Ummayed
JF-Expert Member
- May 21, 2019
- 6,155
- 2,580
Let us begin by looking at a few narratives
from the perspective of Jubilee and Nasa.
Jubilee argues fervently that Uhuru Kenyatta got 98 per cent of the vote in the repeat election on October 26. The Nasa people say that only a third of voters cast their votes in the repeat poll.
The opposition claims dozens of unarmed, peaceful demonstrators have been killed since the August 8 election, and accuse the government of genocide. The government says that only a few looters were shot dead.
Jubilee supporters say opposition leader Raila Odinga has a history of violence and is a danger to the Kenyan state. As key evidence of this violent streak, they point to his alleged involvement in the 1982 coup attempt, and his subsequent confrontations with Kenyan authorities that saw him arrested and detained several times.
These narratives, like articles of faith, are deeply believed in, and are vehemently expressed at rallies, on social media and at social gatherings.
They go to show that tribalism is not just prejudice against a person of another ethnicity, which is immoral and dangerous enough, but that it conditions our brains to embellish without shame, to edit out or refuse to acknowledge unfavourable details, to mix fact and fiction, to revise history to suit our narrative, to quote half-truths as the absolute truth, to play with numbers to support our views, etc.
Tribal ideology has made us lose some basic principles or values on the basis of which we can have an intelligent and honest debate.
Where is the truth? On August 8, about 15 million out of 19 million registered voters cast their ballots. On October 26, only half of the 15 million voted as a result of the boycott of the elections by Nasa. So what Jubilee fails to say is that Uhuru got 98 per cent of 7.4 million votes.
On the other hand, Nasa measures Uhuru’s score against the number of registered voters in order to drive the narrative that Uhuru only enjoys the support of less than one-third of the Kenyan electorate.
A fairer way to assess Uhuru’s win would be to measure his numbers against the number who voted on August 8. The truth, therefore, that these numbers tell is that Uhuru and Raila have an equal number of supporters.
As to the conflicting accounts of the number killed, international and local human-rights organisations report that close to 40 people have been killed since the August 8 poll. Some of those killed were children and even infants. These deaths must be investigated and those responsible punished. But these killings, as criminal as they are, can hardly be said to constitute genocide against an ethnic group.
The Raila narrative peddled by Jubilee conveniently fails to talk about the regime that Raila was opposing. They forget to say that the regime almost brought Kenya to its knees through government-aided looting.
They also forget to say that this was a government that employed systematic torture and assassination of opponents as part of its governing strategy. So who was violent and a danger to the Kenyan nation. The Kanu state or Raila?
The thing that puzzles observers of our situation the most is that these lies from Jubilee and Nasa are repeated by both the least and most educated. Education, which should equip us with the skills to differentiate between fact and fiction and to apply logic in debate, seems not to play any part.
On television panels, top-notch lawyers or professors twist history this or that way, choose which facts to quote or leave out in order to arrive at a position supportive of the narrative pushed by their side of the tribal divide. In Kenya, the blood of the tribe is thicker than the water of education!
Of course, when on national TV, these lawyers, professors or MPs avoid crude tribal demagoguery. Vernacular radio and TV stations is where they come into their own.
In these “safe spaces” they throw off their educated demeanour and get down and dirty. They impute moral or intellectual inferiority to ethnic communities, and advocate violence as the only way to teach this or that one a lesson.
The Constitution we passed in 2010 is one of the most progressive around. But not even its drafters could anticipate that the single most serious impediment to its realisation would be tribalism.
Maybe these professors, lawyers and MPs can help us draw up a “Tribestitution” to replace our Constitution. That way, we would have aligned our governing law to our chronic tribalism.
Tee Ngugi is a social commentator. E-mail:
teengugi@gmail.com
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AKINYEMI: How did China become an economic giant?
NERIMA: Kenya has a Europe, nationalism is a dirty, pejorative word connoting xenophobic and ultra-conservative ideas that are incompatible with an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world. In Kenya, it is the primary socio-political goal of the state, a goal that is as historically elusive as it is seemingly unattainable.
Yet Kenya’s future does not lie in nationalism, but regionalism - in deep, regional economic, social and political integration codified within such organisations as the East African Community, Inter-Governmental Auhtority on Development (Igad) and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa). Indeed, our prosperity as a country and as a continent demands that we transcend our national identity in favour of a regional one.
The challenge, of course, is our continuous inability to first overcome tribalism. As with every other challenge, tribalism also affords us a great opportunity - to leapfrog the pitfalls of nationalism and achieve unprecedented regional integration essential for our collective sustainable development. Tribalism is the past, regionalism the future.
But to exploit this opportunity we must get out of our ethnic cocoons. So how do we resolve, or at least sustainably manage, this intractable obstacle? We have two options.
One, embrace our differences and adopt a system of equitable power sharing. We tried this between 2008 and 2013 to a contested degree of success, and if the rhetoric on television is to be believed, it’s an option preferred by the political class. The second option, and the only sustainable one in my opinion, is to completely abandon our differences and adopt a truly national culture that would make us one people, one tribe, one nation.
If we accept that our ethnicities are a collection of outdated abstract to prosper in the modern world; that tribes have become vestigial tools for political mobilisation; that it is possible for this generation to shed our ethnic skins and create a better future; then we might just be on the verge of a societal transformation.
Post-independence leaders were faced with the same questions we face today: how do you successfully unify, govern, advance and prosper more than 40 distinct ethnic groups with different languages, cultures, traditions, values and norms? How do you create a collective conscious from which you can derive a common identity, pursue a common goal and achieve a common destiny? The solution was right in their faces, as it is in ours: the creation of a national identity with one common culture, one language, as well as common values, beliefs, traditions and norms.
National language
To their credit, our forefathers created one of these in an attempt to unify the republic – the national language of Kiswahili. But as we can all testify today, we are no more united now than we were at independence. Similarly, the authors of the 2010 Constitution deliberately included “national values” in an equally unsuccessful attempt to engender a common sense of identity.
What both these attempts failed to appreciate was that neither language nor values exist in a vacuum. They are, in fact, just parts of a whole, and are therefore unable to produce the desired result independently. Indeed, our ethnic identities are held up by several pillars including not just languages and values, but also traditions, myths, history, beliefs, naming systems and norms among others.
The creation of a national culture, and consequently a national identity, must therefore be two-pronged: the systematic demolition of these ethnic pillars while simultaneously replacing them with national pillars. For instance, Kiswahili is useless as a tool for unity if vernacular languages exist in parallel. True unity requires the total abandonment of ethnic languages by illegalising them in public spaces.
This limited space prohibits a more nuanced argument, but here is the bottom line: tribalism and nationalism cannot run parallel. One must be abandoned in favour of the other. There will never be a Kenyan identity, Kenyan culture, Kenyan nationhood, as long as ethnic identities, cultures, languages, beliefs and norms remain intact. We must abandon ethnic languages for a national language, ethnic values for national values, ethnic histories for a national history, ethnic traditions for national traditions, ethnic stories, myths and beliefs for national ones. This requires a co-ordinated policy and legislative action led by a committed leadership.
How could we achieve this dream? A bottom-up approach targeting a unique Kenyan population: children. Realism obligates us to acknowledge that tribalism is so entrenched in the psyche of the current generation th
