Heed Church’s call and help heal the nation

The move by the country’s largest church to speak out on the state of affairs in the country was a welcome move.

Seen as a constant voice of reason when the nation has appeared to go astray, the Catholic Church has once again taken up the mantle of defender of civil rights and rightly called out the Government on an array of problems it has to confront.

Constant corruption scandals, incompetent institutions with flower girl heads, and an apparent decay of our collective morality must all be dealt with.

In this regard, the Catholic Church is right on track with its prognosis of the current state of affairs — Kenya is sick and a lot needs to be done to get it back to recovery mode.

Although its verdict on the performance of the Government was scathing, a responsible Executive will pay attention to what the clergy had to say yesterday and hopefully chart a path to progress for its citizens.

The Catholic Church revisited Tuesday’s ICC ruling in which Deputy President William Ruto and journalist Joshua Sang were technically set free, and cleared of all the charges that had been leveled against them in regard to the 2007-08 post-election conflict.

The asked but yet to be answered question; what happens to the victims now? Who will speak for them?

 Who will take on the arduous task of soothing the post-election violence victims and ensure that they too become part of a healed nation? Or are we as a nation comfortable with leaving hundreds of thousands of Kenyans with scars over their wounds and assume they are healed? This is an issue we must confront.

The Church has been unequivocal — we must hold public officers, elected or appointed, to account for wrongdoing. It singled out three institutions that needed to be streamlined — the Judiciary, the Independent Electoral Boundary Commission and the Kenya National Examination Council.

There was nothing new in these indictments, because the Government and some heads of these institutions have highlighted their misgivings about the operations in these organisations, Kenya is a country on the path of progress and growth.

But before we get to our mecca, the hurdles of corruption, our painful violent political past and a wavering national moral code cannot be brushed under the carpet. To flourish as a nation we must jump over all of them.