29th to 30th December 2007

As one of the pumbavus severally referred to by the Member of Parliament for Othaya, I faithfully forfeited all activities that usually accompany a Kenyan year end concentrating on one thing and one thing only.

The election.

I did believe. That we have come a long way. Democratically. Financially. Socially. That Kenya is my country, najivunia kuwa mkenya says the government spokesperson. Daima mimi mkenya. Croons Eric Wainaina. I do love that song by the way. Not only for the patriotic part of it, it is a great Kenyan composition. Origino kabisa!

So I voted. I cannot forget the thrill that went through my entire body when I checked those boxes. All three of them. My work was done. Now ECK would take over. And boy did they!

No it was not the first time I voted. I did in 2002 and discovered it could be done. I could have a hand in how my country is governed. Any other election before this am reliably informed was a charade.

I am afraid that even this one IS/WAS a charade. Like many others I still ask what the point of voting is if it does not matter anyway. An exercise in futility. But. I will still be voting if we will still have a country to speak of in the near future.

I stayed up on 27^th night awaiting the results just like I did in 2002. Then, by 5 am in the morning the ECK had done its work after mine and splattered the figures all over the TV screen. It was doable. It was done. I can change my country’s destiny.

The alarm bells started ringing when by 28^th Dec 2007 there was nothing forthcoming from KICC. Then the rumors began. 29^th morning I decided to do other things apart from sit glued to the TV screen. As soon as I left the house sinister whispers were heard. Horrible things are going to happen today. I was told by a man I barely knew as I boarded the bus.

“This is not the time to travel there is going to be war this evening.” War? In Nairobi, Kenya? I wondered. I had heard the stories long before elections. But then I had heard the same things in 2005. Then, we were told to take the children to safer places.

I did believe in the power of the ballot, I am rather skeptical right now.

I was amazed to find a seat very easily on the bus. In fact I had three comfortable seats to myself. I was grateful for this when later in the evening we were forced to sleep in the bus as the roads were all blocked and it was late in the night. At Nakuru the bus management decided to put us at the police station for our own safety for a few hours while we waited for the situation to normalize. While we were there we got to know each other. Kenyans are wonderful people. Especially on long distance journeys. In spite of the horrible roads on the neglected side of Kenya it is fun traveling. I remember how once a lady boarded the wrong bus and threw another who was supposedly sitting on her seat out. She was terribly bossy about it only for us to learn that she was supposed to get onto another bus to Kampala. The rightful occupant had already started crying by the time the confusion was sorted out. Even in those tense times drama galore.

The bus management we discovered was more concerned about the safety of their brand new bus a KBA-H or something, than that of their beloved passengers that they strive to serve. So they offered to refund us our money and take us back to the city. No, that would not be possible as more rumors came in that the city was ablaze too. You see what happens when citizens do not have the correct information? Rumors then become facts until proven otherwise.

Finally after 38 hours on the road, getting intimately acquainted with several police stations that faithfully provided escort to stranded passengers, who by the way were more than helpful, we got to our destinations. But not before having stones, arrows and rubber bullets -some which were not intended for us -thrown in the general direction of our bus. I still get edgy when I see a group of young men on the road; it will take a while for that to go away.

Kenya has always been an island of peace? I do not think so.

Recent history shows the contrary.

EDIT Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (b.1928)

A level headed look at things.

Kenyans are fighting inequality, not ethnicity

By: Rasna Warah
As every middle and upper class Nairobian will tell you, one of the most irritating things about the violence that rocked Kenya in the week after the elections was the fact that many maids, guards and nannies did not show up at work for a whole week.

This was not because they were protesting over their inhuman working conditions or low salaries; it was because many of their shacks had been burned and some were actually living as refugees in various government facilities within the city. Others lived in notoriously dangerous slum areas that had been cordoned off by militia or police.

Yet all I heard from my well-to-do friends, relatives and neighbours in my neck of the woods was how awful it was to do the housework without help, what with all the children in the house during the holidays, and the piles of clothes that needed washing.

NEITHER THEY NOR I BORE THE brunt of the violence that rocked all of Nairobi's slums and some parts of the country last week. We all live in areas where killing your neighbours is not only considered bad manners but bad for business.

We don't look at each other through ethnic eyes, though we do sometimes wonder if the muhindi in Block C bought a new Mercedes through corruption money or if the Luo woman down the road believes in witchcraft.

We decried the inhumanity of Nairobi's wretched slum dwellers, who we concluded were tribalists who could not see the big picture. Why, we wondered, couldn't they remove their ethnic blinkers and see how their activities were affecting tourism and the Nairobi Stock Exchange? And why, for God's sake, were they not reporting for work?

Foreign correspondents, who transmitted the violence in Nairobi's slums for all the world to see, were quick to describe what was happening in Kenya as ethnic cleansing. Like my friends, relatives and neighbours, they totally ignored the social, economic and political forces that were plunging Kenya into mayhem.

They failed to see that the main reason for the violence and protests around the country was not because one ethnic group wanted to forcibly take over the presidency from another ethnic group, but because Kenyans perceived the elections to be unfair.

More importantly, they failed to realise that the root causes of the violence had more to do with the economic and political reality of Kenya than it had to do with ethnic chauvinism (although all three are linked in the Kenyan context, as I will explain).

Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Ten per cent of the country's 35 million people control 42 per cent of the nation's wealth, leaving nearly half of the country's population to subsist below the poverty line.

Inequalities within cities such as Nairobi are stark; Nairobi's ethnically diverse slums, rated as the biggest and most deprived slums in the world, service some of the wealthiest homes and neighbourhoods in Africa.

Inequality tends to manifest itself ethnically and regionally, with some ethnic groups and regions benefiting more from public resources than others.

Because the current constitution bestows enormous powers on the executive and because there are no constitutional provisions to ensure equitable distribution of the country's resources, various presidents have used their powers to accumulate ill-gotten wealth for themselves and their cronies (usually from their own ethnic group), and to allocate disproportionate public resources to projects and regions of their choice (usually to regions where their ethnic base is strongest).

Kenya's struggle is, therefore, more fundamentally linked to inequity than to ethnicity, although wealth and poverty have developed distinctly ethnic tones.

MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, THIS election was seen by the poor and the marginalised as the one that would address past injustices and regional inequalities. In essence, the violence that erupted after the elections was a class war — one in which the impoverished masses took up arms against all those they thought represented the interests of the ruling class, in this case, some of their neighbours, regardless of their political affiliation and despite the fact that some of these neighbours were as dirt poor as they were.

It is no wonder then that the most impoverished parts of the country witnessed some of the most violent clashes. What was most tragic about the violence was that Kenya's dispossessed, instead of uniting to demand justice and equity, turned on each other.

But as the country counts its human and economic losses, there are glimmers of hope and solidarity emerging. As one woman who lives in Nairobi's Kawangware slum told me: “I know that when my child gets sick, I can't call my MP to take him to hospital. I have to call my neighbours. In the end, I have to rely on them to save my child.”

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

The mood in Kenya

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it. -Mohandas K. Gandhi(1869-1948)


The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)