Thursday, November 22, 2007
KENYANS NEVER LOSE!
Kenyans are always winners. No Kenyan ever loses. We are a very rare species who detest, nay abhor, that word loser. Ask any politician, none can ever lose an election be it secret ballot or mlolongo (queuing). Even when your queue has two people on it and your opponent’s has a thousand, you cannot lose. You have to be rigged out. All politicians are rigged out. The people who vote you out don’t matter, their opinion is irrelevant, you get rigged out by your political enemies. Never mind you cannot name one such enemy.
Our sports teams are no better. All the world referees in all sports are in a conspiracy to lock out Kenyan teams. Be it soccer or rugby, tennis or swimming, boxing or athletics, the referees, coaches and umpires are against us. They rig us out. Our athletes are always subjected to conspiracies by other teams’ coaches. They conspire to have our opponents defeat us. They are not supposed to do this, we are winners and never losers. Why should all the world volleyball teams, cricket teams, basketball teams conspire to deny us our victory. We are not losers. We do not lose we are only rigged out! The Ethiopians and Moroccans have conspired to defeat our runners in all world events. This is unacceptable, we are being rigged out.
We have to win at all and every cost. We go and move the courts to declare us winners. We profess written and unwritten procedures and manifestos. We have no confidence in any official who declares us defeated. Our enemies will always have bought them before we could reach them. There is never any justice unless we are the victors. We have developed a culture of intolerance. We have grown some impervious solidity to reason and common sense. We do not ever contemplate working with others if we lose to them but we expect them to work with us, perhaps for us, when we win.
We are not guided by organizational principles and goals. The professed party manifestos and memorandum are trashed the moment we fail to secure the party favour. Never mind it is the people who will have decided. The concept of the majority is not ingrained in us. It can only be the majority if we win. Past popularity is assumed to be our heritage in perpetuity. Never mind that assume makes an ass of u and me. That is why when we lose nominations we have to hop from party to party in search of a parch for we can never lose gracefully. That is why we have to hire goons to wreck havoc on our enemies, never mind they are the voters. That is why we have no confidence in the returning officers. That is why we cannot sit down and agree on a workable system of nomination since we seek to skew it in our favour. That is why we will fail in our quest for democracy.
Democracy is not the result of elections and nominations. Democracy is the process. Democracy is the acceptance that the people’s decisions are to be respected. Democracy behooves our leaders accepting that you don’t have to be an MP to be an effective leader. There are other myriad ways of serving the people. Unfortunately the leadership culture in Kenya subsumes there is a hierarchical pecking order of leaders, with the Mps at the top. Chest thumping and the material accumulation that our MPs have allocated themselves so shamelessly in the past is leading some greedy hyenas out of their dens. They cannot lose because their investment has to bear returns. It is not service and duty to the electorate, it is an economic enterprise with the voters being the pawns in this shuffling of ‘resources’ for maximum returns in the nest five years.
Time has come for the voters to tell these investors that their capital is not welcome, it is tainted and the value of their currency is down. It is time these politicians learnt that there is, yin and yang, players and referees, heads and tails, winners and losers. Not all are rigged out. Let us grow up and nurture democracy, tolerance and principles. Stop hopping like grasshoppers in the morning dew. None of us is indispensable, the country will not halt in its match of development just because you will not be in parliament or county council next year. As someone would have said, the quantity of ugali will not increase when you win or lose.
Our sports teams are no better. All the world referees in all sports are in a conspiracy to lock out Kenyan teams. Be it soccer or rugby, tennis or swimming, boxing or athletics, the referees, coaches and umpires are against us. They rig us out. Our athletes are always subjected to conspiracies by other teams’ coaches. They conspire to have our opponents defeat us. They are not supposed to do this, we are winners and never losers. Why should all the world volleyball teams, cricket teams, basketball teams conspire to deny us our victory. We are not losers. We do not lose we are only rigged out! The Ethiopians and Moroccans have conspired to defeat our runners in all world events. This is unacceptable, we are being rigged out.
We have to win at all and every cost. We go and move the courts to declare us winners. We profess written and unwritten procedures and manifestos. We have no confidence in any official who declares us defeated. Our enemies will always have bought them before we could reach them. There is never any justice unless we are the victors. We have developed a culture of intolerance. We have grown some impervious solidity to reason and common sense. We do not ever contemplate working with others if we lose to them but we expect them to work with us, perhaps for us, when we win.
We are not guided by organizational principles and goals. The professed party manifestos and memorandum are trashed the moment we fail to secure the party favour. Never mind it is the people who will have decided. The concept of the majority is not ingrained in us. It can only be the majority if we win. Past popularity is assumed to be our heritage in perpetuity. Never mind that assume makes an ass of u and me. That is why when we lose nominations we have to hop from party to party in search of a parch for we can never lose gracefully. That is why we have to hire goons to wreck havoc on our enemies, never mind they are the voters. That is why we have no confidence in the returning officers. That is why we cannot sit down and agree on a workable system of nomination since we seek to skew it in our favour. That is why we will fail in our quest for democracy.
Democracy is not the result of elections and nominations. Democracy is the process. Democracy is the acceptance that the people’s decisions are to be respected. Democracy behooves our leaders accepting that you don’t have to be an MP to be an effective leader. There are other myriad ways of serving the people. Unfortunately the leadership culture in Kenya subsumes there is a hierarchical pecking order of leaders, with the Mps at the top. Chest thumping and the material accumulation that our MPs have allocated themselves so shamelessly in the past is leading some greedy hyenas out of their dens. They cannot lose because their investment has to bear returns. It is not service and duty to the electorate, it is an economic enterprise with the voters being the pawns in this shuffling of ‘resources’ for maximum returns in the nest five years.
Time has come for the voters to tell these investors that their capital is not welcome, it is tainted and the value of their currency is down. It is time these politicians learnt that there is, yin and yang, players and referees, heads and tails, winners and losers. Not all are rigged out. Let us grow up and nurture democracy, tolerance and principles. Stop hopping like grasshoppers in the morning dew. None of us is indispensable, the country will not halt in its match of development just because you will not be in parliament or county council next year. As someone would have said, the quantity of ugali will not increase when you win or lose.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Let’s Tread Cautiously
Where there is smoke, there is fire. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between National Muslim Leaders Forum and ODM – read Raila Odinga – currently in circulation is astounding as it is stunning. This, on the heels of the Obiero interview.
I do not claim to know the veracity of the document neither have I known the NMLF or even heard of them before. What I do know is that this is a group willing to stake their reputation, credit and public support -if any- over dogmatic statements over what they perceive to be the Kenya we want. What are the issues propagated there in?
· Their clamor for establishment, recognition and perpetuation of sharia laws in Kenya
· Decimation of a unitary state into fragments serving parochial religious interests
· The myopic intended neutering of the recovering tourism industry at the coast
· The underlying threat of all the non coastal people and investors
· The threat on religious freedom
· The establishment of a theocratic Jimbo
· The threat on the Kenyan women
· And the other myriad issues enumerated in the document or impinging on the rights of the people of Kenya.
Expressions of these and other extremist views are within the purview of constitutional freedom of speech. But when they are views endorsed by a presidential candidate, one who seeks to lead a nation resplendent with a diversity of cultures, religions, economic endowments, ideologies, aspirations and the whole plethora of assorted tribal interests and infatuations, then there is cause to stop and ponder.
Why should any leader, least of all a presidential hopeful, subscribe to such ideas? Is this election going to be worn at any and all cost? Are we going to mortgage our future and that of our nation to such extremism and dangerous views for our nation? Are these the principles we shall see guiding our nation the next five years? We cannot and should not experiment with the freedom that was won through the shedding of blood. Raila and his cabal are selling our freedom to radical Islamists. By placing his signature on this MOU, he has placed his signature on the death knell of our freedom, our sanctity, our future and the essence of our nationhood. The witness to this document is Balala, as a Muslim his interests in the document are well manifested. Yet this is one of the people advising and supporting Raila in his effort to destroy our freedom and demarcate our nation into tribal kingdoms and ethnic supremacy.
It has taken long to build our country, it is not the best, but we should not dynamite a house to rambles because of flawed plumbing. This MOU is dynamite. The signatories do not have the interests of the nation at heart. Support them at your own peril. This marriage must not be consummated.
I do not claim to know the veracity of the document neither have I known the NMLF or even heard of them before. What I do know is that this is a group willing to stake their reputation, credit and public support -if any- over dogmatic statements over what they perceive to be the Kenya we want. What are the issues propagated there in?
· Their clamor for establishment, recognition and perpetuation of sharia laws in Kenya
· Decimation of a unitary state into fragments serving parochial religious interests
· The myopic intended neutering of the recovering tourism industry at the coast
· The underlying threat of all the non coastal people and investors
· The threat on religious freedom
· The establishment of a theocratic Jimbo
· The threat on the Kenyan women
· And the other myriad issues enumerated in the document or impinging on the rights of the people of Kenya.
Expressions of these and other extremist views are within the purview of constitutional freedom of speech. But when they are views endorsed by a presidential candidate, one who seeks to lead a nation resplendent with a diversity of cultures, religions, economic endowments, ideologies, aspirations and the whole plethora of assorted tribal interests and infatuations, then there is cause to stop and ponder.
Why should any leader, least of all a presidential hopeful, subscribe to such ideas? Is this election going to be worn at any and all cost? Are we going to mortgage our future and that of our nation to such extremism and dangerous views for our nation? Are these the principles we shall see guiding our nation the next five years? We cannot and should not experiment with the freedom that was won through the shedding of blood. Raila and his cabal are selling our freedom to radical Islamists. By placing his signature on this MOU, he has placed his signature on the death knell of our freedom, our sanctity, our future and the essence of our nationhood. The witness to this document is Balala, as a Muslim his interests in the document are well manifested. Yet this is one of the people advising and supporting Raila in his effort to destroy our freedom and demarcate our nation into tribal kingdoms and ethnic supremacy.
It has taken long to build our country, it is not the best, but we should not dynamite a house to rambles because of flawed plumbing. This MOU is dynamite. The signatories do not have the interests of the nation at heart. Support them at your own peril. This marriage must not be consummated.
