When the British arrested the men they accused of being the leadership of Mau Mau in 1952, imposed a state of emergency over Kenya Colony, and waged a brutal campaign against Kenyans, there is no doubt in my mind that what Kenyans did to resist the British crimes was not just justified by also morally right. The Kenyan collaborators who were murdered deserved to be killed; after all, because of their actions, Kenyans had been killed in sometimes very heinous ways. The resistance by the Palestinian people against the crime of the Israeli Occupation Forces, including the targeting and killing of Israeli civilians, is justified and morally right.
Any person who tries to compare the corrupt edifices of the Kenyan state to the British colonial government or the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories is not a serious person. I understand how decades of frustration have led to many Kenyans, in their despair, to seek the short cut of murder, violence, mayhem and chaos. In my opinion, they are wrong.
Kenya has had two false starts in the past twenty five years: in December 2002, when Mwai Kibaki was elected as president, and in August 2010 when Kenya promulgated a new constitution. The Kibaki regime made many positive strides towards rebuilding the institutions of government but just as equally, swiftly reversed those gains and supercharged the corruption of the state to unforeseen levels. It was no longer grand corruption; it had morphed into grand looting.
The date of the promulgation of the Constitution - the 27th August, 2010 - was the last time that the new constitutional order was respected, defended, upheld and protected by anyone of consequence in the government. The past fourteen years have seen dedicated efforts, sometimes at the highest levels, to ensure that the values and principles of the constitution have been undermined, subverted and desecrated. Because of these anti-constitutional efforts, fewer and fewer Kenyans have faith in the institutions of government to deal with the entrenched culture of corruption and impunity, whether it is in Parliament, the Judiciary or the executive at both national and county levels. Today, more and more Kenyans have concluded that only the capital execution of the corrupt is the solution. They are no longer interested in the hard work of building, sustaining and nurturing state institutions.
To justify their position, the kill-the-corrupt forces point to the the knock-on effects of corruption from lack of life-saving medications in hospitals to the poorly-designed public infrastructure that lead to the deaths of Kenyans. Some have even go so far as to suggest that the regular Chinese government's habit of executing hordes of corrupt public officials after short show trials may just be the way for Kenya to go. What these people ignore is that so long as they keep the structures of the government unchanged, killing civil servants and politicians will not stop, or slow down, corruption in the government.
Kenyans' suffering because of the corruption of Kenya's public officials is not remotely the same as the destruction of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces. One is the natural outcome of a disaffected population that is disinterested in national building. The other is the natural outcome of colonialism and racial apartheid. The solution to the former is the reintegration of the people in national building. The solution to the latter is armed resistance. It would pay if Kenyans understood the difference.
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