Swearing fealty.

A letter I penned down Friday Morning when I couldn't sleep…

Dear Mr.President, I may not have voted for you, but I respect the Highest Public Office that you hold, and out of that Respect this is my plea as a Citizen of our Great Nation that was fortunate to have Peace for decades but is now under constant attack and in fear for a worse tomorrow.
Sir let’s please shift focus from all the Great Grand plans & put the Security of this Country at top most priority or there will be no one left to benefit from all the Strides we continue to make as a Nation.

It breaks my heart to think that my Children could grow up in a Nation that has Curfews, that is divided by religion, that is every man for himself to the point that every home owns a gun for protection…

This is all but a life of FEAR!! Constant FEAR!! A year ago I lost a colleague & a Friend… Now we have lost 147 innocent Kenyans. Sir it’s time to leave Kismaayo & stop fighting a war that is not our own, it is time to stop fighting our neighbors, it is time to put the Citizens of this Nation before everything else.

Respectably, GM
Kenyan Citizen

I chose to reproduce the letter in full. If I believed divine interventions were the only recourse we had, that is what I would recommend. Where do we begin with this astonishing missive?

Let us begin with the astonishing claim that "our Great Nation that was fortunate to have Peace for decades". If nothing else, we must be honest with each other. Kenya may not have been in the mad grip of a civil war and it may not have been waging war in a neighbouring country, but only those who were not touched by the cold hand of violence could make such an astonishing claim.

Jomo Kenyatta waged his Shifta War and ensured that the North Eastern Province would remain backward for generations. When it was clear that Baba Moi had lost the nation, he waged a sub rosa war against all public dissent. Torture, disappearances and outright murder were the defining features of the 1980s. Think of it as the Kenyan version of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR. The nineties, though, gave us "land clashes" and "ethnic clashes". "Peace for decades"?

How about this plaintive plea: "It breaks my heart to think that my Children could grow up in a Nation that has Curfews, that is divided by religion, that is every man for himself to the point that every home owns a gun for protection…"? 

In the past decade alone, Mt Elgon, West Pokot, Samburu, Lamu, Marsabit and Mandera have had curfews, both official and unofficial, imposed on them. Hundreds of thousands of homes do not have firearms on the premises; that is the privilege of the wealthy and the well-connected. When homes are broken into by brigands, few families have the firearms the author of this letter talks about for their defence. Thousands of Kenyans have been murdered in cold blood because, (a) their police service failed them, and (b) they could not get past the nightmarish bureaucracy that is the gantlet one must walk to obtain a firearms permit.

But the core of this letter seems to be an attempt by its author to swear fealty to the President because of the "respect [for] the Highest Public Office that [you] hold". We did away with the loyalty pledge because the relationship between the people and their president is not based on loyalty of the former for the latter, but the service by the  latter to the former. We are not his subjects. We are not his serfs. He serves us. When our children are murdered in cold blood, the buck stops with him. We will respect him when he earns our respect. He can choose to treat us with contempt; that is the bargain we made when we elected him. But at no point can he demand our loyalty when the bodies of the dead are not cold in the grave. Not at all.