Uhuru Should Lead or Get Out Of The Way

"Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony." It is a line from the hit movie, The Matrix, that our "Digital Government" should be intimately familiar with. On the day that Uhuru Kenyatta stepped on the plane to London on his maiden visit as President to a Western capital (we had all thought that would be elsewhere), it was reported that his hosts in the British government were finally taking steps to address the impunity surrounding historic crimes perpetrated during the MauMau uprising.

The timing of the visit is, of course, ironic because our dear President himself faces his "personal challenge" across the Channel with regards to his alleged role in funding murderous militias during the 2008 post-election violence. He is expected to receive an invitation to visit there soon, though not necessarily in his illustrious capacity.

However, his trip to the UK is also ironic because of some nasty business he has left undone back home. Last week, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, which was created to "establish an accurate, complete and historical record of violations and abuses of human rights, committed between 12 December 1963 and 28 February 2008," took out acres of newspaper space to announce that it had completed its report and was about to hand it over to the President. In fact, it gave the day for the handover as Thursday, 2 May 2013.

Well, it transpires that the President was apparently unable to make the time to receive the report. Now, most of the Kenya media are familiar with his "personal challenge" when it comes to punctuality. However, given the importance of this report, one would have expected more than a few eyebrows to be raised. The TJRC is expected to provide details regarding to abductions, disappearances, detentions, torture, murder, massacres, extra-judicial killings, crimes of sexual nature against female victims and expropriation of property suffered by Kenyans in the last half century. Its report should expose those responsible for gross violations of international human rights law and make recommendations. Further the report will look into historical injustices affecting the irregular and illegal allocation of public land, economic crimes including grand corruption, the perceived economic marginalization of communities and misuse of public institutions for political objectives.

In short, the TJRC will  exhume the ghosts of the past and give the country an opportunity to finally confront them. The need for such a reckoning cannot be gainsaid. The just ended elections exposed deep faults in our body politic, many of which reach all the way down to the foundations of our nation. The presentation of this report was to inaugurate a season of debate and reflection on the report leading to a critical reevaluation of our common history and a new understanding of the basis of our nationhood. Such an outcome would improve prospects for a real peace, real justice, real national unity, real healing, real reconciliation and real dignity for the people of Kenya.

However, with his disappearing act, the President has effectively put off that discussion. TJRC officials, while not speculating on the reasons for the snub, say that they cannot release the report findings until he has officially taken possession of it. Shortly after the handover, they planned to have the entire report posted online, for once circumventing the presidential prerogative of deciding what we could and could not be told about our past and the acts perpetrated by the state in our name.

Perhaps it's too much to expect our feckless journalists to ask about this. After all, they have not seemed overly  concerned over the violations of citizens' rights that we have witnessed in more recent times.  Just a day before the report was to be presented,  the cantakerous and obnoxious COTU boss Francis Atwoli declared before both the President and the Nairobi County Governor, Evans Kidero, that he had his own "army" to deal with troublemakers such as pesky political activists, Nary a question was raised. No one has since asked our dear President why he stayed seated when Atwoli ordered police not to interfere as his goons proceeded to "deal" with Boniface Mwangi. Today, none of them questions why it is the battered and bruised activist who is on trial while Atwoli and his thugs roam the streets free.

Then again we shouldn't be too harsh with the press. Their fear of truth, their propensity to put off till tomorrow the thinking that can be done today, their worship of empty celebrity and their celebration of mediocrity - all these are endemic within our society. Our fake news is a reflection of our fake society. Or is it our society of fakes? After all, many had pledged support for Boniface Mwangi's protest. A few even turned up at Uhuru Park. But when he stood up, he was alone. No one stood up for him when he was assaulted.

All this is reminiscent of the days when we keep ourselves locked in our homes when our neighbours are attacked, hoping we won't be next. Or when we watch impassively as girls are pulled kicking and screaming out of matatus and gang-raped, thinking our own daughters are immune. When we laugh at women being publicly humiliated for "dressing indecently." When we condone the abuses meted out by the authorities in far away places like Garissa.

We must shed this cloak of fear that holds us back from articulating a more useful and confident narrative of citizenship. We should once and for all confront our demons and lay them to rest. The President, who perhaps has more of them to face than most, should either lead the effort or get out of the way. We do not have time to waste and we cannot afford another false start.

Of Neighbours and Machetes

National security has always been the excuse of choice for repressive governments seeking to clamp down on dissent. It is such an attractive ploy because the definition of what constitutes national security, let alone a threat to it, is not only extremely vague but very much dependent on what shadowy figures with "intelligence" declare it to be.

It is they who have the wisdom to handle the sorts of information and knowledge that could not be possibly entrusted to Ordinary Joe. All he is asked to do is sign the checks and trust that whatever is done in his name is for his own good, even though it may require the sacrifice of some essential liberties.

In the just concluded elections, the perceived threat to national peace and stability was again the weapon of choice against dissent, wielded not just by the government, but also by a society uncertain of what it would do if it were shown the intelligence. The violence of just five years ago fresh on our minds, we became a terror unto ourselves.

In 2007, so we are told, historical grievances, sparked by the refusal to accept a stolen election, led to a spontaneous orgy of killing and destruction. This, I think, is largely a work of fiction. Or at best, it is a selective retelling. It seems pretty much everyone who has looked into it has concluded that most of the violence was premeditated and prearranged. Meetings had been held and targets pre-selected; pre-outraged thugs had been paid, prepped, armed and ferried about. Politicians and radio stations incited, homes and churches were burnt and people died.

Today, it is not the fact of pre-ordained violence that we are constantly reminded of. Rather, it is the refusal to accept the official version of events, what many saw as a plainly fraudulent outcome, that is portrayed as the casus belli. The narrative of our sojourn into hell has been spun as a consequence of defying our betters, of demanding to see the intelligence and make up our own minds. If only we knew our place, accepted and acquiesced, then things would have been Oh! so different.

Now, this was far from the first election to have been stolen in Kenyan history. In fact, since the return of multi-party politics, the results of every single presidential election, except the 2002 one, have been disputed. Those in control of the state, as well as their rivals for that control, have been primarily responsible for the political violence that accompanied these contests but have sought to paint it as spontaneous "tribal clashes" over historical grievances. Regardless of the fact that it was actually their greed and ambition that created these grievances in the first place, in the official (and increasingly popular) narrative, it is the victims, both historical and current, who bear the blame.

This narrative has transformed what is essentially a political negotiation between individuals over control of state resources using militia and IDPs as pawns into a tribal fight between the communities they claim to represent. By articulating reality in this way, politicians have managed to socialize responsibility for corruption and violence while paradoxically, privatising the benefits of power. Thus the actions of any politician become identified with those of his tribe, his thievery becomes that of the tribe, his violence that of the tribe.

We have bought into this crude version of events in which the victims have donned the garb of perpetrators. Instead of blaming individuals for fomenting chaos, we have chosen to see entire communities as culpable. We accepted the "official truth" that we were all responsible for the 2007 tragedy, that we were all potentially murderous. In doing so, we have generated a climate of fear and hatred wherein every dispute is seen as an existential threat. Since every neighbour is a potential machete-wielding psycopath in disguise, every action and utterance is the potential spark for mindless, all-consuming violence. This is the genesis of our mutual terror of one another, the consequent quashing of dissent, and the loud and incessant calls for a peaceful silence.

To extricate ourselves from this pernicious ideology, we need to go back to the beginning. To recognise that we have been gullible and begin to reconstruct narratives that more accurately reflect the truth. The report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, due out in a month's time, will be crucial in this endeavour. If the Commission is true to its mandate, the report will lay bare the iniquities of the past and give us an opportunity to rethink the lessons we have drawn from it. Perhaps then we can begin to identify for ourselves where the real threat to our collective security comes from.