If the op-ed proposing the Kenyan divorce had been written by a less distinguished scholar, I would have dismissed it without further thought. In any case, every so often some headline hunting politician will pronounce the need for "his people" to depart, now that they have been excluded from national cake eating. But the piece came from Dr David Ndii, a man whose intellect I have the highest regard for. There has been as much support as there has been opposition to Dr Ndii's piece, including the ridiculous calls for his arrest. I want to pen my two cents worth because I believe that Dr Ndii was a "thought provocateur" presenting his case in the extreme so as to generate debate. I would be horrified to imagine that he intended to be taken literally; that would tell me that he, like many intellectuals before him, has lost the plot.
Dr Ndii in his piece recognised, which any honest Kenyan has long recognised, that we are caught up in a troubled union; the analogy of a marriage is rather simplistic for a complex thing as the Kenyan Nation is. The dreams that sent people to the Aberdare forests, produced freedom fighters like the late Arap Samoei and later bore the likes of Tom Mboya have long turned into nightmares for the Kenyan majority. What Dr Ndii implicitly assumed is that the troubled union is between ethnics and that one or two ethnics have received an unfair share of the marital blessings. Consequently in his view, if we divorced these ethnics, the new singles could do better alone or better yet look for new suitors!