Love him or hate him, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is right, albeit in a roundabout fashion, about one thing - Kenyans got it wrong when they made tribalism the defining feature of their politics. Uganda had gone down this road before, ending with Milton Obote's ill-fated second time round as president that ended with Museveni's National Resistance Movement taking power in 1986.
President Museveni's open contempt for how Kenyan politicians do their thing, despite his twenty-five years of iron-fisted rule, is a wake-up call for all of us. An analogy he uses is apposite - when a man walks into your shop to purchase something, the last thing that you think about is not the tribe he comes from, but how much he will pay for the product or service. If this is how a dictator, though he will dispute this description, sees us, imagine how the rest of the world does. For decades, despite its ups and downs, the rest of the world viewed Kenya as the stable one in a region full of conflict and revolution.
Until Museveni took over, Uganda was constantly deposing its presidents, sometimes violently. Somalia has not had a stable government, or any government at all, since the fall of Mohammed Siad Barre in 1990. Sudan has just emerged from the second civil war with a successful referendum that will give birth to the Republic of Southern Sudan in June 2011. Ethiopia has suffered through the insurrections of the South since Mengistu Haile Mariam deposed Emperor Haile Selassie I as well as after ending its ruinous war with the breakaway Eritrea. Rwanda and Burundi are busily rebuilding after the civil chaos of the mid-1990s. The Democratic Republic of Congo, similarly, is recovering from the deposing of Mobutu Sese Seko and the assassination of Joseph Kabila. Tanzania, the only constantly stable democracy in the region, was almost ruined by the Ujamaa system put in place by their founding president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.
Then Kenya went to the polls in 2007 and it all went to shit. In 2003, we replaced Moi's kleptocracy with the promise of a new beginning. Then President Kibaki suffered a series of serious health crises that necessitated a caretaker arrangement by his minders. Their suspicions of Raila Odinga ensured that they would jettison an MoU signed between the two men, plunging Kenya into a new round of intrigue and political maneuvering that would culminate in two epochal events - the defeat of the Wako Draft constitution in 2005 and the violence that followed the deeply flawed general elections of 2007. As a result, the cozy view Kenyans had of their country was shattered and the world saw us for what we really are - a bunch of tribe-obsessed murderers and looters without a sense of nationhood and an overinflated sense of ourselves. We were put in our place.
To compound our humiliation, we had to suffer through the prescriptions of the Panel of Eminent African Personalities, led by the lucklustre former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. Where once Kenyan diplomats and civil servants had played a leading role in conflict resolution, we were now relying on foreigners to mediate what was basically a political stalemate. Our shame has now been laid bare in African and world capitals by the shuttle diplomacy of the president's men in an attempt to ensure that the tribal coalition being put together to keep Raila Odinga out of State House survives the attentions of the ICC. Where once Kenya led the way, we are now left behind, fulminating at the contemptuous treatment the likes of Museveni and President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania feel free to dish out at our expense.
Mzalendo Kibunjia's National Cohesion and Integration Commission is one of the band-aids that we saw fit to use over the deep crevasses of our fractured nation. President Museveni is right that if we do not properly diagnose our political problems, we will not come up with the correct political prescription for what ails our body politic. No matter how flawed Uganda's elections are, we cannot continue feeling superior towards Ugandans for today we are no better off than they are. Indeed, we may be worse off. Until we face head on the reality of the tribal arithmetic that goes into our political calculus, we will never advance to become a middle-income nation, despite the lofty ideals encapsulated in the Kenya Vision 2030 policy documents that we will churn out over the next two decades. It is for this reason alone that if Uganda manages to use its oil revenue well, it will surpass Kenya to become the economic and diplomatic engine of East Africa and it will take its place at the head of the table when it comes to EAC integration, leaving Kenya with the scraps.
A good example of our tribal myopia is the proposed privatisation of the Mombasa Port, or parts of it. Tribal chieftains in Mombasa have declared that the privatisation will lead to the continued impoverishment of 'their' people, forgetting that the port benefits not only the Coast region of Kenya, but the nation as a whole and that it must be the nation's interest that guides its privatisation and not the needs of the people of the Coast alone. If this is the attitude that we will bring to the management of national institutions when we eventually implement the devolution contemplated in the Constitution, then the national good will continue to be a pipe-dream, and all Kenyans will be the poorer (and sorrier) for it. We will continue to worry loudly about the place of 'my' tribe in national politics and at the helm of national institutions and forget about the integrated approach to nation-building that we will need if we are to regain our place as a respected leader in East Africa or indeed the rest of the continent. Museveni will go to his grave marvelling at the stupidity and futility of our politics and thank God that he was able to re-build a nation from ashes.
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