The good, the bad and the photogenic

These are the problems that drive people up the wall going by the hyperbole on Twitter timelines. A photograph of a beggar crawling past Parliament Buildings is posted on twitter. Some saw the photo as an indictment of Parliament, and the national government, while others saw it as an indictment of the one who took the photo while seemingly doing nothing to help the beggar. Some thought that highlighting our problems was the right thing to do; others thought that providing solutions to these problems was essential.

I once used a tragedy to make a larger point and it cost me the respect of a man I respect. Life is like the story of the five blind men and the elephant. Each one of them used their hands - experience - to see that part of the elephant they touched. The one who took the photo saw all the policies of the Government of Kenya, personified in the greed of the members of Parliament, to say one thing. Some commentators saw his callous and inhuman use of the tragedy of another to make a wider statement. Still some others saw the photo as a catalyst for Kenyans to find solutions instead of bellyaching all the time about how bad their country is.

I don't know if all three are guilty of being held hostage to the single-story narrative that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie so brilliantly deconstructed on a TED talk, but it is plain to see from the Twitter timeline that we all have our hangups and that we are unafraid to state our case and let the chips fall where they will. What may have escaped the commentators on the timeline, so committed to their argument, was that even taking into account the relative anonymity and security of the internet, at this moment Kenyans have never been freer to comment on public affairs without fear. 

It is almost impossible to imagine that in the days before the internet, e-mail, mobile phones, social media apps and the like, Kenyans were held hostage to the narrative dictated by their government as personified in the President. You were free to think what you wanted to think; you were not free to express your though freely, though. Speech came with a very high cost; political speech should have come with a health warning because it frequently led to orthopaedic surgery or even fatalities.

We cannot paper over the fact that many millions of Kenyans live in abject circumstances. We cannot paper over the fact that a significant amount of the suffering in Kenya is because of policies and politics that exclude the people at all levels. But we cannot ignore the fact that we are freer than we were fifteen years ago. We cannot ignore the fact that in a changing global economy we have coped better than most and that our potential to be great remains. Finally we cannot ignore the fact that sometimes transitional periods last decades. So while we debate the Kenya we want, let us put everything in perspective: the good, the bad and the photogenic.