This New Tyranny Threatens Everyone This government headed by Uhuru Kenyatta is a fraud. Kenyans should feel really angry with themselves for having trusted a bunch of conmen and women masquerading as a digital transformative leadership while in reality they were a group of vicious anti-democratic hangmen. We have a leadership that deludes itself that public relations can run a country. The latest fraudulent act is that of the overpublicised sacking of former Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph ole Lenku and the resignation of Police Inspector General David Kimaiyo last Tuesday. I have declared before on these pages that I don’t believe that firing of Interior Lenku or exit of Kimaiyo would be the solution to the catastrophic security situation that we have in this country. Instead, we need to address the architecture of our security edifice. We have to cater for the welfare of women and men entrusted with law enforcement. We must, without hesitation, create an environment facilitative of the work of police and other security agencies – including equipping and tooling them adequately. If you thought our President had gone overboard by enjoying a luxury motor sport in a faraway land while dozens of Kenyans were being slaughtered, you aint seen nothing yet! His statement that we the citizens who pay taxes with tears to train and pay security personnel and buy the requisite equipment must take care of our own security bags the jackpot as cruel joke of the year. Some of the actions by operatives of this digital government makes Moi regime operators during the years of Kariuki Chotara, Shariff Nassir and Okiki Amayo look real amateurs. When an outfit fed by my tax money like the renamed Presidential Press Unit – now going under the title of Public Strategic Communications Unit – is used to fight narrow partisan battles at the expense of informing us why our leader does not want to protect us, then something is irreparably broken in our leadership. That something contempt of the people of Kenya. After it had become obvious to almost everyone that it was impossible for Lenku to remain in the Cabinet and Kimaiyo to continue as chief of the National Police Service in the wake of killings in Marsabit, Tana River and Mpeketoni, the President still refused to sack them. He gave them them a second chance. Forgiveness and redemption, by all means. But they are not unconditional – without contrition or even acknowledgement that wrong has been done, there’s no difference between giving people a second chance and engaging in an almighty cover-up. There has seldom, in the democratic era, been a better time to thrive by appeasing wealth and ethnic power, or to fail by sticking to your principles. Politicians who twist and turn on behalf of tyranny of tribes are immune to attack. Those who resist are excoriated. Here’s where a culture of impossible schemes and feeble accountability leads – Kenyans are mowed down in Lamu, Eastleigh, Kapedo and Mandera, among the many killing fields in this country. The leadership resorts to public relation and the memory of the dead are wiped out of our psyche. To blot people out of existence first you must blot them from your mind. Then you can persuade yourself that what you are doing is moral and necessary. In this digital age, this isn’t difficult. Those who act without compassion can draw upon a system of thought and language whose purpose is to shield them – and blind us – to the consequences. The media, instead of confronting the power barons with facts and figures to say human beings were killed, they talk about “opposition plot to derail the government” – they become purveyors of this insensitivity. Uncontested, their sanitised, trivialised, belittling terms seep into our own mouths, until we are all talking about security challenges or illegal aliens without stopping to consider how those words resonate and what they permit us not to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are buried, dehumanising metaphors in this article that even I have failed to spot. If we wish to reclaim public life from this small number of people who have captured it – which we must - we have also to reclaim the language in which it is expressed. To know what we are talking about, this, in more than one sense, is the task of those who want a better world. In the wake of President Kenyatta public relations as Kenyans die, I can only resort to singing these verses of the Psalms. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For they had carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” Above the joy and celebration of the musical chairs, I hear the mournful wail of millions of Kenyans, whose chains, weighty and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more excruciating by the euphoric shouts and carousing that reach them. If I forget, if I fail to remember those bleeding children of sorrow today, “may my right hand forget her cunning and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” Unless Kenyans rise as one to say a collective know to this creeping return of naked dictatorship, we don’t know how far these turncoat reformers will go. Watch this space. - The Star
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:52:17 +0000
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