Parents and wayward wards.

We frown with mighty displeasure when we see parents smacking their kids for behaving badly in public. Therefore, many parents with an ounce of grey matter have adapted; they have become adept at manipulating their children, whether it is with rewards or privileges rarely granted. The relationship between Kenya and what we refer to as the West is akin to the relationship of a parent with a wayward child.

 

This parent-wayward child relationship was demonstrated when the British government advised its citizens to avoid certain parts of Kenya, parts that are major mainstay of the tourism industry, and British tour companies took the unprecedented step of evacuating by air some of their clients from Kenya. Britain's diplomats in Kenya went out of their way to assure the Government of Uhuru Kenyatta that the reason why the British government had issued the travel "advisory" was simply to keep Britons safe; it was not with the sinister intention of crippling a key foreign exchange revenue earner of the Government of Kenya.

 

Certain stalwarts of the Jubilee cheering section have a less-than-astute appreciation of geo-politics. They, therefore, inevitably see an avenging hand in the British actions because Kenya has found a new sugar daddy in the People's Republic of China. Their simplistic analysis revolves around what is basically a substitution equation: if the Chinese win the tenders they are winning in Kenya, Kenya will use Chinese technology and hardware for the projects and give up British and Western technology and hardware. These Jubilant analysts are getting aggressively belligerent in their comments against the West and are seeing Western conspiracies in everything that is going wrong in Kenya today.

 

It is likely that these analysts are not too far off the mark. nations have manipulated each other since diplomacy was invented. In the global market, manipulation is a fact of life and only the astute survive. In global politics, the Theory of Natural Selection is perfectly adapted; the smart will survive and prosper; the not-so-smart remain poor and at the mercy of the richer and smarter.

 

Kenya has always been the plaything of the mzungu. Since some white man decided to find the source of the Nile River, Kenya's fate was never its own again. Now in the middle of a crisis, when millions of Kenyans are unsure that their next bus trip will not end up in the mortuary, it is the mzungu with the perfect knowledge of the security intelligence who uses it to remind us that the Chinese sugar daddy may have a fat wallet today, but it is the mzungu who still calls the shots when it comes to the key sectors of our economy. The evacuation of 300 wazungus back to their cold and dreary island reinforced this point. It was about as subtle as a sledgehammer wielded against a mosquito and just as devastating.