You can’t call for law review and silence voices of reason

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that progress flows along a straight line. Great success is often very deceptive. For, sooner than later, we find ourselves in the hard place where we have been before. Philosophers have told us that history is itself cyclic. We rise and rise, until we begin declining. Then we fall. Our children go right where their grandparents were, to begin all over.

If it were not so, we would not remember today, that in 1981 Jaramogi Oginga Odinga wrote a caustic open letter to President Moi. It was an angry yet sober letter, from a pained heart. Jaramogi was concerned about the intolerance in Kenya. Two years earlier, he had been barred from contesting in the General Election. And this year, he had been briefly accepted back into the Kanu fold, only to be dropped like a hot brick, for saying unacceptable things about the late President Jomo Kenyatta. In the letter published in Salim Lone’s Viva Magazine, Jaramogi asked Kenya’s second president to stop behaving as if he had a title deed for the whole country. He told President Moi that Kenyans were not squatters. He asked him to open up democratic space. Every Kenyan had a right to participate in the civic life of the country and to benefit from the opportunities.