Reform was never about Kadhis, abortion

SPORTS

By KIPKOECH TANUI

The Draft Constitution survived Attorney General Amos Wako’s itchy hands and mercenary legal mind. It was published after the Parliamentary Select Committee certified he had only concentrated on putting a comma here and there.

As professional writer I can tell you even the shift of a comma can change the meaning of a sentence and there is a precedent in history. In journalism classes there is that US newspaper which carried the headline, America, too proud to join the war, when Second World War broke out and she felt too big to join the allied forces.

But when the Japanese bombed US naval forces at Pearl Habour in Hawaii, America struck with fury and the newspaper merely shifted the comma and the previous headline bore the opposite meaning. It ran: America too, proud to join the war. America was no longer "too proud" to be part of it but she too was proudly in the survival war.

But again, I trust the PSC’s Abdikadir Mohammed more than Wako, who distorted the character of the 2005 Bomas Draft when he was given it in Kilifi. This hireling did his ‘job’ so well, Kenyans could not recognise the ‘Bomas’ in it and rejected it at the referendum.

Wako did worse in 1992 when he cunningly and criminally tried to help former President Moi wrong-foot the Opposition in his strategy of making the election date a secret weapon. He altered the electoral laws without going through Parliament. How? He published a legal notice removing the words "a period not less than 21 days", replacing them with "a period not more than 21 days".

I am sure today if President Kibaki was not for ‘Yes’, we would be crying over Wako’s editing pen.

But that said, it was baffling listening to him describe what he saw as Kenya’s equivalent of Jews’ march from captivity in Egypt under the Pharaoh, through the wilderness. The Old Testament, in which Wako’s parents must have got the name ‘Amos’ records how the journey ended in the Promised Land, or Canaan. This is the paradise Wako promised Kenya was headed to yesterday. Ironically, he smiled, as he always does, and did not acknowledge his bulwark-role in Kenya’s troubled reform history.

Heart-rending story

It is this troubled history, which saw some Kenyans, including clergymen like Jamleck Miano, detained ostensibly for engaging in ‘subversive activities’, — what we today call being ‘reform minded’. Miano’s diary was used in court as ‘evidence’ that he was a ‘criminal element’.

I recall the heart-rending story of George Anyona at Nyayo House torture chambers, where he would daily be taken up the lift from the underground cells, stark naked and blindfolded. When the blinds were removed he would be sitting on the floor, having gone without a meal for days, and on the table are his interrogators led by their buffoonish ‘commander’ called Opiyo, deboning chicken meat and gulping down fresh juices. They would ask Anyona, whose crime was trying to reintroduce multi-partyism, whether he was ready to "plead guilty" and be set free.

For tea, he was given a plastic cup with a hole below the handle, just in case someone pitied him and tried to fill his cup!

This was the bad season in which the Church came out with their conscience blazing. The moral icons in the church included Alexander Muge, Manasses Kuria, David Gitari, Henry Okulu and Ndingi Mwana ’a Nzeki.

As a young writer the scent of teargas, the sound of the police cudgels landing on human flesh and wailing as security forces crushed pro-reform rallies still lingers in my mind. I recall how President Kibaki and his friends were tear-gassed at All Saints Cathedral. A young cop even smashed broken the hand of his age-mate and then Nithi MP Njoka Mutani.

At the forefront were hardened ‘graduates’ of Kamiti such as Raila Odinga, Kenneth Matiba, Charles Rubia, Njeru Kathangu and Martin Shikuku. There was a young man stabbed outside All Saints Cathedral in a Kanu-sponsored political frenzy. He died as we watched. A Special Branch officer sent to spy on a pro-reform meeting at Uhuru Park was chased down and killed like a rat.

The sad stories are endless, the statistics gory and Kanu’s brutality legendary. But in all these cases at no time did the pro-reform ‘tribe’ talk about Kadhi courts and abortion. That was not anyone’s priority. There was simply too much dictatorship, pain and fear around.

Kenya wept for a document that would tame the presidency like this Draft Constitution seeks to do; dole out the national cake evenly and fairly and protect the majority’s will as well as those of the minority. They knew once the time is ripe, Moi would give in, and in a future date the refinement would follow.

Peripheral issues

Now that what many died for and hundreds incarcerated, is coming in peacetime, but it is baffling the new ‘war’ by the Church and some voices form the past seem to be plotting to stop it on the excuse of some peripheral issues that won’t address our governance problems and which few would be willing to die for.

I would add it is unlikely history would put another President in the ‘Yes’ corner more than it has Kibaki today in our lifetime.

The writer is managing editor The Standard, Daily Editions.

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