To move on, we must be ready to confront our dark, bitter past

By Khamati Shilabukha
As the presidential campaigns hit fever pitch, we must remain vigilant because some aspirants focus on the wrong things, making a mockery of our intelligence.

For instance, one of new entrants into the race claimed he is running because if he does not become president, “his” province will never “develop”. He was using the province as a euphemism for his ethnic community.

In that case, he is trying to capture the minds of his kinsmen and women. He is actually consolidating an ethnic constituency. What I get from this thinking is that he will be president solely for the benefit of his province (read his ethnic community).

However, politics of exclusivity and exclusion cannot be encouraged in Kenya today. Is this presidential hopeful inferring that the current Government set-up is benefitting a certain province (ethnic community) from where he intends to pick from? What about those communities without a candidate?

However, that is not my major concern today. My concern is the way more and more aspirants are apparently hopping on the bandwagon of running on the platform of blocking a single politician from becoming president. The matter took a rather ominous tangent when we were told some people cannot be trusted with leadership because they will polarise the country on the account of bitterness about how they were treated in the past. What bizarre and lopsided logic?

I dare posit that the country has never moved to the next level in fighting the ills confronting us because we fear bitterness. That is the reason a Permanent Secretary appears on TV and, without batting an eyelid, defends ethnic hegemony.

How can we be so forgiving to gloss over such arrogance? We must be bitter and express our disappointment in no uncertain terms that this trend should stop. We failed in 2002 on account of this kind of cowardice and fear of confronting our past. That is why we ended up with the Anglo Leasing scandal.

This kind of leadership is manipulating our history and political memory by deciding what should be remembered and what should not. And this is not right. We are treading on dangerous grounds by allowing such defeatist philosophies to reign supreme.

We must always remember the enormity of the social, economic and political crimes committed since independence. We should never tire to remind the culprits that we remember what happened. This is not about ethnic communities ascending to power to develop their regions for that will never happen. It is individuals who ascend to power. And development should benefit all.

In the justification of this drastic reconfiguration of collective memory, we should point out to those seeking our votes that the aim of the State is to build a nation, and the first step towards this daunting task is to do away with ethnic labels once and for all. The logic of this argument is straightforward “divisionism” — ethnic, regional and political — has been the bane of Kenya and indeed the root cause of our retarded development. Time has come to lay the foundation for a national community free of the stigma of ethnicity.

Leaders are acutely aware memory is a pre-eminently subjective phenomenon. They want to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between factual truth and interpretive truth. They want to operate on blind spots, selective amnesia and denials of historical evidence to mask truths and magnify others out of proportion. These are the self-same demagogues who lie consciously, coldly falsifying social reality.

They are confident because there are numerous gullibles who will weigh, anchor, move off, momentarily or forever, from genuine memories, and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality.

For these leaders, the past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for things done or suffered and want to replace them with others. The substitution has always been there, with invented scenarios, mendacious and restored.

They have been repeating these descriptions.  In the process, they will make sure that the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours. In short, they want us to forget Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing and even the post-election mayhem.

The writer is a research fellow at the University of Nairobi