Kenya could lose another chance to institute peaceful change

By Barrack MulukaI have taken another leap into the future, courtesy of H G Wells’ Time Machine. I always do this during crises. Wells’ Time Machine is a veritable Deus ex machina – a goddess out of a machine. It can take you into any age and time in history. It can take you anywhere in the universe. All you have to do is to close your eyes and make a wish. Before your can say "H G Wells" you will be there.So, for my part, whenever I want to run away from the discomfitures, the cares and wherefores of life and from the vagaries of the political class, I take a leap into another age and space. Today I have elected to run into the future. It is the year 2108. I am a visitor, newly arrived in Kenya from the outer space.It is a desolate and disconsolate place I have come to. The country is still trying to come to terms with the atrocious events of 2012 to 2030, which shook the entire Eastern Africa and the whole Great Lakes Region to its very core. I am seated somewhere in a little dingy hall. They call it Town Hall in the ramshackle Nairobi that they are trying to reconstruct after a wasteful internecine war that burst its banks and engulfed the entire Eastern Africa region. A professor is revisiting the war and prescribing the way forward. He has noted with profound regret that at the beginning of the millennium the political class paid earsplitting lip service to something they called Vision 2030. They made believe that Kenya would become a world class country, whatever that meant. Ironically, the only significant thing was that that was the year when the taps of human blood that began in 2012 eventually dried up.I listen intently as he recalls the country’s tragic story. "The year 2002 was a turning point when history failed to turn," he says. "But it is not exactly true that history failed to turn. For history does not turn itself; it is turned. So, to get it right, let us say that President Kibaki, the country’s third Head of State and Government, refused or failed to turn history. Kenya experienced a revolution in 2002. But it was a revolution without revolutionaries."Here was a country that had gone through 40 years of misrule under a one-party hegemony. It reeled under a morass of corruption, mismanagement, tribalism, nepotism and other assorted malpractices. Something was going to give way. Then with one accord, the country decided to redeem itself by decisively voting for change. Habit of braggingBut the new managers refused change, taking up, instead, all the bad sweet things from the past and perfecting their badness. The poor became poorer, the rich richer and haughty. There were no standards, no systems, no parameters, no nothing! Hypocrisy, lies, sycophancy was the path to good living. "Government functionaries were in the habit of bragging about how the economy had grown. But the ordinary people could not feel that growth in their stomachs and pockets. Looking at the lifestyle of the ruling class and how so quickly every new government big cat got grotesquely fat and splashed and flaunted opulence, however, it was clear that yes, the economy was growing. But the structural arrangement did not allow the benefits to flow. "In a rare show of arrogance, the government conspired in November 2005 to deny the people a new Constitution they so much yearned for. Mercifully, some ministers voted with the people to defeat an even worse Constitution the Government wanted to give them. At the next General Election, in December 2007, many hoped to kick out a government they considered flawed in all ways an African government could be flawed, and worse. But the election was either stolen, or appeared stolen. We will never know."What we know, however, is that top leaders sponsored people to murder one another. The people were cannon fodder in a political power game by Raila Odinga, a self-mystifying political nonconformist who thought he owned people and Kibaki, a political operator whose sinister smile masked a lot of things. An internationally supported investigation into the violence in which thousands had been killed, women raped, property torched and unmentionable things done was rubbished by a self-serving and guilt-ridden political elite. They cast the truth, justice and common decency into the dustbin."And so Kenya lost another chance to institute peaceful change. A hitherto mutually acrimonious political elite toned down its reciprocal rhetorical hostility. It accepted, at last, that it was bound together in a structural conspiracy against the people. The stage was perfect. Greed went to a new high. Impunity ruled. Abuse of power, defilement of wealth and of the people became the culture. The door to disaster yawned. Impunity marked Kenya with the stamp of mass murder and mayhem. The rest is history." —The writer (okwaromuluka@yahoo.com) is a publishing editor and media consultant with Mvule Publishers.

Kenya could lose another chance to institute peaceful change

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