Let’s reshape our society and not be tied down by culture

On December 10, 2007, I predicted that Kenya would be engulfed in civil war after elections that year. I was speaking at a Kenya Human Rights Commission International Human Rights Day event at The Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. Not a single Kenyan media house reported my dire prediction. Methinks I know why Kenyans live in denial about their worst proclivities. They would minimise Armageddon if it stared them in the face. It’s not blissful ignorance. We suffer from a culture of fatalism willful negligence that’s built on an alchemy of mysticism, religion, and ambivalence about modernity. We are too wedded to divine intervention. Avoidable tragedies are met with an expression of abdication and resignation it’s the will of God.

Even the most highly educated among us are tightly gripped by denial and superstition. My prediction at The Stanley Hotel event was met with incredulity and righteous indignation. A well-known human rights advocate publicly disagreed with me and opined that Kenya wasn’t Somalia, or Liberia. My thesis was that Kenya was so tribally polarised that neither PNU’s Mwai Kibaki nor ODM’s Raila Odinga or their surrogates would accept, or countenance, defeat. In an instant, the country was aflame, and human carnage never before seen since 1964 turned Kenya into a killing field. Kenya became hell. Long latent demons were unleashed. It took the African Union led by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to put humpty dumpty back together again.