Ghost of intolerance back, toting guns

There are always two sides to a coin, and so too in the case of Makueni County, where six were injured in a shoot-out between guards of rival political groups.

Yes, we can lament about the shame of political violence and the flagrance of intolerance, clannism and tribalism.

We can even condemn the chaos as symptomatic of the crude nature of our politics, where opponents or those whose opinion or ideology (if ever our parties have such a thing) you disagree with, are automatically branded your enemies.

Before we come to the gun drama that involved bodyguards of Members of the County Assembly and their Governor Kivutha Kibwana, let us scan the country’s political terrain over the last few months.

In Migori, there was heckling among rival groups right in the middle of a presidential function, and as the temperatures rose - thanks to the money poured to unemployed youths by their political benefactors - shoes were thrown around.

In Nakuru, a soft-spoken Governor Kinuthia Mbugua who, for those who have not met him, looks soft and harmless, zoned off his county (as if he has the powers) against referendum campaigns.

In the voice of the former head of Administration of Police, roared the echoes of the old politicians who had declared their regions ‘Kanu Zones’, meaning then Opposition leaders such as Mwai Kibaki, Raila Odinga, Kenneth Matiba, Kijana Wamalwa, James Orengo, George Anyona and Ahmed Bahamriz, would not be allowed to set foot.

In those years, there was something called the ‘Kanu Briefs’ in the defunct Kenya Times newspaper which was owned by the Jogoo party, and I remember one paragraph from my college days: “Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s favourite radio programme appears to be Matangazo ya Vifo (Death announcements) where he gets a list of funerals to attend in Luo Nyanza and preach the politics of backwardness and rebellion.”

Around this time, the late burly and cantankerous Local Government minister Stanley Shapashina Oloitiptip had found time in his busy schedule as Kenya’s number on polygamist to lambast the Luo (which was a pet subject then because they were deemed anti-government) as a people, “who worship Jaramogi as their Messiah and Gor Mahia as their religion’’.

So this is the age that Kinuthia’s statement rekindles, the years where dissent was crushed and opponents kept away as if they were the lepers in the Old Testament. This intolerance is also manifest in the way some “Jubilee damu” MP has come up with a Bill seeking to block funds to counties whose Governors support the Pesa Mashinani referendum initiative.

You would think the people who live in those counties are not Kenyan citizens and taxpayers too. All that this chap is doing is to enhance the game of using the people as political pawns, for or against a certain personal cause.

In the old times, Opposition figures would tell you that if they had loans they were quickly recalled so as to push you either to bridle your tongue and slow your actions, or goad you to the abyss of poverty and bankruptcy.

If you recall the layman’s definition of bankruptcy in class then, it was inability to transact business costing as little as one shilling, and if proven in court, you automatically lost your elective seat.

May be the reasoning was that broke guys would spend time in office devising ways to steal and make up for their shrunken earnings, than in doing the work they were employed to do.

There have been other cases of political intolerance and nowhere else is it summed up as we said last week, than in the one and only Aden Duale, the venerable Leader of Majority in Parliament.

His beef with Bomet Governor Isaac Ruto is that he has chosen to work with ‘the other side’. After the confrontation in Narok, two things have happened: Duale has repeated the line that county funds don’t belong to Isaac Ruto’s family (he had said his mother before), and URP, true to the old political lessons learned years ago, initiated a process to expel the Bomet Governor from the party.

Again, it just serves to demonstrate how we quickly view a person we disagree with politically as an enemy whose neck, if we could, we would chop off and walk away as the thing falls to the ground.

But back to Makueni; the gun drama reminds us that indeed our political rivalries are also moving with  modernisation, where the bullet is taking the place of the stones and shoes that used to be hurled at political rivals in the past.

This is both dangerous and begs the question; how many guns are in private hands and are they all deserved or merited in the strict sense of estimation of the potential dangers the applicants present to the licensing officer?

How on earth, because the police said so, can MCAs not only have guns and armed bodyguards too? Does it mean incidents like those of an MP attacked by a mentally-unstable man in Ndia, are so frequent and they all need all these arsenals wherever our elected leaders step out of their offices and homes?

What about you and me, what happens when we tie down our police to protecting politicians and their families?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but I remember how I felt when an MP claimed journalists were behaving like monkeys given guns, but it is a relief to see that the guns actually went to monkeys in a different forest.