This is not time for tribal groupings

If you live in the United States and are not white, there is a movement of racists who remind you that you don’t belong, and that some day you must return from whence you came.

Members of this movement are identifiable by their white masks and robes. This is the dreaded Ku Klux Klan (KKK) or simply, The Klan.

Lately, our politicians have been romanticising the notion of another three Ks — the brand new Kamba, Kalenjin, Kikuyu till-2012-do-us-part solidarity.

This marks the return of the single most dangerous enemy of the country’s on-going cohesion and reconciliation efforts — tribal chieftains who will scale any heights to extend their political sell-by dates.

It took only a few shouts of ‘stolen elections’ in 2007 to unleash an unprecedented bloodletting. Now some people aren’t willing to think before using the Mau Forest eviction to stoke the fires of hatred and return the nation to the killing fields.

They want to sail the murky, political waters to 2012 on MV Makabila, and think that their plan is strategic. If you are Kamba, Kikuyu or Kalenjin and are tempted to think these leaders are right, then you should know you are supporting chaos and strife.

Tribal axis

Other tribes could also pick this bizarre cue and form tribal axis’s and stand in the way of ‘The Grand March’ by the big three.

Instead of wasting precious time on useless gambits that don’t add value, we should prioritise what urgently needs our attention and leave the rest for later.

Let’s help the citizens who have been sucked into the Mau evictions brouhaha and remove them from the roadside camps. We also have IDPs who are yet to be settled two Christmases later.

Let’s also brace for The Hague’s investigation into post-election violence.

{Kabaria Muturi, Nairobi}

Tribal chauvinism is a threat to national reconciliation and stability in any country.

In the name of a referendum in 2005, we balkanised and polarised the nation. Two years later, poor Kenyans massacred one another in the name of a stolen election.

People were maimed, killed and burnt alive, acts that should remind us of the cruelty of negative ethnicity.

Therefore, the debate on the KKK alliance should not be given space and time to take root. The alliance’s architects are political opportunists, but their rhetoric is not what Kenyans want to hear.

We do not need a Kamba, Kikuyu, and Kalenjin alliance. Neither do we need a Luo, Kalenjin, and Luhya alliance.

For heaven’s sake, Kenya has more than 42 tribes. If we need a political alliance, then the 42-plus tribes must all be represented. This is what national harmony and cohesion is all about.

While we should not tolerate the manner in which poor Kenyans are being evicted from the Mau, we should never politicise environmental issues.

Any misgivings in the way Government is running its affairs should be addressed in diplomatic and amicable ways.

Kenyans will rise and fall as one, whether poor or rich, educated or uneducated, or whether Luo, Kamba, Mijikenda, Kalenjin or any other tribe.

{Christopher Mutisya, Nairobi}