It's time for leaders to realise that Kenya has entered a very dangerous phase

Kenya invites you to wrestle with your conscience all the time. You are perpetually struggling against yourself, striving to win the fight. If you were brought up in a certain environment you are likely to conquer yourself. You will succeed in killing the human being within you. Henceforth, you will see no evil and hear none.

You will close your eyes to injustice. Decadence will be beautiful. Yet it is also possible that such fights do not arise, in your case. Your cradle and nurture did not prepare you for such concerns and fights. You staggered into adulthood with a conscientious wild card. Accordingly, you have only one fight – the strife for your goals. Anything that could bring and protect them justifies itself.

It is Saturday morning, at a city hotel in Nairobi. The presidential election results were announced last night. They threw parts of the Lake Victoria Basin into violent protest. Not to be left behind were the Nairobi slums of Kibera and Mathare. Angry voters have been crying over what they see as their stolen election. I am watching images of the protests on TV in the hotel lobby, in the company of a close friend. Also with us is a top cop, a member of the cream of the Kenya Police Service. Suddenly, the officer breaks the agonised silence with the words, “We are going to kill all of these bastards! These are the sorts of fellows we shoot to kill!”

I am confused. If such a senior officer can say this before me, a civilian, what do these police people say when they are alone? I have run into this gentleman many times before, courtesy of our mutual friend. I could call him an acquaintance, or even a “friend,” why not? The man knows I work in public information. Yet here he is, going on and on about “the need to shoot and kill these bastards!”

This is where his conscience has brought him. But, perhaps, he expects us to be a part of this conspiracy to “shoot to kill”? I find my voice and politely tell him that he should not kill the “bastards.” It should be enough to contain them. My friend agrees with me that the “bastards” should not be killed. “But how?” the officer asks, visibly dismayed, “You cannot contain these characters! You kill them!” Mercifully, he soon excuses himself, to attend to other things. I remain nursing the hope that he has not gone to issue orders against “the bastards.”

Later, in the evening, he is on TV, impressively in his police uniform. He is all piety and eloquence. He hotly denies that the police have killed anybody. It is never the intent of the police to kill, he says, except in the case of those found robbing. I have a problem with this. Only this morning, this man was speaking with a knife between his teeth. He vowed to “kill these bastards.” What should I make of this public display of policeman piety? I also find it strange that those “found robbing” should be shot dead. So which law says that? Is robbing sufficient cause to shoot to kill? Should there not be other contributory factors, or causes that make it necessary to shoot to kill? For now, I know that when we see policemen breaking into homes to batter people, the orders have come from above. How high up, I don’t know. However, the command structure is known.

We are rolling back to Methuselah. In spite of a new Constitution and new leaders, Kenya faces the same old challenges. State sponsored violence of this kind is a factor of what social science calls Manichean dualism. The notion comes from Mani, an ancient philosopher who taught in Mesopotamia in the 240s AD. Mani was the ultimate master of extreme polarity. Accordingly, a society such as ours takes on the character of two distinct and diametrically hostile population clusters. The two-way opposition between them may be real, or exaggerated. Regardless, it is still there – and dangerously so.

In this context, the two populations are defined within ethnic clusters. Accordingly, there is the ruling ethnic population and the population of the ruled. They see themselves as social classes. The ruling class preserves itself through unrestrained violence and threat to employ violence. Outsiders must be put in check by permanent fear of violence against them. In the essay titled “Concerning Violence,” Franz Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth fame tells us that such a society lives on the edge of catastrophe. It will eventually eat up itself, soon or later.

The resolution rests in a reordering of relationships in the combined population. The conversations that we have had even in Kenya’s mainstream media are frightening. Even public intellectuals who see themselves as belonging to the privileged corner apologise for police violence, believing that they are comfortable. They are not able to think outside the false dilemma of “them” versus “us.” The social media, for its part, is a jungle in which “the ruling” populations and “the ruled” are engaged in an all against all cyber warfare.

As the contestation between NASA and Jubilee moves to the Supreme Court, the Manichean engagement in the social media migrates to the courts with the cyber soldiers; complete with the cross, foul and primitive language of savagery. Whatever the outcome of the Supreme Court process, it seems critical for the country’s leadership to understand that Kenya has entered a very dangerous phase.

The Manichean structure of the State must be dismantled. This will be the very first assignment, whenever the new government begins its work. An arrangement in which a cluster of the national population sees itself as “rulers” and another one as “the ruled” is unsustainable. President Uhuru Kenyatta, or Raila Odinga – whoever takes power – must reorganise the Kenyan State. State sponsored violence is not part of the equation. Nor is intellectual dishonesty.

- Mr Muluka is a publishing editor, special consultant and advisor on public and media relations. [email protected]