By Barrack Muluka

Accept my congenial greetings and message of goodwill in this brand New Year, 2009. Thank you very much for reading this column throughout the just ended year. I am aware that you probably liked some of the things that I wrote, while others rubbed you the wrong way. That is why I am here – to make you alternately happy and angry – provided that the truth is told and that I am fair all the time.

It pleases me to promise you that my pen proposes to be sharper and more forceful than ever, this year.

You will recall that I have previously told you that the greatest want of our times is the want of men and women who cannot be bought or sold, men and women of true and honest hearts. As the poet E G White said, we need men and women who call sin by its name and whose conscience is true to duty as the needle is to the North Pole. Such people will stand for the truth, though the heavens fall.

In my life, I have strived to be such a person. My longsuffering family and I have sometimes paid for this quite heavily. I apologise to my dear family for this.

But they appreciate the value of honesty and uprightness. I am profoundly proud of them in this regard. That is why in this year of Our Lord 2009, my only resolution is to remain the dreamy boy, a graduate of the field and the streets.

I must remain untaught in the school of sycophancy, a man true to his conscience; an admiral sailing the high seas of thought. While some immensely wealthy family heritages can only reek of theft, shame and scandal, mine should glow with pride, respect and honour. We must remain a proud family.

I welcome all those Kenyans who would strive to defend conscience to tarry with me in this New Year. For a start, please join me in calling the lie the screaming that we went through two nights ago. We cursed and shouted away the ended year. It is not hard to understand why, for we saw the face of death in 2008.

In my life, I have been privileged to witness the screaming away of a whole half a century. I can therefore tell you the kind of things that only a seasoned elder can tell you. I can tell you, for example, that a year is a neutral phenomenon.

It can neither be happy nor sad. It is the things that human beings do which make for happy or unhappy results. When they reap the unhappiness that their actions must invariably produce, people go on to condemn the innocent season of harvest. An innocent and neutral year becomes ‘such a nasty year as we should never go through again.’

Weird ways to success

What ill did the year 2008 do against you, my dear reader? Did some virulent virus suddenly slap you from some unknown planet? Was Kenya assailed by some strange force from the outer space, rendering our lives meaningless? The truth of the matter is that we allowed our greed to overtake us, through the years.

We have mutually prayed for the worst plagues to befall whole communities that we consider to be our political and tribal enemies. Not satisfied to wait for the plagues and floods to do them in, we set our country on fire in the name of sorting them out. And now we say 2008 was a bad year. We hope that 2009 will be ‘happy and prosperous.’

But a year does not have its own fluid mechanics that will suddenly render it ‘happy and prosperous.’ That is why Kenyans are unlikely to experience anything different in 2009 from what they did in 2008. As a people, we do not care to climb to the top by simply stepping on someone else’s head and crushing it underfoot.

Our insatiable ends justify the disgraceful means by which we achieve them.

We have yet to appreciate, with Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, that the end must always be preexistent with the means. The New Year can hardly be happy when horrid means justify shameful ends.

When ministers hide behind dubious masks to supply cement and to import maize and wheat without paying duty, the year can be neither new nor happy.

When MPs shamelessly fix their salaries and refuse to pay tax, it cannot be a happy year. Nor can it be one when the sword of Damocles swings dangerously over the head of free media. Indeed, it cannot be a happy new year when the top brass contemplates a new constitution only to the extent that it kites jobs for them and their lackeys.

Sadder still is when we worship tribal warlords and deify political robber barons called tribal spokespersons.

To those who sincerely wish to confront the multiple headed dragon of greed, deceit, tribalism and tribal hero worship; to those who will call sin by its name, regardless of who commits it, and though the high heavens fall, here is wishing you a truly Happy and prosperous New Year.

—The writer (okwaromuluka@yahoo.com) is a publishing editor and media consultant with Mvule Publishers.