A man endorsed by The National Alliance to stand in the by-election to elect Gatundu South's next member of the National Assembly has, in his attempt to get the electors of Gatundu South to give him their votes, alluded to "foreskins" in his campaign. He is not the first Gatundu South political candidate to do so. It is unlikely he will be the last. His allusion to that particular cultural shibboleth is a subliminal attempt to remind the electors in Gatundu South that the tribal card has special facility in Kenya's Twenty-first Century politics.
Koigi Wamwere has written extensively on the politics of negative ethnicity. He has pointed out that had it not been for some of the men who surrounded Jomo Kenyatta in the decade after Independence, the colonial legacy of divide-and-rule would not be expressed in the politics of tyrannies of numbers. Lets I be misunderstood, this is not a screed endorsing the idea that a community must rally behind one of their own in order to prevail and succeed; that has remained the intellectual bastion of the men and women who have dared to contest elections in Kenya since the declaration of the Republic.
The Orange Democratic Movement Party is seen as a Luo-dominated party. The National Alliance is seen as a Kikuyu-dominated party. The Wiper Democratic Movement Party is seen as a Kamba-dominated party. The United Republican Party is seen as a Kalenjin-dominated party. The Forum for the Restoration of Democracy-Kenya Party is seen as Luhyia-dominated party. The Forum for the Restoration of Democracy-People Party is seen as a Kisii-dominated party. And the list goes on and on. If the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission ever fixes its website, perhaps Kenyans will have the opportunity to go through the data the Commission holds and determine whether the parties' protestations that they are Big Tents, welcome to all, holds water.
That is the allegation, anyway. That politics and, by extension, public policy, is driven solely by the thought that "my tribe" shall have this, that or the other. Some of the optics, as crass as it might sound, are not encouraging. On #SabaSaba, the men who seemed to be third-wheeling uncomfortably in a largely ODM affair were Ford-K's Moses Wetangula and the Wiperists, Kalonzo Musyoka and Johnston Muthama. Odinga, Orengo, Nyong'o, Kajwang'...the optics could not have been better. Jubilee's affairs are no better. When the new Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps took his oath of office, those present hailed from the same general geographical and cultural region.
A keen look at the forty-seven county governments is revealing. Save, perhaps, for Nairobi, Mombasa, Machakos and Nakuru, the county executives of the county governments are dominated by one or two tribes. The county assemblies and county public services, too, reflect this uncomfortable fact. Turn your eye on state corporations and the same trend prevails. Surprisingly, too, state universities have joined the trend. What is shocking is that the phenomenon is also to be observed in the private sector, where one would expect that profit above all else would motivate whom one hired and whom one traded with. But when you observe that the so-called "tenderpreneurs" simply want to trade with the government and the government alone, it all makes sense.
In order for Kenya to make the leap from third-world middling backwater into a successful economic powerhouse in which poverty, illiteracy and disease are confined to the extreme fringes, where opportunities for success are available to all in a generally level playing field, and where institutions are respected and trusted, we must take concrete steps to reverse the trend of tribalising everything. We can begin by simply reducing the size of government investment to the bare minimum: schools, hospitals, policemen, roads and high-tension power lines. This business of trading with the government must be reduced to the barest minimum. How that can be done remains the one nut not even the advanced Western democracies have managed to crack.
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