Saturday, September 15, 2012

We are all complicit.

Fascism always rides on the back of violence. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco...all came to power on the back of violence. By identifying the "them" that had caused the downfall of their nations, they aroused the passions of the "common man" against their common enemy. Wielding their demagogic power, they used violence in the place of political discourse to seize power and determine the destiny of their nations. They fashioned dictatorships out of the passions they had aroused in the "downtrodden". They ruled with a mixture of fear and repression. They were spectacularly successful. But it is Franco who died in his sleep. Hitler and Mussolini died violently.

Mwai Kibaki has despatched policemen to the troubled Tana Delta. The violence between the Orma and the Pokomo is not new, nor is it surprising. The scale of the violence is new, but not surprising. The response of the government is not new nor surprising. Nor is the response of the punditocracy and the media. We are all engaged in charade, evoking the spirit of an already bastardised constitution to justify our pronouncements. In a few weeks, the police will claim to have successfully retrieved the over 3,500 firearms in the Tana Delta, the violence will abate and we will turn our collective attentions to the pressing matter of electing Mwai Kibaki's successor. The nascent fascism inherent in our politics will fester until the final crisis that pushes it to the fore. We will sleepwalk into another dictatorship. This is the script to which we are all playing a part.

We all invoke the dark cloud of the "culture of impunity" without batting an eyelid, confident that it afflicts only the political class and those well-connected individuals who have filched billions out of the national treasury. We refuse t admit that in many small ways we contribute to that culture every day. In the landscapes of our minds we have drawn lines separating small, petty rules that can be ignored from the "important" ones that we dare not. When we jump traffic lights or encourage drug-addled matatu drivers to take risks with our lives, we contribute to that culture. When we refuse to castigate our "leaders" when they manufacture ethnic hatreds and animosities, we reinforce that culture. When we claim exceptionalism, or peculiarity, as Kenyans, we admit to ourselves that we do not think that the rule of law applies against us, only against "them", whoever they may be. It is why even when celebrating Chief Justice Willy Mutunga's efforts, we do all in our power to undermine him at every turn. It is why we celebrate the imprisonment of the "small fish" while the "big fish" continue to swim in the ocean of impunity.

Politically-inspired violence in Kenya is not new. It has been with us ever since we declared ourselves a republic and finally shoved the last British administrator from the House that Jomo Kenyatta built. The Kenya that we inherited in 1964 was not a nation in which we could all claim pride, but a territory in which ethnic animosities would form the basis for political discourse for fifty years. The tribe-that-must-not-be-named is our political bete noir. Our relationship with it defines us, defines our politics and our national priorities. A new constitution will not fix this fixation; it merely changes the rules by which the traditional games have been played since 1964. The murderous violence in the Tana Delta is merely the latest manifestation of this truism.

The Constitution proclaims the national values and principles of governance in Article 2 that include "the rule of law, democracy and the participation of the people" and decrees that these shall bind "all State organs, State officers, public officers and all persons". The violence in the Tana Delta, and the quality of political discourse in the country generally, is an indictment the peoples of Kenya. Our indifference to these national values and principles is the feedstock for those who would seek to weaken us and to rob us of our rightful places in the comity of nations. We are the laughingstock of the world when we attempt to claim civilisation. We are to be pitied. We are to suffer the shame of being a people who have wasted the national resources God endowed us with in the pursuit of an individualised success story that can only be obtained when we are at peace with ourselves.  We are sleepwalking into slavery, and we are doing it with the active encouragment of the men and women claiming to speak for us.

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