Kenyans must make a stand to cure tribal illness

By Anthony Muheria

The bloody scenes in Tana River where Kenyans raised swords against each are disheartening. While the Church has been fingered for doing little to heal such rot, the Government is equally guilty of failing to tame this raw ethnicity.

Ideally, there are two major diseases that assail us – ethnicity and endemic blindness. We seem as nation to have lost vision. We no longer see clearly because we have decided to wear prisms of our self centredness, greed, and ethnic baggage in leadership and we never dare admit it.

The raw ethnicity blindly sees only the tribe of the person, not the action or capacity or qualities of the individual. Distorted ethnic vision is manifested in immediate primitive reactions.

It has been suggested by some leaders, for instance, that the Tana murders are driven by ethnicity or political power greed. Just how mad and raw is this “ethnic vision” that it can drive the political class to set their Oromo and Pokomo tribesmen to butcher one another to claim senatorial of gubernatorial seats?

The default position irrespective of moral culpability or gaping evidence, even in such circumstances, is that the politicians are right “because they belong to my group”. Consequently “we” defend them by any means: the rule of law is suspended, good and evil cease to exist, indecency and dishonesty is permitted, violence, nay, is allowed to achieve the “good” of self glorification of a “group”. And then we call that politics.

Slavery was propagated and defended with similar mindsets. The slave had no rights and indeed was not a person; he was a lower type of tribe.

History teaches that dehumanising slavery split the US. George Washington’s word to awaken the consciences of the peoples, to our aspiring leaders:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Endemic blindness has made us insensitive to the most atrocious actions right in front of our very eyes. Indeed “raw ethnicity” very soon affects our moral and intellectual “eyesight” and judgement. We refuse to see. We talk of abstract corruption, dishonesty, rule of law, but do we really see what is happening on streets?

Today’s Kenya where we are ruled by the greed of a few, the greed of many, or a greed of all who take any chance to make money (better if it is free) without ethics or concern for the other human beings. Can we be so blind as to have sold our “vision” of a better Kenya.

The real change will start with the ordinary Kenyan reclaiming his self respect, worth and values, with a clear direction and stand. So long as we continue to allow ourselves to be “ruled” by a culture of selfish interest, the “matatu” mentality which is a synonym of lawlessness, we will not reclaim our nation.

Our consciences must awaken. The human person has inherent rights, arising from his or her dignity as a child of God. All other adjectives (including tribe) add nothing and remove nothing to his worth.

We must discover the place for God in our Kenyan society, by discovering his place in our hearts. Once again affirm right and wrong, the inherent God given human dignity of all men from all tribes, and the need to act accordingly. Good is good no matter who does it, and evil, evil.

Stand up now for what is right and return the dignity of Kenyans by standing for true values. We want value-drive, value-centred leaders. And values are principles we Kenyans must all sign up to in order to demand the same from leaders.

In a recent moving presentation to the Kenyan Catholic bishops, director of Vision 2030, Mugo Kibati,  eloquently captured our failing underpinning value system. According to him, what ails us in Kenya is a very deep illness that seems to have completely eroded our value system – negative ethnicity.

We must never allow the bloody scenes of 2007 revisit our beloved country again. And the Catholic Church is this time around taking a serious view on this. Let us cure ourselves of these illnesses to build One country, one future, one common ethic because we believe truly in one God.