Uhuru's Blockbuster 'iBelieve' Inspires Status Quo

The Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta launched his much-awaited party The National Alliance (TNA) anchored on the theme of 'iBelieve'. To his credit belief is a virtue and a very valuable ingredient in search of success. But there also begins the mischief and lack of imagination.

Belief without rebooting the mindset to embrace change is an exercise in semantic laundering. You know, TNA may as well stand for Total Non-Action or This is Not Applicable or worse still Trial Ndiyo Anaenda (Tuko Na A........).

Uhuru may have succeeded in the heavy lifting by dispensing with both Moi and Kibaki baggage but his simplistic theme of belief smacks of Moi’s mantra of all heat no light - creating an impression of motion without any trace of real movement (remember MKAE IVYO IVYO?). Status quo has never been better packaged.

True, loaded message is often delivered in simple terms albeit without being simplistic. But just like a fool who reduces love to a piece of metal fixed to the finger, it is obtusely simplistic to tell Kenyans that you wear a wrist band with the national flag colours at all times as a constant reminder of your love and commitment to your country. That was thoughtless symbolism at its best.

Surely talk is cheap when actions speak loudly otherwise. Jomo Junior sounded more like his late father regurgitating the same old vile trinity of poverty, disease and ignorance. And we are in 2012. What a shameless contradiction for a preface on belief while thoughtlessly extolling the privilege of carrying the country into the future. But at least Uhuru was brave enough to inadvertently add to his dad’s core twin vices as stitched in toxic tribalism and criminal corruption.

Simplistic belief

Reading his speech, one cannot fail to see Uhuru’s irony in preaching about the wealth of our nation’s history while the same lips twist and conveniently fail to warn of the perils of neglecting lessons from the very (dark) past. The speaker must have been comfortable preaching sandwiched between his dad's meusoleum, Uhuru Highway/Park and Mama Ngina Road.

The colonialist was fought primarily for grabbing our land and Uhuru would have led by example and from infront by addressing and offloading the massive acreage his family inherited from his father.

Here we have Uhuru shamelessly talking about past injustices and land issues when his family owns almost 20% of Coast's prime land. And his audience? The multitude landless in all part of the country who have agreed to be collectively fooled.

But I guess asking the basics out of Kenyan politicians is akin to preaching to a choir. No wonder Uhuru wrapped himself in youthful gab pontificating to his listening landless youth that the answers for a better tomorrow lie with them. That was a smart but thinly-veiled laugh at the collective Kenyan youth's grave.

And patented hypocrisy flowed when the gullible youth and audience were asked to leave the unaddressed past behind them and fly forward on the wings of (delusional) transformational change.

Kibaki Legacy: Ethnic Hegemony, Toxic Tribalism

By Pheroze Nowrojee

Though President Kibaki states that he will not endorse any individual’s candidacy, he is in fact endorsing the candidacy of one ethnic group to the presidency. His endorsement of one ethnic group’s candidacy is an endorsement against other ethnic groups. This is an imminent danger to national cohesion. The newspapers are debating what the Kibaki legacy will be. Some posit an infrastructure of roads, others an increased freedom in society. The facts however give the impression that the only legacy that Kibaki wants now to ensure is a succession by the same ethnic group.

Kibaki’s refusal to order a correction of these matters is not a sign of his lack of leadership. To the contrary, it is a sign of his leadership – of these preferences. He is not sitting on the fence. He is squarely on the side of the preferred ethnic outcome. Events to this end take place under his silence.

In furtherance of this, Kibaki is trying an old and obvious trick : the Statute Miscellaneous Amendments Act. This is an Act of Parliament within which it makes amendments to many other Acts of Parliament. It has such a bland name and has so little publicity, that unless one goes through its contents with a tooth comb, one would not know that within it, quietly, many laws are being amended removing constitutional and hard won checks on Presidential or Ministerial powers.

This latest such bill is the Statute Law Miscellaneous Amendments Bill, 2012, which following the bad tradition has slipped in a bad amendment. It is that once their terms are up, (which will be soon), President Kibaki will be able to reappoint the chiefs of the National Cohesion and Integration Commission unilaterally, without Parliament vetting the reappointments or appointments. Since the Commission will control hate speech during the election campaign and can bring criminal cases against violators of the law, this amendment will obviously assist those who will campaign for the ethnic outcome preferred by the President.

Such a process is exactly what Kibaki used two months before the 2007 elections. That year, he unilaterally appointed and re-appointed all his own choices as Election Commissioners in the Election Commission of Kenya (ECK) under Samuel Kivuitu, and refused to allow the political parties to nominate them as previously done. The result of Kibaki’s insistence on his own choices was the disastrous Election of 2007 and the Post- Election Violence which brought Kenya to its lowest point ever.

Now again in 2012, Kibaki and the new elite around him do not care about the nation’s safety, but only about the result they want again - that the same ethnic group is declared winner of the election. Therefore they want the National Cohesion Commission not to prosecute any hate speech from their preferred ethnic group and its candidate, but instead to curb its opponents by prosecutions. For that they need their own appointments, not Parliament’s. Hence the amendment. The amendment must be opposed. Kenya does not want a repeat of a failed-state election or PEV, 2007-8 style.

This time the elite around Kibaki is divided. This is because his actions continuously assist a candidate from only one part of that one ethnic group. Hence the complaints that he prefers a southern candidate and forgets the fact that, “the Kiambu fighters entered the Aberdares several months after our people from Fort Hall and Nyeri had already established themselves there.”(Mau Mau From Within Karari Njama & Donald L. Barnett (1966, 274)

By this amendment only months before the elections, Kibaki is admitting publicly that there is a group that intends to violate the hate speech prohibitions in the National Cohesion Act, and needs immunity to achieve the preferred outcome. Therefore the independence and impartiality of the Cohesion Commission has to be removed before the elections. It also makes clear such a compliant Commission will be used against the opponents of the preferred outcome.

A legacy is what an ancestor leaves to his descendants. Who does Kibaki consider as his descendants? Just now it appears these descendants are only some of the people of Kenya. If he genuinely believes that his descendants should be all the people of Kenya, then he must move away from this ethnic succession. Such a legacy has the dangerously close potential to break the nation, as in 2008. Kibaki must return to and inhabit the centre of Kenya instead of Central Kenya. He must not ride the matatu we once used to see, that said, “Centralising the nation.”