Time to get off the bench!

WikiLeaks is the gift that keeps on giving. Now it emerges that President Kibaki did not offer a sufficiently robust riposte to President Museveni's land-grab in Lake Victoria because he wanted to weaken the Prime Minister and his acolytes in the ODM. It further emerges that before Dr. Sally Kosgei saw the tribal light on her way to the Kalenjin Damascus, she thought very little of the Little Emperor of Eldoret, William Ruto. The picture that Ambassadors William Bellamy and Michael Ranneberger have drawn of our leaders gets less and less flattering the more we read these exposes.

Apparently, the Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court at The Hague has decided to issue summons to appear to the Ocampo Six. This at a time when President Kibaki has despatched his special envoys to the member states of the UN Security Council to beg for a deferral of the prosecutions at The Hague. The summons require the suspects to appear some time in early April. Meanwhile, Parliament has given itself a two-week holiday, after a charge-filled last week in business. PNU is still determined to bloody the PM's nose. ODM is determined to set its house in order, and if the Ruto Twins and their foot-soldiers to not heed the call, they will find themselves out of the Party and out of parliament.

Kenya still faces challenges. Hunger still stalks the land. The Met Department tells us that the long rains may not be as fulsome as some expect, with very few areas receiving adequate rainfall. Youth unemployment remains frustratingly high, yet the commercial banks are raking it in. Informal settlements are going up in flames yet housing finance companies and real estate development companies are making plans for mega projects. Prof. Anyang' Nyong'o has made a triumphal return, calling for more investment into the diagnosis and treatment of cancer while millions of Kenyans go without even the most basic of primary healthcare. Intern doctors do not want to spend three years in government service, yet their expensive education has been largely subsidised by the same people they seek to avoid in the corridors of government-run hospitals. The world celebrates the International Women's Day and yet in Kenya, Angela Ambitho and InforTrak-Harris tell us that gender-equity might as well be a pipe dream. Hundreds of thousands of youthful Kenyans are taking and passing the KSCE without a guarantee that they will have a place in our national institutions of higher learning, having failed time and again to increase their capacities or establish new ones. And in the midst of a road-construction boom, Nairobi is becoming more and more a seriously large parking lot. Millions of man-hours are lost annually by workers stuck in traffic, delayed by the madness on our roads.

And yet it is only one tiny aspect of politics that fascinates us day in, day out. When will we stop obsessing over every minute pronouncement by our political leaders and instead, take up the challenge of getting more and more engaged in the political process? It is time we took time out to consider how and where we can contribute to the political, social, spiritual, economic and cultural development of our nation. This Constitution that we are so proud of will remain but a piece of paper if we do not inculcate in ourselves its principles and objectives. It is our duty as citizens to question our leaders on why things are so dark at present. It is our duty to take responsibility for the irresponsible choices we have made in our political leaders, both at national and local level. It is time we got off the bench and took matters into our own hands. Kenya needs an Arab Uprising of its own; one directed against the pilfering, lying, cheating, murdering, greedy, selfish political leadership that is leading us to death and darkness. We cannot wish our contribution away. The only solution is to become the masters of our destinies. A first step is to remind the politicians that they should fear us, not us them. A powerful signal of our intent will be to not only to ship off The Hague Six off to the ICC, but to round up the thousands that caused mayhem, destruction and murder, and arraign every single one of them before our courts.