Sinai Tragedy and the Real Tragedy

By Mwarangethe

They say that, a picture is worthy a thousand words. As concerns the on going Sinai Tragedy, nothing proves this than the faces of Ms Rose Nafula and Mr Henry Osumba courtesy of the Daily Nation shown here: http://is.gd/J73oHH. However, in our view, the real tragedy lies in the incapacity of Kenyans to understand the meaning of human events such as Sinai tragedy. We add, it was the purpose of the new constitution to remove the real causes of these tragedies, but, that chance has been lost. We sample a few reactions to illustrate this incapacity. The first to react was Mutuma Mathiu who wrote that: “Negligent and failed leadership has allowed the tragedy that is Sinai,” available at http://is.gd/3uJAzo. Among other stuff, he told
us that:

“... When all Kenyans go to bed tonight, little children, possibly the same age as the ones you have in your house, will be laying down their little heads in their hovels at Sinai... The main difference is that only a few feet away will be coursing 500,000 litres of petrol an hour. The little children of Sinai live atop a bomb. Why are people living like this? They are dehumanised by poverty and forced to take risks. There is also the possibility that they are not very bright. In Kenya, someone strings together pieces of paper and mud and claims to have built a house. Many of the people who wallow in filth in the slums come from the countryside where they have a piece of land, a decent house, and a toilet.”

Having described the situation, his solution was simple.

“Our leaders should find the courage to evict all those who live in slums — provide alternative housing, by all means, if you can — and end this indignity. It is immoral, it is cowardly, it is wrong to allow human beings to live the way the people of Sinai live.”

In other words, according to Mutuma Mathiu, the Kenyan leaders should show leadership by evicting the slum dwellers Muoroto style. How to organise the logistics of such eviction and make sure these guys stay and die in rural areas away from our eyes, he does not venture to tell us. More so, what made them leave their rural areas, he ventures not to discuss. Also, he suggests that, we should handle over more of our labour to the mp’s like Waititu, he of Embakasi MP, so as to build
decent houses. Just see Waititu in action: http://is.gd/mu70j1. Mutuma seems not to grasp that, it is humanely impossible to have decent houses under our current land tenure system. It cannot be done and shall not be done.

The other person to pen his views was Murithi Mutiga who wrote that: “Disaster offered a snapshot of all you need to know about slum life,” available at http://is.gd/SJ6M3C. Referring to the government officials who went to witness the colossal waste of human life, Mutiga writes that:

“...the authorities saw little problem with these discontents of the city suffering indignity in death, as they had in life.... senior government officials, sirens ablaze, soon arrived at the scene... appeared shocked by the grim evidence of the disaster. The real question is whether they will be moved into addressing the awful
conditions in which the city’s poor live or whether they will wait around for the next call alerting them to tragedy. Sinai slum, like many other such slums, exists in an alternative universe where the writ of government does not extend.”

The third person to pen his views was Gitau Warigi who wrote: “Believe me! Apartheid has lessons for Kenya on preventing slum tragedies,” available @ http://is.gd/lVDw5Q. According to Warigi, we should copy the apartheid system for as he tells us:

“The immorality of the policy aside — which was applied purely on race irrespective of whether a black person could afford to live in Sandton or Constantia — there is something to be said about building satellite towns to house the urban poor away from the inevitable inner-city squalor.”

If this is how journalists reacted to the event, we waited to read Mr Kituyi’s article, in our expectation that, being a sociologist he would breathe some proper perspective. What a disappointment for he writes: “Why are we so fatalistic as to risk death in quest for free things?” This you can find @ http://is.gd/WGI4tr. His headline alone tells us all we need to know. He forgets that, human events are half
understood or are distorted, if one stops with their superficial appearance. A true sociologist must not be satisfied with loose external relationships of individual events. He must proceed to the center of things from which their true nexus can be understood.

By this we mean, he must not tear the individual occurrences OUT OF THEIR TOTAL CONTEXT, and thereby, put petty commotions of personal motives in the place of universal destiny. This requires a man like Kituyi to render strict account of the inner nexus of human events so as to establish the ACTIVE FORCES or the LAW OF NECESSITY, so as to recognise their trends at a given moment, inquire into the
relationship of the active forces and trends to the existing state of affairs and to changes that have preceded it. If he did this, he would come to the mature realisation that, as such, even the will of man, which seems free, is determined by circumstances established long before a man’s birth and even before the growth of the nation he may belong to.

With due respect to the authors of these essays, it seems to us that, like most Kenyans/Africans, they are yet to grasp the real meaning of this tragedy, past ones and many others to come. This is the deal. The Sinai tragedy is but, the logical outcome of our IMF and WB imposed neo - feudal economic structure on Africa. As such, without revolutionary re-organisation of our economic system, not even the Divine powers can save the Kenyan situation from complete destruction.

The Kenyan economy, as is those of other Southern Hemisphere, have been locked by the economic warfare strategy of the IMF and the WB into social and economic backwardness. So locked, Kenya like the rest of Africa has no choice but, to desperately bring in a lot of the USELESS papers they call dollars. This, we do via a number of routes: (a) via the IMF “loans” which Kibaki just asked for last week
(http://is.gd/ewKQd7), just as we predicted last year (http://is.gd/2x1lk0); (b) via export of cheap agricultural products such as coffee and tea; (c ) via tourism; (d) via remittances by Kenyans in the Diaspora and (e) export of slave - wage consumer
products from our slave enclaves, otherwise known as the Export Promotion Zones (EPZ’s). All these means of obtaining these USELESS dollars are evil and can only lead to tragedy such as Sinai and no amount of human leadership can avert it. One may ask, how so? We explain below.

Last year, when Kenyans were excited like little children by their USELESS new constitution to notice anything else, we cautioned that, in conjunction with the IMF, the government of Kenya was falsifying the inflation rates. We wrote this: EPZs and Modern Slavery: Who Shall Tell Wanjiku the Ugly Truth - Part I. Among other things, we wrote that:

“So by Kibaki, Raila, Kalonzo, Uhuru, Muslia making inflation seem low when it is not in reality, the Wanjiku's wages can be suppressed further down "scientifically." With suppression of Wanjiku's income a mission accomplished, it is time to invite the foreign infestors into this paradise where Hakuna Matata, with their free dollars from the FED into our EPZ's. …. If you doubt these "leaders" commitments to
this ECONOMIC GENOCIDE you need to read this: "Kenya to roll out special trade zones in six months". The word special here means two things. No tax for foreign infestors and even lower wages for Wanjiku.

In other words, more exploitative trade zones in a casino state.” All this you can read at: http://is.gd/CvVW4D.

The point is this. Given the IMF and World Bank imposed economic structure, Kenya must export cheap manufactured stuff. And, since we are in a global economy which is geared to produce more poverty, than wealth, there is only one way of ensuing we export more. This way is to lower the wages of the poor Kenyans who work in these export oriented industries to slave wages. So, the slave wages is what we must offer the Sinai residents so as to compete and get the USELESS dollars. If this is the real situation, do we expect the EPZ slaves to live in Karen or on top of gas pipes? In other words, they do not live in these places because they like it. It is because they have no purchasing power to afford better houses. In fact, our plans are to lower even further their purchasing power which means, they must sink into worse conditions. We explored this matter in: How To Fool and Enslave Africans @ http://is.gd/XwVkWX.

As if slave wages was not enough, another policy pursued by the Kenyan government is to weaken the Kenyan shilling. According to the high priests who who dominate the IMF and the World Bank and who call the shorts in Kenya, a weak shilling is good because to makes us competitive. If there is one who can sell the “benefits” of a weak shilling, it is Jimna Mbaru, a member of the IMF, WB sponsored OLIGARCHY (Trojan horse), as we hear him here from 8.13 @ http://is.gd/lCzFVZ.

Thus, according to Mbaru and his grossly mis - educated fellows running the Kenyan affairs, a weak shilling is good for it will make our economy even more export oriented, as he puts it, the business people will see more opportunities outside Kenyan than they will see in Kenya with a weak shilling, it will help the agricultural sector, it will spur the tourism sector and such silly jazz.

So, what is Mr Mbaru really saying on our national TV and how does what he says has to do with Sinai tragedy and the others to come? When Mbaru says that the Kenyan businesses will find more opportunities abroad than locally, he is saying that, we MUST REDUCE THE KENYAN’S PURCHASING POWER. This is equivalent to saying, LET US INCREASE THE RESIDENTS OF SINAI for it is obvious, or, ought to be, even to an idiot that, by reducing the purchasing power of our poor people, we can only increase our slums and the social degradation which goes with it. This is said on the national TV! By so so doing, this is supposed to leave more output available for export TO PAY FOREIGN CREDITORS.

More so, what Mr Mbaru and such mis - educated Africans do not grasp is this. When we devalue our currency, it is the PRICE OF LABOUR of the RESIDENTS OF SINAI we devalue even further. This is so because, the price of raw materials and capital goods are dollarised as well as our FOREIGN DEBTS. As such, the effects of such devaluation as preached by Mr Mbaru is to make exports cheaper, i.e. subsidise the
lives of the rich, while making imports such as food even more expensive for the Sinai residents as each DOLLAR OF EXPORTS BUYS FEWER and FEWER IMPORTS.

In terms of our foreign denominated debts, such devaluation must mean that, we must provide more and more of our coffee and cheap consumer goods for each unit of foreign debt. All this, further impairs our terms of trade while increasing the debt burden in terms of our domestic currency. This means we can never work our way out of the debts. This means that, our debts are rolled over which makes us sink further into the crutches of the IMF and WB vampire. To sink into the arms of these blood vampires is simply to enlarge Sinai slums and wait for more tragedies.

Therefore, as we ponder over this tragedy, let us remember this. If we get the IMF “loans” to try and prevent further collapse of our currency, and therefore, prevent the collapse of the so called middle class living standards most readers of this blog enjoy, the repayment of these dollars must come from the FURTHER IMPOVERISHMENT and DEHUMANISATION of the residents of Sinai. As such, if you carefully examined the foundation of our so called prosperity/civilization you will find therein, the bones of the Sinai residents playing the role of the stones, their flesh playing the role of the mortar and their blood playing the role of the water for joining the stones and the mortar. This being the case then, bear this in mind:

In our research to understand these conditions we find ourselves in, we have visited Tombs of almost all dead States and civilizations. In all these tombs, we have found stern warnings for those who would listen in that, all these States built their vast civilization superstructures on the foundations of involuntary and degraded toil.

Just as an example, on the Babylonian tomb, we found this:

1. Babylon was great. She used science, art and architecture, but, she abused humanity.

2. she invented SUNDIALS , i.e. a device for measuring time by the position of the sun, but, forgot to regulate with justice the hours of labour.

3. she could calculate the a star’s eclipse, but, not her own.

4. No state has been more guilty of the waste of human life and therefore, a her history is a warning to all nations.

5. Therefore, it is dangerous and foolish in the extreme, to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, was thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin!