiry into security lapses and response failures linked to the September 2013 Westgate attack can be attributed squarely to the imperative to protect government’s “good name” and avoid accountability. A similar dynamic is at work in the two-month silence over the casualties of the Al Shabaab attack on a Kenyan-manned AMISOM base in El Adde, Somalia.

The effective binning in Parliament of the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission also illustrates the elite belief that historical injustices can be solved via transient political arrangements and empty rhetoric about "restorative justice".  

It all boils down to the conflation of Kenyans’ troubles with those of its politicians. In this formulation, citizens don't have bread-and-butter issues. They have "political problems" requiring "political solutions". An ethnic community’s welfare is improved, and its poverty vicariously eradicated, by granting its political sons opportunities to “eat” public resources. And conversely, it is impoverished by their exclusion from the feast.

Thus the response of the Jubilee government to allegations of corruption, which has essentially been to point out that the leaders of the opposition CORD coalition are similarly implicated, is entirely understandable. Because, as Mr Moi has revealed, the problem is not that public money has been stolen, but that the government is getting blamed for it. And the reason why so little has changed since he left power is that this continues to be the problem Kenyan politicians are grappling with. 

They don't want to change the system. They want their turn to eat.

#147NotJustANumber

“Kenya is not a nation if we can’t properly memorialize each and every citizen we lose” writes renowned Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Garissa University College which killed at least 148 people, there have been calls for Kenyans to name and remember those who have died, not just in this incident, but also in previous attacks and at the hands of the state.

The hashtag #147NotJustANumber has sprung up and is being widely used by Kenya’s active online community to commemorate the individual lives lost. It is a worthy and commendable effort, one that deserves the full support of all Kenyans. It is one that seeks to buck a long-standing tradition of official amnesia, especially when it comes to victims of state violence and neglect. In a very real sense, it is about ensuring that those in power are not allowed to play down or dismiss the consequences of their malfeasance.

Nearly two weeks ago, President Uhuru Kenyatta addressed a joint session of the country’s Parliament and delivered an apology for his and previous administrations’ wrongs against Kenyan over the past half century. He also announced the setting up of a Ksh 10 billion fund to compensate victims. With that, he declared he had drawn a line under a shared painful past. He repeated this statement following the Garissa attack, adding that there was a false narrative “being propagated that Kenyan Somalis and Muslims are victims of marginalisation and oppression.”

As even a cursory reading of history -or a visit to Garissa- will demonstrate, the President was being disingenuous. The Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission found that there had been deliberate oppression and marginalisation of populations especially in the North-Eastern region of Kenya. And while the apology and fund were recommended by the TJRC report, which today languishes in Parliament, so was the memorialisation of victims as well as the prosecution of perpetrators.

It appears that by “drawing a line under a shared painful past” the President is attempting an erasure of sorts; to present a past with neither consequence nor culpability. While asserting the presence of victims who need to be compensated and assisted, he nonetheless denies their victimisation, that their circumstances are the result of that victimisation. He refuses to see them as individuals, to acknowledge their individual pain, to name them.

He does not, for example, see Hussein Farah Wachu, a survivor of the infamous November, 1980 Bulla Karatasi Massacre in which over 3000 nameless citizens in Garissa were killled by security forces in. Mr Wachu’s wife was subsequently murdered by an off-duty policeman in 1994, an incident for which he still waits for justice two decades later. Similarly, the President has said nothing about repealing the 1970 Indemnity Act, which illegally gave retroactive blanket immunity to all government personnel for crimes committed during the Shifta war, in which the lives of up to 7000 Kenyans were snuffed out, and during which the government herded the North Eastern population into concentration camps.

The President appears to imagine that some compensation will serve as a substitute for justice. And worse, that it will remove the need to confront this history, to acknowledge the many lives ruined and to punish those responsible.

By insisting on memorialising these victims, on uttering their names, Kenyans on Twitter are refusing to be railroaded into a superficial closure that leaves wounds festering underneath. They are insisting on seeing the victims as full human beings, not just as units to be bought off with the promise of compensation. They demand that the full horror of what happened is acknowledged, not just instrumentalized by a government looking to score some PR points. And this idea goes beyond naming just those who died. The myriads today living with the consequences of our history need to be seen and acknowledged as well.

Last week’s events in Garissa need to be understood as part of a history where the residents have been primary victims, not just of terrorists taking advantage of governmental neglect, but also of security forces responding to such attacks. We cannot wish away the fact that they, like many of their counterparts across the country, still have to endure the legacy of the last 50 years and beyond. Naming them, and seeing them, is the first step towards acknowledging and finally confronting this history. It will also be the first step in the process of cleaning out the foundations of our nationhood and establishing them on firmer ground.

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 Past Is A Disease

A version of this article was previously published in The Star.

Last week, President Uhuru Kenyatta witnessed the blowing up of a ship said to be full of illegal drugs. It was his “burning ivory” moment – a harkening back to then President Daniel arap Moi’s 1989 photogenic bonfire of a heap of elephant tusks which became an icon for conservationists around the world. President Kenyatta was supposedly signalling his determination to stamp out the illegal trade. However, his moment was somewhat spoilt by a Mombasa judge who had, a few hours before the fireworks, issued an order stopping the ship’s destruction which the President promptly ignored.

Still, Kenyan media was full of stories highlighting the government’s new found enthusiasm for the war against drugs. As has become the norm, little was said about the legality of its actions or the emptiness of its rhetoric. After all, it has long been rumoured that many of Kenya’s most powerful people are behind the drug trade. In 2010, at least four Members of Parliament, including Hassan Joho and William Kabogo who are both County Governors and Gideon “Sonko” Mbuvi, who is currently a Senator, were being investigated in relation to drug trafficking (they were subsequently cleared).

Further, a damning 2006 US cable released by Wikileaks revealed that “Standard journalists and others” privately believed that the police raid against the Standard Group premises in March that year were prompted by suspicions in State House that the paper had documents implicating President Kibaki's family in “grand-scale corruption, possibly including narcotics trafficking.”

A Parliamentary report into the activities of the infamous Artur brothers said it was “abundantly clear that the two brothers were conmen and drug traffickers. That they enjoyed protection by the high and mighty in the Government is not in doubt.”

It is safe to say that President Uhuru’s administration is unlikely to pursue any serious investigations against his immediate predecessor. In this, he is again following on a well trodden path. In the 1970s, the Kenyatta family was widely suspected of involvement in the illegal poaching that decimated Kenya’s wildlife. Still, on taking over power, Moi saw fit not to look too hard into the past. Similarly, despite being implicated in massive corruption scandals, Moi’s family was afforded protection by the Kibaki administration.

As I have described before, the profits from these illicit activities are laundered through the Kenyan economy and particularly through the real estate market. This is driving up the cost of housing and making the dream of owning a home an increasingly distant prospect for most. However, it is not just money that’s being laundered. Reputations are too.

This week we were treated to a sterling example of this. As Moi celebrated his 90^th birthday on Tuesday, Kenyan press was replete with a retelling of his time in power that almost completely ignored his brutal and kleptocratic ways. Instead we were presented with a vision of meekness, of a man who rose from humble beginnings to lead his nation, a peaceable lover of education who only wanted what was best for his country.  

To be fair, the fawning was not limited to Kenyans. Former Tanzanian President, Benjamin Mkapa, similarly gushed about “ the visionary manner in which [Moi] introduced and managed the multiparty politics and system of government.” Little was said about the fact that it was Moi who turned Kenya into a de jure one party state, that he only acquiesced to pluralistic politics after Kenyans took to the streets and donors withdrew their funding. Few mentioned the political murders his regime was responsible for, the Nyayo House torture chambers, his single-handed demolition of the economy and the education system, his instigation of so-called “tribal clashes” in 1992 and 1997 in which scores lost their lives.

At least, one would think, we have alternative history in the form of the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. But even here, we have found it hard to resist the urge to edit history. Both State House and Parliament have tampered with the Commission’s findings in an attempt to, in the words of Majority Leader Aden Duale, “improve” it. The Presidency pushed through changes to the land chapter designed to camouflage Jomo Kenyatta’s land grabs and, it appears, Parliament has arrogated to itself the power to “clear” those who are named in the report.

All this fits in to a disturbing pattern that has emerged over the last decade or so and that perhaps has roots that go back even further to the dawn of independence. It speaks to a determination to ignore the past. As a Swahili saying goes, yaliyopita si ndwele., tugange yajayo -which roughly translates to “the past is no disease, let’s cure the future”. We have been constantly and consistently encouraged to let bygones be bygone, to forgive and forget, to accept and move on. But the truth is that the past is a disease. We can no more ignore it than we can any of the other maladies rampaging through our country.

We are deluding ourselves if we think that airbrushing the uncomfortable moments of our history will provide more than a transient relief. Exploding ships and infernos of ivory may look good on TV or on the front pages of the newspapers, but they are no substitute for real action to tackle poaching and the drug trade and to bring culprits to book. Similarly, hagiographic retelling of our history is no substitute for truth and justice.

Photo-ops and makeovers will only take us so far. Eventually we will have to confront reality, whether we are dealing with illicit activity or with the effects of our history. And the longer we put off that confrontation, the harder and more traumatic it will be.

Only Kenyans can save Kenya

A version of this article was published in The Star

Before last weekend, you’d probably never heard of Hussein Farah Wachu. His is not a famous name, though perhaps it should be. A survivor of the infamous Garissa (or Bulla Karatasi) Massacre of November 1980, whose wife was subsequently murdered by an off-duty policeman fourteen years later, Hussein Farah still waits for justice two decades later. He is an example of what the American author, Negley Farson referred to as the “one half of Kenya which the other half knows nothing about, and seems to care even less.”

Last week, I was reminded of the existence of this other Kenya when I participated in KTN’s show, The Bottom Line, which focused on marginalized communities. The show was held in Garissa town and it was there that I came across Hussein Farah, who for years has pursued his wife’s case and even procured a High Court ruling that his wife was indeed killed by the police and that there was an attempt to cover it up. Yet, to date, no one has been prosecuted for the crime and he has received no compensation.

Needless to say, no one has ever been held accountable for the murder and torture of hundreds of civilians during the Garissa massacre, which the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission described as “a systematic attack against a civilian population [which] thus qualifies as a crime against humanity.”
I guess this should not be surprising in a country led by a President and his deputy, both accused of organising similar crimes in the more recent past. But what is surprising is the extent to which the rest of Kenya refuses to acknowledge the brutalisation and marginalisation of communities, especially tough not exclusively, in what was then called the Northern Frontier District, and at the Coast. This tendency to forget, to “accept and move on”, is best captured in the government’s stance towards the TJRC report which was published in May last year but to date remains hostage to political machinations.

That’s not how it was meant to be. According the TJRC website, “the Commission has the power, and is obligated, to publish its final report in the government gazette, and is obligated to make the report ‘widely available to the public in at least three local newspapers with wide circulation.’  While the Commission will also submit its report to the President, it is the Commission, and not the President, that makes the report public.” Now, this has already been done. The full report –minus a minority report on the land chapter (I’ll come to that presently)- is available online.

By now, the 40,000 witness statements, the most collected by any truth commission anywhere in the world, should have been handed over to the Kenya National Archives. This was the first real attempt to begin to tell the story of Kenya from the point of view of the Kenyans who lived it. So why is it not influencing our understanding of our history? Why are the contents of the report not the subject of national debate, whether in Parliament, the Senate or, perhaps more importantly, in the bars and homes where the people of Kenya assemble? After all, as the Chairman of the TJRC (who is himself adversely named in the report along with about 400 other prominent Kenyans) noted, the report was to serve as a starting point for Kenyans to realistically reassess their history and to begin to address the injustices and iniquities slowly rotting away the foundations of our nation.

“The recommendations of the Commission are binding as a matter of law, and thus are to be implemented,” was the TJRC’s interpretation of the Act that established it. The TJRC was mandated to establish an “implementation committee” to monitor and facilitate such implementation and to make quarterly reports to the public which would evaluate the efforts of the Government and others the same. Further the Cabinet Secretary for Justice should be reporting on the same to Parliament every six months, including reasons for any non-implementation.

However, none of this has happened. Some of the TJRC recommendations, like a public apology by the President and the heads of various security institutions to people like Hussein Farah, were supposed to have been honoured by the beginning of this year, and would have perhaps gone a long way in officially acknowledging the pain and beginning the process of healing. The recommended investigation and prosecution of the many politicians and government officials, many of whom still hold public office, has too been ignored.

The Uhuru administration’s standard excuse is that the report is held up in Parliament (which, by the way, wanted to arrogate itself the power to “improve” the report even though the TJRC Act gave it no such role).  However, that doesn’t wash. There has been nothing stopping the government and its agents from commencing investigations into what happened, from addressing cases like Hussein Farah’s and delivering justice to the citizens in the North East and elsewhere.

The answer to the non-implementation of this most important report is to be found in something the TJRC acknowledges: “While the Commission has more powers than any other previous Kenyan commission to ensure that its recommendations are implemented, it is only through the efforts and diligence of elected officials, civil society, and all Kenyans to monitor and ensure that the letter of the law is followed.   The Commission thus urges all Kenyans to take up the cause of making sure that the Commission’s recommendations are in fact implemented.”

The fact is we are all at fault. Our silence and wilful ignorance condemns us all. We all failed Hussein Farah and the many others for whom justice remains as elusive as ever when we refuse to stand up to State House pressure which led to the gerrymandering of the land chapter (and the subsequent issuing of a dissent from the international commissioners which was not included in the final report). We fail them when we do not insist on a prompt and full implementation of the report, including the recommendations on reparations and prosecutions.

We fail them when we do not insist on the repeal of the appalling Indemnity Act which in 1970 illegally gave retroactive blanket immunity to all government personnel for crimes committed during the Shifta war, in which the lives of up to 7000 Kenyans were snuffed out, and during which the government herded the North Eastern population into concentration camps in the same manner the colonial government had done to the Kikuyu population a decade earlier. We fail them when we accept the feeble excuses of the elite for not fundamentally overthrowing the ethos and practices of the colonial state, when we allow them to continue to entrench division, neglect and abuse.

The illusion that marginalisation of faraway places has no consequences for the rest of us is as dangerous as it is false. The alienation of substantial segments of our population, whether in the North East, the Coast, in Nyanza or even in the slums of Kibera and Mathare, has only fostered resentment, violence and a radicalized politics. This anger cannot be wished away. It is already manifesting itself in the legion of young men willing to join the terror group Al Shabaab and bring chaos and death to our streets.

In the end, it is only Kenyans who can save Kenya. It is us who must step up to the plate and demand an accounting for the past, a righting of wrongs. If we don’t, we are only setting ourselves on a collision course with reality and it is unlikely that any of us would escape that unscathed.

The Past Is Never Dead

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun. Over the last week, the truth of that phrase has been reconfirmed in Kenya. Six years ago, the country was almost dissolved in an orgy of bloodletting. Two years later, we inaugurated a new constitution meant to ensure that never happened again. Today, however, the ruling elite is busy recreating the very conditions that led to the violence and making a mockery of the aspirations of millions of our citizens.

It seemed oh so different just over a decade ago, when we thought we were “Unbwogable” and “Yote yawezekana bila Moi”. At the time, as we approached the 2002 general election, everything truly seemed possible and the future was full of promise, not fear. In a very real sense, we were leaving the humiliation, self-doubt, failure, corruption and violence in the past where it belonged, and moving on. 

Sadly though, the past was not through with us. It refused to die. Within months, the politics of ethnicity and corruption would resurface and in five years, we would be at each others’ throat. By 2013, we were most definitely a “bwogable” nation, scared of the thoughts in our own heads and terrified of the future; seeking solace and safety in the very people responsible for taking us to the brink in 2008. 

The past is still not through with us. Last week, we heard the same grumblings about the ethnic preferences characterising presidential appointments that heralded the unravelling of the NARC coalition a decade ago. The same ghost of corruption that haunted NARC from early on is rarely far from nearly every policy proposal made by the Jubilee government. The traditional victimisation and collective punishment of the Somali and Muslim communities is today presented as counter-terrorism policy. 

The imperial presidency has also made a comeback, not only with the unilateral move by President Uhuru Kenyatta to increase the powers of county commissioners but also, apparently, his own to agree security deals worth nearly Kshs. 15 billion to increase its surveillance of Kenyans without seeking Parliamentary approval. He as well chose to ignore the protestations of Parliament and the advice of the Auditor-General and unilaterally authorize the payment of over Kshs. 1 billion to briefcase companies in deals he himself, as leader of the opposition in 2006, had declared to be illegal. 

The past isn’t dead. It refuses to be buried under constitutions that exist on paper but not in hearts. It will not be drowned out by the statements of a government that prefers rhetoric to action. It is not even past but expressed when those close to power can openly discuss the murder of an inconvenient blogger and incite violence against certain communities without fear of prosecution. When the President promises yet more investigations into the AngloLeasing scams while ignoring the Kroll report, which details where the country’s thieving elite has stashed away its ill-gotten gains, and that of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission which offers us a way to begin addressing the decades of state persecution of the citizenry. When his administration presents a budget which allocates more money for his wife’s “hospitality” than to the entire Anti-Terrorism Police Unit and when it refuses to prosecute the poaching kingpins behind the devastation being wrought on our wildlife today. 

We have spent over a decade trying to outrun the past, to ignore it, to hide from it or to hide it. None of that has worked, nor was it ever likely to. The past is something we must acknowledge as being the stuff of the present. “What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare and if we do not begin to confront it, it will also be the stuff of our future. It should be clear that as the very conditions of ethnic polarization, concentration of power, inequality and impoverishment that led to the violence in 2008 are re-established they can only bring about similar results. If we are to get off the cycle of polarization, corruption, poverty and violence, we must learn to do things differently. 

Face up to the past instead of trying to escape it. Perhaps instead of ignoring corruption, we decide to do something about it. Instead of victimising innocents, we try to understand our vulnerabilities to terrorism and to improve the capabilities of our security forces to investigate and prosecute the real attackers. Maybe we try to implement the reports that we commission, to enforce the laws that we pass and to implement, not just the letter, but more importantly, the spirit of our constitution. 

A major theme of Faulkner's, according to Gene Andrew Jarrett, Professor and Chair of the English Department at Boston University, is that “the life of the past in the present and in the future has often been a curse, often too difficult to defeat in one blow." A single act, such as passing a constitution or voting out (or in) a particular leader, is thus unlikely to exorcise our demons. However, if we consistently choose to learn from the past instead of running from it, and resist the temptation to indulge our elites in return for the promise of a temporary safety, we can then have a realistic chance of not repeating it.

A Monument To Exclusion

Kenyans love their monuments. A look around Nairobi's central business district will reveal a good number of them, commemorating everything from the first world war, to the fight for independence, to the KANU dictatorship and even the public transport system.

However, there is one curious and inconspicuous piece of unintentional public art that more than any other speaks to the state of Kenya today. Along Mama Ngina Street, one of the city's only two distinct walkways, stands a City Clock whose base the Nairobi County Government has seen fit to decorate with barbed wire. The message is clear. "No idling about. Keep on walking."

Thus even on one of the few streets that have supposedly been set aside for pedestrians, for the people and not the cars, we are encouraged to keep shuffling along. Not to hang about. We are constantly reminded that the city is not ours and that our presence in it is merely tolerated.

It's location, on the street named after the billionaire wife of the first President Kenyatta, a few metres away from the statue and street honouring Dedan Kimathi, whose revolution was stolen by the political elite her husband and son represent, is a wonderful metaphor for the Kenyan public space, which while pretending inclusion, is actually better characterised by the lack of it. 

Take for example the ongoing debate on the wage bill. It was kicked off a few weeks ago, with a conference of bigwigs bemoaning the burden that their salaries has imposed on "Wanjiku" -the ordinary Kenyan. At this meeting, Wanjiku herself was afforded a hearing, a token appearance that was as brief as it was forgotten. In being included, she was actually being excluded. This was a debate whose terms would be defined, not by those who carry the burdens, but by those who benefit from the current state of affairs.

As it turns out, it is all  a smokescreen, a very clever piece of political judo which seeks to turn the tables on Wanjiku herself: taking advantage of the outcry against the obscene wages and allowances paid to a few public officials to manufacture a crisis and set the stage for rolling back the political order inaugurated in 2010 which mandated the decentralisation and devolution of power. It is a reminder the political elite's historic antipathy to sharing power. In the run up to Independence, as noted by Professor Daniel Branch in the introduction to his book Kenya, Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2012, the KANU delegation to Lancaster House agreed to accept a constitution it did not want on the understanding that once it had the government, it would change what it considered "a temporary document only."

Four years ago, the elite was once again forced to accept a constitution it didn't want. Now it is set to exploit the discussion on it's own wages to undo that document and reinforce the peculiarly Kenyan approach to democracy where the people are encouraged to turn out in large numbers once every five years to rubber stamp pre-determined electoral choices, and then are expected to essentially keep their opinions to themselves in the intervening periods. The illusion, if not exactly the reality, of participation.

Similar tactics were at play last week. On Thursday, President Uhuru Kenyatta delivered his annual address to a joint session of Parliament. The 46 minute speech mentioned the poor thrice: once while recognising that the expansion of VAT "may have been perceived" as hurting them, which he described "as a painful jab," and, twice when announcing "a social safety net programme ... to transfer [untold billions in] cash to the most vulnerable." Far from a jab, this was a sucker punch from a President who justifies the requisition of the resources of the poor and their concentration in the hands of the rich in the name of "funding development" while at the same time pledging fidelity to "the value of inclusion" defined as offering the poor vague promises of handouts.

(A day later, the President met with what were described representatives of the Kenyan Somali community to urge them to fight "terrorism" even as the police terrorized city districts with a significant population of ethnic Somalis, arresting hundreds, including Kenyan Somalis. Despite the harassment, isolation, demonizing and scapegoating of ethnic Somalis and Somali refugees that has been a characteristic of the Kenyatta administration's response to terror attacks, the President continued to pretend inclusion declaring "Muslims are in the center of my government.")

"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," asked Mwai Kibaki in 1964. In fact, as the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission confirmed, and every Kenyan knew, the "Old Establishment" was never overthrown. The colonial state endured and the elites, who have always "encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first and foremost by [tribe]," opted to hype ethnicity to crush demands for redistribution of resources from the centre while paying lip service to the ideal of unity.

Like that City Clock on Mama Ngina street, the wage bill debate is a monument to the deceptive methods that have been utilised by a few to retain power and privilege at the expense of the many. If the rest of us do not come together to call time on such mischief, it will not be long before we wake up to find that the clock has been turned back to a darker era.

Remembering The Year of Forgetting

“Compare the size of the windshield to the the size of the rearview mirror. Let that tell us what we should be paying attention to.” These were the words of then Finance Minister, Amos Kimunya, when making a presentation at the Kenya Diaspora Investment Forum in the US in 2007. As I remarked at the time, the Minister was “urging us to judge the government's performance, not by what it has accomplished, but by what it is promising.”

It was interesting, reading through Deputy President William Ruto’s piece in the Sunday Nation more than six years later, to see how the same message is rehashed. He characterizes the delivery of the Jubilee coalition’s manifesto pledges as a serious commitment, without mentioning that nine months into the first hundred days, we are yet to see the promised free laptops, reduced costs of living, fully stocked hospitals and free primary healthcare. The clear intent of the DP’s article is to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the future of promises, and to lull us into forgetting the realities of the past.

2013 was supposed to be, oh so different. It was to be a special year, a year of remembrance marking five decades of independence from colonial rule. Instead, it turned out to be a year to forget. Or, more accurately, a year of forgetting.

Dominated by what John Githongo had called “the politics of memory" - the essential questions of how to define the past, what to do about it, and how it affects both the present and the future of society- the year saw an all-out an effort by the governing elite to erase their unflattering roles in the tragic events of Kenyan history. Thus it came about that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, both accused at the International Criminal Court of organizing and financing opposite sides in the 2007/8 post-election violence in which at least 1,300 died, came to jointly run for, and ascend to, the highest offices in the land; and that the trials they promised would be personal challenges were transformed into national, even international issues.

The silence that followed the farcical elections in March as well as a ludicrous Supreme Court of Kenya judgment that gave the election results a veneer of legality, if not exactly legitimacy, bespoke of a national conspiracy to abet the forgetting. The local media played its part in this by consistently refusing to question official narratives. Critical inquiry -even after all systems designed to ensure credibility of the poll failed- was not a feature of the election coverage most of which consisted of a call for keeping the peace. “Accept and move on” became the prevailing mantra.

Similarly, when prosecution witnesses begun dropping out of the newly inaugurated President and his Deputy’s ICC trials, little shrift was given to allegations of witness tampering and, bribery and intimidation. Instead all the focus was on the crumbling prosecution case. Notions of justice and of the need to protect witnesses were discarded as the accused were transformed into victims. In fact, there was not so much as a whimper of protest when Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Macharia Kamau, appeared to suggest that many of those displaced by the post-election violence had actually “come out way ahead” because as, he put it, they were landless squatters before and now had the prospect of being resettled.

The forgetting inevitably spilled over into other areas. When the arrivals terminal at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport burnt down in August, the lackluster response was immortalized by pictures of Kenya Defence Forces personnel helping to fight the fire with buckets of water. An embarrassed President Kenyatta promised a full investigation but four months later, the results of the probe are yet to be made public.

A few weeks after the airport fire, 4 terrorists stormed the Westgate Mall in central Nairobi, slaughtering dozens and, if one believes what the government says, keeping hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and police at bay for 4 days. The contradictory and sometimes, downright ludicrous, statements issued by various spokesmen during and after the events, as well as laudable exposes by a few local journalists, laid to waste the credibility of the government’s version of events. Once again, as evidence mounted that the terrorists may have escaped and that security forces had systematically looted the mall, a forensic investigation as well as a Commission of Inquiry were promised and promptly forgotten. The latter was never established and, so far, nothing has been heard from the former. On the contrary, Gen Julius Karangi, whose soldiers so badly bungled the operation has actually been secretly rewarded with an extension of his contract as the head of the Kenya Defence Forces.

By far the worst attempt at erasing the past is the editing of the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, a document containing 40,000 witness statements and that is the first real attempt to tell an aspect of the Kenya’s history through the experience of the Kenyans who lived it. It implicates 400 individuals –the cream of Kenya’s political elite including the governing duo, as well as many of their allies and rivals- in massacres, illegal land grabs, theft and other atrocities that the government has committed against its citizens since colonial times.

Its crucial lesson is ironic considering the Golden Jubilee: the colonial state was never dismantled. Kenya simply exchanged one bunch of oppressors for another. The nation building project has very much been an exercise in forgetting that the relationship between the powerful and the people remains one based on exploitation.

Predictably, there have been moves to water down the report. State House operatives initially delayed its presentation to the President, insisting on changes to the chapter on land which accused the Kenyatta family of irregular acquisitions. On Christmas Eve, the President signed into law an amendment which allows parliament to, as the Majority Leader Aden Duale put it, “improve the report.” Few doubt that this is the prelude to a whitewash.

Just as his father, who as the newly-elected Prime Minister, held a meeting with nearly 400 frightened white settlers to reassure them with the famous refrain ‘We shall forgive but we shall not forget,” (we of course forgot), President Kenyatta is set to issue the same blanket immunity to the 400 blacks who replaced them at the apex of Kenya’s power structure.  In a very real sense, Kenya’s history, and thus its present and future, continue to be refashioned through acts of forgetting. However, this has not proven to be anything more than a passing comfort and the country always seems to end up right where it started. Real and lasting change can only come when the leadership and citizenry develop the courage to remember and face up to the past.

Raining On The Parade

On Thursday, Kenya marks fifty years of independence. Over the next week, I expect that much of the country's news media will be focused on a retelling of the history of the past half century. However, the previews I have seen over the last week do not offer much cause for hope that this will be an exercise in full honesty.

For example, last weekend NTV had two reports on the Kenya Defence Forces: one posing as a history of the force and the other highlighting the KDF's special forces unit. The first totally ignored the numerous atrocities the KDF has been accused of committing in Northern Kenya against its own citizens; the second similarly skipped over the uncomfortable subject of KDF actions during the Westgate terror attack.

So it is clear that this will be a season of hagiography. Kenya will put on its Sunday Best and apply some patriotic perfume to cover the stench of the last five decades. We have already heard former President Mwai Kibaki's version of our history, one which largely edited out the corruption and theft perpetrated by his and previous regimes. The National Assembly has just given itself the power to "improve" the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. The Standard newspaper has even taken to comparing Jomo Kenyatta with Nelson Mandela, declaring that he was accommodating of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, whom he held under house arrest, and Tom Mboya, whom he murdered.

There is obviously little appetite for the truth. Like the coverage of the general election nine months ago, no one wants to be the on to rain on the national parade of self-congratulation, no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Yet, like in March, this is an opportunity for real introspection, a chance to take stock of the achievements and failures of the past and to learn lessons for the present and future. It is an opportunity that we will waste little time missing, but a critical one nonetheless.

So what would we learn if we were honest about the past? At best, it's a mixed bag. At independence, the government identified poverty, disease and ignorance as the most urgent challenges. Fifty years later, it is undeniable that progress has been made. Poverty rates have been lowered, we have more pupils than ever in our schools and life expectancy is as high as it's ever been since independence. We were one of the very few nations in Africa to do pretty well in the 1970s-80s in terms of covering basic needs and have even become a major trading hub in the region, despite up-and-down growth rates. In fact, for the first time in our history, the economy stands a real chance of maintaining a growth rate of above five percent for more than five consecutive years. These are the stories we will likely hear. How we have overcome the legacy of colonialism and put ourselves on the path to wealth and dignity.

Less will be said of the fact that Kenya is actually one of the most unequal places on earth, that much of the progress, especially the growth in incomes, has largely been concentrated in the top five percent of the population. You will probably not hear about the failures of the Free Primary Education policy which has overcrowded the system, destroyed the prospect of quality education and, as whoever could take their kids out did, has driven up the cost of private schooling, locking the poor in a failing system. Or of our over-crowded and understaffed hospitals. Or of the fact that nearly a tenth of all babies do not survive to age five, most dying of preventable causes. The media will not lament the fact that though our lawmakers and government officials are among the highest paid in the world, we have no money to pay teachers, nurses and policemen.

Ordinary Kenyans will be exhorted to pull together for even further progress by 2063. They will be asked to rally behind their government and its visions of progress. They will not be reminded that they are locked in to a system that delays, not expedites, their emancipation from chains of dictatorship and poverty. They will not be encouraged to question the assumptions underlying the definitions of independence and sovereignty and to ask why the system only seems to work for a few.

In 1997, the Swedish Parliament passed the Road Traffic Safety Bill which declared that, "the responsibility for every death or loss of health in the road transport system rests with the person responsible for the design of that system". Think about that for a minute. Road accidents are not the fault of drunk or crazy drivers, of careless pedestrians or stupid cyclists. Instead, as Dinesh Mohan notes, the Swedes put the blame on "the engineers who build and maintain the road and the police department that manages traffic on that road. Not primarily on the people who use the road because it has been demonstrated that road user behavior is conditioned by the system design and how it is managed."

In a similar manner, Kenyan political behavior has been conditioned by the design of our political system and how it has been managed since 1963 and beyond. We have been conditioned to expect failure or at best, mediocrity, from those we pay to deliver services to us. We have been conditioned to accept and move on when elections are stolen, when government revenue is used to line the pockets of elites, when alternative voices are silenced and when the news becomes little more than propaganda.

Kenyans are wont to blame themselves for electing poor leaders, for retreating into tribal cocoons, for driving badly, for the corruption, for the violence and crime. Yet, as Rev Timothy Njoya said recently, that is blaming the victims. We instead need to look at the design of the system we have been laboring under since before independence. We need to scrutinize the conduct of those charged with maintaining it. We must understand why it does not work for us. Why, for example, traffic rules seem to only make money for government and not stem the carnage on roads. Or why constitutional protections seem not to matter when government considers them inconvenient.

According to the World Bank, Kenya has the opportunity to achieve one of the goals we had at independence and eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. To do that, we need to reduce poverty by two percentage points each year. But that would only be possible if economic growth is accompanied by structural changes that reduce inequality and enable the poor benefit from new economic opportunities. We would also need to ensure that safety nets adequately protect them from vulnerability to shocks.

However, for this, and more, to happen, we need to be honest with ourselves about our system and those responsible for it. We will need to expose our past and resist the attempt, whether by politicians or journalists, to improve it. Even when this means raining on the golden jubilee parade.

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.

The Change Merry-Go-Round

The problem with revolutions is that they tend to go round in circles. Over the last half-century, Kenya has seemed to undergo its own slow-motion revolution. We have gone from an oppressive and extractive colonial state, through a repressed one-party dictatorship to a relatively open, somewhat prospering, pseudo-democracy. Two years ago, we made the crowning achievement -for the second time in our history, we had a new constitution.

Yet, it is still easy to despair with Kenya. We still have pretty much the same crooked politicians, the same corrupt and brutal police, a judiciary that despite "radical surgery," struggles with the concept of justice. Poverty and disease and ignorance and violence are still running amok. A lot of times it just feels like we are aboard a change merry-go-round. The more we change things, the more they remain the same. After twenty years of reform, we seem to have to have ended up right back where we started. We created new constitutional arrangements but, at its core, the country didn't change.

It remains very much the product of the colonial past. As the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission reminded us this week, the colonial state was never dismantled. We simply exchanged one bunch of oppressors for another. The relationship between the powerful and the people remains one based on exploitation, not the platitudes of service we are treated to every day. It is still very much a country that defines success in terms of the fortunes of its government, not those of its citizens.

Our first attempt at independence to pour the new constitutional wine into the old wineskins of the of this colonial edifice did not result in the bursting of the latter. Rather, it was the constitution that was extensively mangled, spawning decades of political, economic and social crises.

It's a lesson we should have learnt by now. Our legalistic approach to all kinds of social problems has not worked. The alcoholism ravaging our communities has not been assuaged by passing laws on opening hours. Ever more copious layers of legislation have not brought order to our roads and illegal drugs are still easily available. Since we do not bother addressing the underlying reasons for destructive behaviour, new laws are either ignored or perverted and sometimes create even worse problems.

Similarly, changing constitutional arrangements without changing the nature of these understandings between citizens and those who exercise the authority of the state, and between the citizens themselves, is thus futile. As was the case 50 years ago, a new constitution will not automatically erase either the century-old practices and attitudes in institutions like the police, or the ingrained habits of those who consider themselves our lords and masters.

A new constitution is therefore insufficient to wring the change we desire. We now need to do the work that the independence generation failed to do. We need to engineer a rebirth of the nation. In a sense the real problem with Kenya was always that it's full of Kenyans and to change that means refashioning the very idea of what it means to be Kenyan.

During the struggle for the second liberation, there was much talk of "the Kenya we want". Not much was said about the the Kenyans we want. We must begin there. We could choose to inscribe the constitution on our hearts, to affirm the value of universal values of life, dignity, and liberty; to begin to measure our progress by the quality of life and opportunities enjoyed by our poorest citizens as opposed to that of our richest.

We cannot change the past but we can make our peace with it, and decide not to let it define us. And that's why I think the TJRC report is so important. It is about releasing Kenyans from the shackles of the past and so freeing them to choose their future. It can be the start of a real national self-examination. If we have the courage to do this, then we can finally begin to learn from the mistakes of the past instead of being condemned to repeat them.

What We Must Accept In Order To Move On

It is easy to poke holes into the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. And I'm certain many will seek do so. Journalists are, after all, a pretty cynical lot. We delight in nothing more than tearing down the edifices of officialdom and being the small axe that chops down the big, big tree.

So in the coming days, aspersions will be cast of the report's credibility given the delay in issuing it; the infighting within the commission which dates back to its establishment; the missing signatures on the land chapter and rumours of a minority report; the contradiction of condemning impunity on the one hand and, on the other, seemingly letting off Daniel Arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki despite acknowledgement of the gross violations of Kenyan's rights that happened on their watch.

All these, and many other valid criticisms, will be levelled at the report and at its authors (I've done my share). And it is right and proper that they are. A report such as important as this should be held up to the full glare of public examination. However, as we do so, we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. For despite its failings, and there are bound to be many, this report is a monumental achievement for Kenya.

As we focus on the findings and recommendations of the report, we must keep in mind that it represents the first real and concerted attempt to tell an aspect of the Kenyan story through the eyes and experience of the Kenyans who lived it. The 40,000 or so statements collected by the TJRC, the largest number of statements of any truth commission in history, represent a living history of the troubled times that Kenyans have endured (and continue to endure). It is not a history that you will read in any of the textbooks that purport to teach our children about the travails of independent Kenya. And it is neither a perfect, or even complete, history by any means. It is, though, a valuable start in demolishing the walls of myth, lies and official silences that have surrounded traumatic events, and shedding light on some of the darkest chapters of our common history.

It was critical that these testimonies were recorded before memories faded and the events disappeared into the mists of time. Now the stories, some of which were only whispered in the shadows, have become part of the national record. Lodged at the National Archives, they`should provide fodder for historians seeking to tell a more accurate version of what happened in our past.

For the rest of us, it is important that we hear these Kenyans and recognise that their voices are representative of countless others who remain unseen. We must strive to hear them all. Their testimonies are raw and uncomfortable to hear, but we must not turn away. Their pain is real and cries out for acknowledgement.

But more than merely listening, this report should spark a discussion, a radical and honest reappraisal of our common past, a reformulation of our national identity with the aim of fostering a fresh and deeper understanding of the ties that bind us. The discussion must not, like has been the case previously, be restricted to the ivory towers of academia. It must go on in our homes, in our schools, in our places of worship, in our pubs and in our social gatherings. The stories in the report must become our stories; the pain, our pain.

And that is only the beginning. It would be unreasonable to expect that any one report, however well intentioned and resourced, could  capture every aspect of our history. I therefore hope the report sparks more exploration into the events that make up our past.  We must keep up the effort to fully document, to borrow from Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, the easily forgotten tragedies that occur in places abandoned by government and its enemies.

Finally we should, as a nation, seek to understand how that past still influences attitudes and actions today, how present-day Kenya is very much a product of its past. We must, for example, see the common thread running through the Shifta War, the many atrocities committed by the security forces in the North East and the recent "security operation" in Garissa. We must understand the militancy of the Nyanza politics through the prism of the region's nearly half century of political and economic marginalisation. For it only when we see these linkages that differentiate history from just another interesting story, that transform the accounts into a tool for refashioning our nationhood and for ensuring that we do not continue to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Then, and only then, can we truly and honestly accept and move on.

Oppa Kenyan Style

“This is Kenya and things have to be done the Kenyan style.” That was the angry message reportedly given to Ronald Slye, a commissioner at the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, the body charged with exhuming Kenya's past so we can exorcise the ghosts and lay to rest the fears that have supposedly petrified our national life. His crime was the refusal to "ngo srowry" on the chapter covering political assassinations which, as his Kenyan counterparts recognised, violates deeply entrenched cultural beliefs and taboos.

You see, Slye is American. He and the two other non-Kenyan commissioners seconded to the TJRC by the AU's Panel of Eminent African Personalities -Zambian Gertrude Chawatama and Ethiopian Berhanu Dinka- have failed to appreciate the traditional "Kenyan style" of report writing. Namely, that reports can only reveal the truth when the government has opportunity to frustrate the consequences of such revelations either by withholding the findings from the public or by bungling long-drawn out prosecutions.

The TJRC report, however, does not afford the Kenyatta administration much room for manoeuvre. The report can be made public immediately the President touches it, and indeed the TJRC said to have copies ready to go live on its website once President Kenyatta gives them a date to present it to him. They have been waiting for better part of three weeks though, so I guess he is not too keen to get it.

Also, like the Waki Report, its recommendations must be implemented. The self-propelling mechanisms ensure that once the report is handed over to the President, the wheels of justice are set in motion and the culprits must be brought to book. Even more worrisome, its pages probably contain potentially career and freedom-threatening observations on issues such as grand corruption, illegal land acquisitions and political assassinations

Embarrassing and punishing senior government officials is most definitely not "the Kenyan style." We rather prefer that the foreigners shut up unless they have something positive to say. Just look at where Waki got us -our excellent Excellencies having to endure the ignominy of a trial at the Hague. Therefore, we must all hope that the TJRC has not followed Waki's un-African example and come up with yet another secret envelope to be handed over to Western imperialists in the event of local non-compliance with its recommendations. That might bring the wrath of the gods.

For there is only one thing that is more Kenyan style than impunity. And that is forgetfulness, our time-honoured and traditional tendency to bury our heads in the sand. Our culture does not permit to speak ill of the dead, and that includes those with a deadened conscience, especially when they control our version of the nuclear football. Kenyan style reports should not allow us to learn from past mistakes as doing so risks acknowledging that our ancestral warrior-kings -the heralds of independence and peace and all things democratic- and their present descendants may have made mistakes, or even worse, that they may have knowingly acted in immoral, thieving and murderous ways. Chaos and mayhem, we fear, may be visited upon us as these spirits take their vengeance on our self-righteous souls.

On the other hand, there is no need to waken the spirits of the non-victims of past non-indiscretions though. Their powerlessness and anonymity follows them beyond the grave so long as we have the good sense to ignore them. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Now, since the ignorant foreigners have already raised the spectre of wrongdoing, a traditional cleansing is required. The report must therefore become a whitewash of all sins and must meet with the approval of our priest-king. Any mention of his name, and those of  his friends, must be deleted in the course of this cleansing. In return, he will intercede for us with his glorious ancestors who will resume the flow of riches from heaven and, for the present at least, spare us violence.

In future, fellow Kenyans, if we must remember the past, then let us remember the good times and the silver linings. Our children should only hear the positive and the embellished. Like how we always came first in class, and how they are all descended from great chiefs. We must purge our history books of anything that may be remotely embarrassing, any references to colonial collaborators or murderous and thieving governments. They must understand that all were freedom fighters, especially those who fought from the inside, and all were honest-to-God patriots.

That is the Kenyan style, the path to a Kenyan peace.