KENYA: The Inspector General of Police yesterday ordered six Members of Parliament to record statements for making utterances deemed inflammatory and likely to cause a breach of peace.
For Moses Kuria (Gatundu South) and Ferdinand Waititu (Kabete) this is not strange territory. Kimani Ngunjiri (Bahati) is accused of mobilising youth who tried to eject CORD leader Raila Odinga from a meeting in Nakuru on Saturday.
Not to be outdone, the Opposition CORD's response was equally vitriolic. Three of its politicians, responding to the Jubilee hate mongers, uttered, in front of media, remarks which were no less reckless and toxic. The primitive ideology of an eye for an eye is what Timothy Bosire (Kitutu Masaba), Junet Mohammed (Suna East) and Aisha Jumwa (Kilifi County Women Rep MP) seemed to propagate.
Yet two wrongs do not make a right.
Be they Jubilee or Cord, the politicians' outbursts send the wrong signals to a nation that is already deeply divided along political and tribal lines. They are unnecessarily pushing up the country's political temperature a whole one-and- a- half years to the General Election. That ought to stop.
It is as if the 2007/08 Post Election Violence never happened: No one remembers the 1,133 that died and the hundreds of thousands others who were displaced. Yet 2007 was a chilling lesson on the blood-soaked dangers of ethnicity and political brinkmanship. Right-thinking Kenyans have a reason to feel let down by the politicians; they have a reason to reject the low road that our politics has taken.
The names may change, but the culprits come draped in the same garb. Mr Kuria and Mr Waititu have run afoul of the law in the past and have pending cases of incitement in court.
That the three were still roaming around as free men, stoking ethnic distrust and tension with abandon, is a sorry commentary on our law enforcement agencies and a tragic reflection of our casual view of hate speech as a political crime.
They spewed tribal bigotry before witnesses at the weekend, and no-one had moved against them a whole 24 hours later, until the CORD trio seemingly acting from the same base motives, stepped up to serve Kenyans more of the same hateful script.
Why are the police and the National Cohesion and Integration Commission unable to act swiftly on this odious crime? Are they cautious to a fault or do they lack the capacity to save this nation from destroying itself? When they act, they make this most grievous of transgressions look like a joke. For a past transgression, for instance, Mr Kuria was asked to issue a public apology published in a national newspaper. Nothing else.
Yet to rely exclusively on laws and punishment as means of stamping out tribal hatred is to misunderstand the nature of the beast. Kenya's bane is the politics of exclusivity that is devoid of issues and where the winner-takes-it-all. Our nation's undoing is the neanderthal culture of political mobilisation based on tribe and kin. Corruption feeds off this form of politics.
Therefore, it will take more than laws to create a harmonious society. A cultural shift championed by enlightened example from the men and women who lead us is the place to start. Thereafter, the law can foster our aversion to negative ethnicity.
