What The Elite Don't Want Us To See

A version of this article was published on Aljazeera Online

Just over a month ago, Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga returned from what he described as a three-month sabbatical with a call for a national dialogue and announced a series of countrywide political rallies culminating on the historic Saba Saba (or 7/7 for the 7th of July), the anniversary of a banned 1990 rally, a highlight of the push for what came to be known as "the Second Liberation".

It is a hugely significant date. During the fight against the Moi dictatorship, Saba Saba came to be a symbol of defiance, a reminder of the time when Kenyans faced up to and overcame their fear of the regime. Today, however, it is proving to be the exact opposite. Raila's return has rallied both friend and foe in a way perhaps only he can. In his absence, Kenyan politics sometimes seemed all at sea, the opposition completely rudderless as waves of scandal threatened to beach the Jubilee government itself. But now, the opposition have their champion and the elite it's bogeyman.

The scare-mongering has since begun in earnest. The country was already on edge following the many unresolved terror attacks -mostly blamed on the Somali insurgent group, Al Shabaab. Intemperate politicians on both sides have been fanning the flames of tribal hate, and social media has filled with the same kind of vitriol seen before and after last year’s general election. The government has done little to calm the fears. Quite the opposite. Despite token attempts at investigating and prosecuting hate speech, the Uhuru administration has largely regarded the situation as a political opportunity and engaged in more than a little scare-mongering of its own.

Both deliberately and by dint of its incompetence, it has driven the fear into overdrive. When gunmen stormed the coastal town of Mpeketoni and slaughtered nearly 60 people, the ineptitude of the security services was only overshadowed by the cynical attempt by President Uhuru Kenyatta and his henchmen to politicize the tragedy and blame it on the opposition. In an ill-advised statement to the nation, the President got into an unseemly blame game with the Al Shabaab who claimed responsibility for the attack. The government, however, had other ideas, preferring to point the finger at nebulous "local political networks," and to paint it as motivated by the kind of ethnic disharmony it claimed the opposition was causing with their meetings.

With Saba Saba now upon us, the media is inundated by appeals to peace and stability. Business and religious leaders as well as foreign ambassadors have issued calls for politicians not to "raise political temperatures" -shorthand for Raila to call off the rallies. A national day of prayer has been scheduled at the President's request. A bunch of folks calling themselves Kikuyu elders, have carried out supposed traditional cleansing ceremonies at Uhuru Park, the venue of the rally, and expressed dark forebodings of the coming chaos and bloodshed.

We have been here before. Just as in the run up to the March 2013 election, Kenyans are being scared into silence; into not asking uncomfortable questions; into turning a blind eye to government malfeasance and into acquiescing in the derogation of the fundamental freedoms.

That derogation has already begun with a High Court judge reportedly issuing (and later rescinding) orders barring Raila and his fellow CORD leaders from calling for mass action, despite the clear constitutional protections for "the right, peaceably and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket, and to present petitions to public authorities." The court apparently declared CORD leaders would be held personally liable for any damage caused during the rally, a ruling which would set a chilling precedent for any organisers of public protests or demonstrations. It is not unheard of for such to be infiltrated by thugs and troublemakers who may be hired by the authorities themselves to discredit the protesters.

The fact is neither the government nor the opposition has shown any interest in addressing the root causes of failures of the last 15 months. Neither has demonstrated any willingness to examine the historic and systemic issues behind the authorities' inability to protect the people, to confront the spectre of grand corruption, the rising cost of living, the crisis in education. They have shown little interest in the lessons contained in the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission.

Why would something as mundane in a democracy as an opposition political rally cause such uproar and fear? The problem is not with the rally, but with the shaky democracy. The terror reveals the hollowness of Kenya’s democratic transformation. Just as the problems with the 2013 election were swept under the carpet of "peace", so today Kenyans are being told to either shut up and go to work, or to call for a dialogue which is more about giving opposition politicians a chance to “eat” than with resolving fundamental problems.

Like they have done over the past 50 years, our political elite is determined to hype ethnic differences as a cover for its thieving ways. It is creating tribal animosity and fear to circumvent real and meaningful discussion over the causes of our penury, over the real reasons for our insecurity and why it is that the exercise of constitutionally guaranteed rights by even a section of Kenyans generates such terror.

They do not want us confronting our fear and realizing that it has been wielded as a weapon against us by the people in State House, in Orange House, in the fancy mansions governors are building across the country on the backs of their subjects, in Parliament and County Assemblies, and in the gleaming towers of big business.

They do not want us to see the systems of oppression of privilege and oppression that have been maintained since colonial times, to understand how these constantly work to extract dignity, rights and resources from the majority and bestow them upon a minority at the top.

The truth is the shenanigans and fear-mongering surrounding the Saba Saba rally have nothing to do with improving the welfare of Kenyans. On the contrary, they are about distracting us from the farmhouse window and from seeing that the pigs have hung us out to dry – that the Liberation has been stolen.

Correction:
Apparently High Court Judge Isaac Lenaola did not reverse himself on the matter of mass action but did lift his earlier order that the CORD leaders would be held responsible for any loss emanating from possible violence at the rally.

The Kenyan Roulette

Once, when I was young boy, one of my numerous uncles, a policeman by trade, came calling. He had with him a rifle and he set it down in the corner of the room. I couldn’t take my eyes of it as he and my dad chatted away. Its presence in the room was both terrifying and comforting. Terrifying because of what it could do. Comforting because, at least in my childish imagination, it would be doing it on my behalf, wielded by people on my side against those who would do me harm.

As I have grown older and hopefully wiser, I have come to see that the state’s capacity for violence is rarely comforting, that the state rarely wields its violence on my behalf. Rarely does it carry guns into homes to protect the people within. Neither is it a source of comfort to encounter them in the streets.

Though we like to tout ourselves as exceptional, as an island of peace, Kenya is actually a very violent place, where the language of violence is routinely used to mediate relationships, between parents and their children, teachers and their students, the men and their women, the rich and the poor, the state and its subjects Security and peace seem to have become the passwords to a system of exclusion that means at any time any of us could be at the receiving end even as we declare we have peace and security. On the receiving end, in fact, to preserve peace and security.

Violence has become normalized, acceptable, desirable even. It has become a way to build the nation by constantly defining ourselves in terms of opposition to one another. Kenyanness is constantly recreated  by acts of violence. Thus it becomes the height of patriotism to call for a war with Uganda over a tiny piece of rock in Lake Victoria. And unpatriotic to question the actions of the government in Somalia or in a shopping mall in Nairobi.

In the aftermath of the Westgate attacks, Kenya will again be redefined by the violence we will mete out against those we have othered. Today it is the Muslims, the refugees, the Somalis, and the Somalians. There will be little outrage when doors in Eastleigh are kicked down and people in Garissa are hauled away and some village in Somalia is leveled the name of fighting terrorism. Just as when it’s the turn of civil society activists and ICC witnesses to be threatened or hunted down in the name of preserving a tenuous peace. Before them, the Kikuyu, the Luo, the the Kalenjin the Oromo, the Sabaots, the Pokot, the Turkana, the Whites, the Indians. Everyone gets their turn on the Kenyan Roulette.

In this Republic of Fear, there is little need for justice, or values, or rights. Only someone on whom to focus our ferocity, and with whose body and dignity to establish our claim to togetherness. We constantly terrorize and dehumanize. It is a place where the victims of that violence are told to accept and move on. Where cops laugh at women reporting rape. Where a senior public official can tell the hundreds of thousands displaced by the 2007/8 post-election violence that they came out “way ahead” and face no opprobrium. It is a place where we fight, not to end oppression, but for our turn to be the oppressors, our turn to eat.

The republic is defined by the very violence we say we want to end but yet celebrate. Where the fear, adorned in the language of civility, is what unites. Where we are one because, not despite, our terror of one another. A place where reconciliation becomes a euphemism for “until next time.” A place where economic growth need not generate good jobs nor end poverty, where the purveyors of violence take what they want, when they want. Where we dare not question official truths lest we are ourselved othered.

I suppose we are not unique. It is in the nature of states to be violent. They are after all the product of exclusion. Parceling out the world according to arbitrary imaginary lines drawn on maps by men of power can only create communities where the state is allowed to decide who is a human being and who is not and where we can legitimately have otherwise obscene arguments over who deserves dignity and who doesn’t. Where humanity is accessed and indeed defined by things like citizenship and passports and IDs, the state gets to certify your very existence and can declare you a non-person.

The malevolent power, represented by the menacing presence of that gun in the corner of the room, can only offer a temporary comfort, an illusory safety, a false peace. True comfort will only come with true community, when we embrace our humanity and refuse to be defined by the logic of the state, by the logic of othering, the logic of fear. When we are one with all, not just with those who look like us or speak like us or believe what we do. Otherwise, we'll just have to take our chances on the roulette.

The Republic Of Fear

It used to be we were only afraid of the state and its capacity for illegitimate violence. We blamed politicians, not opinions, for inciting tribal clashes. It was the government, not citizens, which gagged the press or forbade dissent.

No more.

Welcome to the Republic of Fear. Where terror rules and citizens are frightened of what lurks in the dark recesses of their hearts. It is a country where no questions are allowed which may break uncomfortable silences or awaken the ghosts of deadened intellectual faculties.

This is the nation we are building in Kenya. A country of official truth. When citizens feel disenfranchised by bungled elections, we tell them to shut up and keep the peace. Wait for the Supreme Court to tell you what you should or should not think. Do not trust yourself, just as we do not trust you.

Well, the Supreme Court has given its ruling. The election and declaration of Uhuru Kenyatta as President-Elect were done in conformity with the law. That is the official truth. We will wait for two weeks to learn of the reasons underlying it. In the meantime, we are told to keep calm. In the Republic of Fear, inconvenient opinions and uncomfortable thoughts are banned. But, unlike in the past, this is not a ban enforced by the security agencies. It is imposed by mobs of citizens which roam our airwaves and digital superhighways, armed with virtual machetes and ready to hack away at the first hint of free thinking.

We have already let them burn down the temples of dissent. Our famously rumbustious press now remains mute when expensive BVR kits and results transmission systems don’t work and when the IEBC presents woolly sums, and when protestors (today called rioters) die following the Supreme Court verdict. Our civil society organisations have been silenced by dubious allegations of pursuing foreign agendas. When politicians kiss and make up, "historical grievances" and the IDPs they have generated disappear.

Only official election results matter -or more accurately, only the official version of election results matters. Media houses with reporters on the ground at all polling stations cannot call the election as their sums may differ from official tallies. And if they do differ, they are not to ask questions. The official truth trumps all! Today our journalists are reduced to performers and comedians – a role they seem to have accepted with relish as cheerleaders for the “Keep the Peace” and “Let’s Move On” bands.

But what exactly are we moving on to? Rather than signal Kenya’s rise from the ashes of the violence of five years ago, the elections have revealed just how much further we still have to go. We have spent the last half-century of independence in a battle against the state, in an effort to tame and reform it. In large measure, the people’s triumph, as reflected in the new constitution, has turned out to be a hollow victory.The struggle against the state obscured a much more fundamental challenge. With these elections, that mask has been removed. It is now obvious that the real enemies lie within. It is our passions and minds that need reforming. It is our fear and distrust of one another that need taming.

No longer can we just blame a thieving political class. It is rather a time for deep reflection on our own conduct and beliefs. The media can and should lead this effort. It is the least they can do to begin to atone for their own conduct over the last month.