Alshabaab: "The" Number One Enemy of Islam and Somali People
Dalmar Kaahin
August 29, 2009
For almost two decades politically polarized warmongers, acting like spoiled children who refused to share a sandbox, held Somalia hostage. But never before have Somalis seen a terrifying group like Alshabaab cult. From a victorious group that evicted Ethiopian troops from Somalia to a barbaric enemy of Islam and Somali society, Alshabaab is the most loathed faction in Somalia today. This religious cult pretends to advocate for the rule of Sharia laws yet undertakes the most un-Islamic acts; it screams about the presence of foreign troops in Somali soil, yet Alshabaab parachutes foreign suicide bombers into the country. Worse yet, the Western Media uses Alshabaab´s barbarism as a powerful propaganda tool against Islam. And above all, this ruthless group brought death and destruction to an oasis of serenity amid chaos in Horn of Africa: the democratic republic of Somaliland.
Alshabaab´s hypocrisy in abundant supply, it advocates for the rule Sharia, but it carries out the most un-Islamic acts of violence—suicide bombings. For starters, in the Somali world suicide bombers remain foreign ideologies that Alshabaab imported to the country. It is a new phenomenon that frightens the Somali people. So far, Alshabaab targeted government officials and civilians alike with suicide bombings. Without a doubt, suicide bombings are against the teachings of Islam. Clearly, any Muslim scholar that you speak to will tell you that suicide bombing is one of the most un-Islamic acts—a guaranteed ticket to hell; yet Alshabaab in the name of its version of Islam conducts what Islam resolutely forbids.
Equally, new to Somalia and as gruesome as the suicide bombing is the limb amputations. While in every neighbourhood of Mogadishu women are raped and people are mugged—never mind securing the rest of the country—Alshabaab horns its skills to chop up body parts of young boys caught shoplifting. But what does Islam say about limb amputations?
To amputate thieves´ arms or legs strict conditions must be met: first, a functioning Islamic state with its security forces, economy, justice and health care systems should exist. Second, the state must prove beyond shadow of a doubt that the government can provide jobs for the thieves, but they resort to stealing. Before, the perpetrators lose their limbs, the president of the Islamic republic—if required—must testify in a court of law that it is not his/her government that fails them, but they let themselves down. Third, the owner of the stolen goods must insist not to forgive the perpetrators, which will never happen in the Somali society. Fourth, the perpetrators and community should have time to evaluate what is at stake. During this period the community convinces the owner to forgive the thieves. Currently, Somalia is far from a nation that can be applied to Islamic laws.
But Alshabaab devises a brutal campaign of terror and argues such an atrocity is based on Islamic Sharia law. Destroying cemeteries, killing civilians and displacing them, among other atrocities, Alshabaab carries out a barbaric war against the Somali people. However, among Somali Islamic scholars Alshabaab´s barbarism has nothing to do with promoting Sharia. "Before Sheik Sharif's election you were all fighting for an Islamic leader, but now you have no excuse," the chairman of the Somali Clerics Council, Sheikh Nur Barood Gurhan states. http://hiiraan.com/news2/2009/Feb/somali_clerics_council_endorses_president.aspx (Sheik Sharif is the current Somali president, or more precisely: the besieged mayor of Mogadishu.)
Now don´t forget: many members of Alshabaab fighters are in fact from former warlords´ militias. In the past, some of these militias who currently call themselves Alshabaab raped Somali women and girls, looted businesses, and murdered countless innocent people in the name of defending not Islam or Somalia but the interest of their tribes. (Back then, tribes were the new sports on the block.) These gangs just changed shirts. In that case, shouldn´t Alshabaab´s Sharia applied to its members? Of course not, because Alshabaab zealots accept only the part of Islam that favours them. That is, they exonerate themselves from their horrendous crimes—without a tinge of regret—yet preach us about Islam.
Also, while Alshabaab screams about the presence of the African peacekeeping forces known as UNISOM in Somalia, it [Alshabaab] parachutes foreign suicide bombers into Somalia. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the leader of Hisbul Islam—an ally of Alshabaab—unequivocally admits receiving support from Eritrea and foreign fighters. He states, "Eritrea supports us…there may be two or three Arabs who were moved by Islam to fight alongside us." http://markacadeey.com/may/20090523_1e.htm
Now, admittedly, when attacked the UNISOM forces´ indiscriminate slaughter against civilians provide Alshabaab yet another reason to wage war. Worse yet, the current Somali regime´s imprudent strategy to associated with Ethiopia, and signing bogus maritime deals with Kenya which allow Kenya to steal a large chunk of Somalia´s territorial waters, among other blunders, provide Alshabaab a cause to wage war. See these articles about the scandalous treaty:
http://somalilandpress.com/4335/for-sale-somalia%E2%80%99s-territorial-waters/
http://www.unforum.com/UNheadlines571.htm and http://tinyurl.com/njjxgy
But the maritime treaty isn´t as scandalous as the Western Media´s malicious propaganda campaign against Islam. The Western Media could not be happier with Alshabaab´s un-Islamic barbaric acts. For instance, with respect to Somalia´s turmoil almost every article that you come across, or every channel you flip states, "Alshabaab enforce strict Sharia laws". What kind of Sharia? Without a doubt, this is the invaluable propaganda that the Western Media rejoices. And to make sure that an undiluted ignorance—the worst disinformation of the century, a condoned Islamaphobia—spreads like a wildfire, none of the Media groups invite Islamic scholars to clarify whether Alshabaab practices Islam, or barbarism. Instead, the Media invites the so-called Western experts who repeatedly regurgitate the same stale propaganda against Islam. Through the thick lenses of the West, Islam and terrorism are synonymous words, and so are Sharia and limb amputations. But in the long run these deliberate fear-mongering tactics and unabated Islamaphobia will harm the Western image and inadvertently recruit more groups like Alshabaab.
And who created this monster? Of course, Alshabaab came to power when U.S. commissioned Ethiopia to invade Somalia in December 2006. Ethiopian troops fled; U.S. failed its mission; Somalia inherited the monster.
But Somalia is not the only victim of Alshabaab. The democratic republic of Somaliland also received the wrath of Alshabaab. It detonated one of the worst suicide attacks in Somaliland´s history in October 2008. Over twenty two civilians lost their life. The scares of the bomb attacks are still visible in Hargeisa, Somaliland capital. And while panic-stricken Somalilanders focused on local suspects from Somalia, I asked a simple question: "Is Canada Harbouring Terrorists Who Attacked Hargeisa, Somaliland capital?" http://www.maanhadal.com/articles/Is_Canada_Harboring_Terrorists.html
One year later, Canada´s National Post Newspaper answers my question and details how Alshabaab sympathizers from Canada planned to spur chaos in Somaliland: http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=1472963 Similarly, a brainwashed Somali-American from Minneapolis was among the suicide bombers that sent body part flying over rooftops in downtown Hargeisa.
Now, Hargeisa is only 280km from U.S. bases in Djibouti. Additionally, Somaliland border guards near Djibouti are poorly trained and barely equipped to stop suicide bombers and terrorists. Therefore, God forbid but it will be a matter of time before Alshabaab attacks U.S. bases in Djibouti. And that is why it is paramount for the U.S. not only to train and equip Somaliland forces but also base some U.S. forces near the border between Somaliland and Somalia to stop suicide bombers destined to attack U.S. base in Djibouti.
Surely, just as the Alshabaab terrorists bombed Somaliland in 2008, so too they could detonate deadly explosives against U.S. bases in Djibouti. Hence, the U.S. must stop Alshabaab at the border between Somaliland and Somalia and not at the gates of the U.S. military bases in Djibouti. The indisputable fact is: the ONLY wall that separates Alshabaab suicide bombers and U.S. forces in Djibouti is Somaliland. If this wall is thick enough, Alshabaab will have less chances of attacking the U.S. interests in Djibouti.
To sum up, Alshabaab´s callous brutality against Somalis, its un-Islamic ideologies, and its unabated barbaric limb amputations, among others, now forced many Somalis to either stay frightened in their houses, or flee in droves. Also, this group´s brutal war to annihilate anyone that opposes its ideologies is unprecedented in Somalia.
With conviction, overwhelmingly the Somali citizens, the intellectuals, and the Islamic scholars, view Alshabaab as the number one enemy of the Somali society and Islam.
As for the West, it cannot abandon Somalia and watch while West-created monster: Alshabaab decimates the current Mogadishu regime.
The truth is: while Alshabaab is left to amputate and terrorise Somali people, the West uses this terror group as an indispensible propaganda tool against Islam. The fact is: if the U.S. and its allies want to annihilate Alshabaab they could do so easily. But why bother? After all, Alshabaab has very little chance or motive to detonate bombs in the Western countries (minus staged terrorism, of course), despite the ludicrous shrills from the West. And more important, to continue the Western imperial expansion, an enemy is always needed.
Similarly, both Ethiopia and Kenya desperately need Alshabaab to keep Somalia´s inferno burning.
Doubtless, once Alshabaab terrorists overrun Mogadishu and its environs, they will take their suicide bombs to the democratic republic of Somaliland—once again—where during its upcoming presidential election in September 2009 terrorists plan to detonate massive explosives at polling stations.
Nor will the U.S. bases in Djibouti escape Alshabaab terrorists´ attack, if U.S. doesn´t stop them before they enter Somaliland.
Dalmar Kaahin
dalmar_k@yahoo.com
Monday, November 9, 2009
Al Shabaab
I will be posting alot of material and my personal opinions on the current sitauation in Somalia and the madness of Al sabaab.....shortly
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Mboya sends Obama to school
(Mboya welcomes Bob Kennedy to Nairobi, Mboya and Kennedy)
Why does nation newspaper in particular have such a problem with Mboya’s role in Kenyas independence?
Look at the following story in Nation 1 April 2008. In it there is no mention of Mboya. Look at the original story in the Washington post of 30 March 2008 and come to your own conclusion. Nation do not even mention 'Washington Post' but simply 'Washington'
If it were not for the efforts of Mboya Obama may not have been a presidential candidate today.
(Nation Story)
Obama admits Kennedy tale over airlift not exactly true Publication Date: 2008/04/01
WASHINGTON, Monday
Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama, a year ago, Senator Barack Obama traced his “very existence” to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.
The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Mr Obama’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which “history replays itself” and by how “two generations of two families — separated by distance, culture and wealth — can intersect in strange and wonderful ways.”
But the key details of the story are either untrue or grossly oversimplified.
Contrary to Mr Obama’s claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedys did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the US that included Mr Obama’s father.
According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached to support the programme nearly a year later, in July 1960.
The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton acknowledged on Saturday that the senator from Illinois had erred in crediting the Kennedy family with a role in his father’s arrival in the US.
Meanwhile, with the next big contest coming in Pennsylvania on April 22, Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate McCain took much of the day off.
In their absence, Mr Obama took the opportunity to attack McCain’s stance on the war in Iraq, a war he said had failed to make the United States safer while costing billions of dollars in part because of Bush’s tax cuts.
“When you ask John McCain how it has made us safer you get - err,” Mr Obama told a raucus crowd of 2,000 at Harrisburg town hall in Pennsylvania. “He will argue that the surge has been the right thing to do but ... the question is why did we go in there in the first place.”
Earlier, Obama campaigned at Pennsylvania State University. where some 22,000 people came
to listen to him speak at an open air rally in what aides said was one of the biggest events of the Democratic campaign.
College students have been some of Obama’s most active supporters and in Pennsylvania he must score big among them if he is to do well against Clinton.
College students have been some of Obama’s most active supporters and in Pennsylvania he must score big among them if he is to do well against Clinton.
Agencies
(Now the FULL story)
Obama Overstates Kennedys' Role in Helping His Father
Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.
The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which "history replays itself" and by how "two generations of two families -- separated by distance, culture and wealth -- can intersect in strange and wonderful ways."
It is a touching story -- but the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified.
Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton acknowledged yesterday that the senator from Illinois had erred in crediting the Kennedy family with a role in his father's arrival in the United States. He said the Kennedy involvement in the Kenya student program apparently "started 48 years ago, not 49 years ago as Obama has mistakenly suggested in the past."
The real story of Barack Obama Sr.'s arrival in the United States and the subsequent Kennedy involvement in the airlifts of African students sheds light on the highly competitive presidential election of 1960 and Africa's struggle to free itself from colonialism, as well as the huge strides made by the Obama family, which has gone in two generations from herding goats in the hills of western Kenya to the doors of the White House.
In his speech commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, Sen. Obama linked his father's arrival in the United States with the turmoil of the civil rights movement. Although the airlift occurred before John F. Kennedy became president, Obama said that "folks in the White House" around President Kennedy were looking for ways to counter charges of hypocrisy and "win hearts and minds all across the world" at a time when America was "battling communism."
"So the Kennedys decided 'we're going to do an airlift,' " Obama continued. " 'We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.' This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves. . . . So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."
A more accurate version of the story would begin not with the Kennedys but with a Kenyan nationalist leader named Tom Mboya, who traveled to the United States in 1959 and 1960 to persuade thousands of Americans to support his efforts to educate a new African elite. Mboya did not approach the Kennedys for financial support until Obama Sr. was already studying in Hawaii.
Mboya, a charismatic politician, was assassinated in 1969. His daughter Susan, now living in Ohio, said the mass airlifts of Kenyan students to the United States had a "huge" impact on the young African nation, which gained its independence from Britain in 1963. She cited a University of Nairobi study that showed that 70 percent of top Kenyan officials after independence, including Obama Sr., were products of the American program.
In the late 1950s, there was no university in Kenya, and educational opportunities for Africans were limited. The British colonial government opposed Mboya's efforts to send talented young Kenyans to the United States for an education, arguing that there was a perfectly good university, Makerere College, in neighboring Uganda. The U.S. State Department supported the British and turned down Mboya's requests for assistance.
During his 1959 trip to the United States, the 29-year-old Mboya raised enough money for scholarships for 81 young Kenyans, including Obama Sr., with the help of the African-American Students Foundation. Records show that almost 8,000 individuals contributed. Early supporters included baseball star Jackie Robinson, who gave $4,000, and actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.
There was enormous excitement when the Britannia aircraft took off for New York with the future Kenyan elite on board. After a few weeks of orientation, the students were dispatched to universities across the United States to study subjects that would help them govern Kenya after the departure of the British. Obama Sr. was interested in economics and was sent to Hawaii, where he met, and later married, a Kansas native named Ann Dunham. Barack Jr. was born in August 1961.
Among the other students on the first airlift was Philip Ochieng, who went on to become a prominent Kenyan journalist. In a 2004 article for the Nation, Kenya's leading newspaper, Ochieng remembered Obama Sr. as "charming, generous and extraordinarily clever," but also "imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and his wealth." Obama Jr. paints a similar portrait in his best-selling 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," describing his father as exceptionally gifted but also "wild," "boastful" and "stubborn."
After the success of the first student airlift, Mboya decided to expand the program in 1960 and to include students from neighboring African countries. This time, he raised $250,000 for 256 students. Universities and colleges promised scholarships worth $1,600,000, but Mboya still needed money for the airlift itself. His American friends suggested that he approach Sen. John F. Kennedy, who had just launched his presidential campaign. In addition to chairing a Senate subcommittee on Africa, Kennedy controlled the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, named after his older brother who was killed in World War II.
The two men met at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass., on July 26, 1960. Kennedy later said that the family was initially "reluctant" to support the program because of other commitments but eventually agreed to provide $100,000 because it was impossible to raise the funds elsewhere.
Stephen Plotkin, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, said a search of the records did not turn up any evidence that the Kennedy family supported the 1959 airlift.
Vice President Richard M. Nixon, determined not to be outdone by his Democratic rival for the White House, persuaded the State Department to drop its long-standing refusal to fund the program. The head of the Nixon campaign "truth squad," Sen. Hugh Scott, accused Kennedy of attempting to "outbid the U.S. government" in a "misuse of tax-exempt foundation money for blatant political purposes." Kennedy responded by accusing the Nixon campaign of "the most unfair, distorted and malignant attack that I have heard in 14 years in politics."
The former executive director of the African-American Students Foundation, Cora Weiss, said some of the money provided by the Kennedys was used to pay off old debts and subsidize student stipends. Even though Obama Sr. arrived the previous year, he and other members of the 1959 cohort benefited indirectly from Kennedy family support.
According to a letter on file in the Mboya papers at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, "most" of Obama Sr.'s early expenses in the United States were covered by an international literacy expert named Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, who had traveled widely in Kenya. Kirk wrote to Mboya in May 1962 to request additional funds to "sponsor Barack Obama for graduate study, preferably at Harvard." She said she would "like to do more" to assist the young man but had two stepchildren ready for college.
Susan Mboya credits the student airlifts with helping to make Kenya "an island of stability in a region rocked by turmoil" until very recently. "We were fortunate in having a lot of highly educated people who were able to come back and take over the government after the British left," she said. Products of the airlift project included Africa's first female Nobel Peace Prize winner, the environmentalist Wangari Maathai.
Obama's Selma speech offers a very confused chronology of both the Kenya student program and the civil rights movement. Relating the story of how his parents met, Obama said: "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Junior was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama."
After bloggers pointed out that the Selma bridge protest occurred four years after Obama's birth, a spokesman explained that the senator was referring to the civil rights movement in general, rather than any one event.
Obama Sr. never quite lived up to his enormous potential. He achieved his dream of studying at Harvard after graduating from the University of Hawaii. He divorced Dunham in 1963 and married another woman.
He returned to Kenya and became a close aide to Mboya, a fellow Luo tribesman, at the Ministry of Economic Development. According to his old "drinking buddy" Ochieng, he antagonized other officials with his "boasting," was "excessively fond of Scotch" and ended up in poverty "without a job." He got into frequent car accidents, one of which led to the amputation of both his legs. He was killed in another car accident, in 1982, at the age of 46.
Special correspondent Michael Zielenziger in Stanford, Calif., contributed to this report.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Confronting the enemny that is 'Tribalism' (Phillip Ochieng, Nation Newspaper Feb 10 2008)
(The madness of 'tribalism')
For years, Kenyans have clamoured for laws better than the present ones. But, surely, there must be some good laws among the existing ones. What can be better than the one which states that a Kenyan can live in any part of Kenya?
It is a crime for a Taita to prevent a Teso from putting up a home in Taitaland, unless the Teso has acquired the land illegally. Yet that is precisely the law that we are now so busy breaking. Kenyans are chasing Kenyans with the civility of a cheetah pursuing a gazelle in the Maasai Mara.
WHAT CAN IT MEAN? SURELY, THIS – THAT THE “betterness” of a piece of law lies not in its wording but only in whether it is achieving its purpose. There are two ways in which it can do this. One is through the police – both to prevent flouting and to punish flouters.
But by far the cheaper and more effective one is to obviate the need for policing. Why waste resources -- which might be direly needed in vastly more important social areas -- on what Dostoyevsky called Crime and Punishment?
It is important to catch felons and bring them to book. Yet this can deal only with “manual crime.” But, as Jacob Bronowski remarks in The Ascent of Man, the hand is not an independent agent. The hand is merely “? the cutting edge of the mind?”
It is the mind that instigates the crimes that we commit, including the chauvinism which leads you to attack your neighbour on account of his ethnic affiliation. The upshot is that, in the war on crime, mental education is a hundred times more effective than a hundred manacles.
The chief failing of all our upbringing – including the classroom formality that we claim to be “education” – is that it does not attempt to remove from our minds any of the groundless assumptions, sentiments and thoughts that we hold against one another as ethnic communities.
THE CHIEF CULPRITS ARE OUR PARENTS, OUR teachers, our priests and – by the favouritism with which they hire and fire – our government officials. If these are members of our most “educated” elite, how can we expect our mass of peasants and proletarians to know any better?
That is why it is not surprising that, as we cut one another’s throats, most of us clamour merely for a greater police presence.
The police may have prevented much of what has happened. They may arrest us and the courts may sentence us to stiff punishment.
But they cannot arrest and detain or jail the parochialism that hag-rides us as races, tribes, genders and religions. It is not their duty. Appalling is the revelation, since December 27, that, since independence, Kenyans have not moved even a flea-hop in the direction of mental education, uplift and refinement.
Nothing is more embarrassing than to listen to PhDs from one community, seated at the counter of a pub, uttering the most fetid drivel about other tribes. They demand “revolutionary changes” in the body politic but only if these changes are manned by members of their tribe. At the counter – that’s why I call them counter-revolutionaries.
FOR IT IS THEY WHO OUGHT TO PLAY THE VANGUARD role in our seemingly insuperable task of creating a single national mind out of a conglomeration of disparate ethnic minds. Yet since December 27, I have not seen even a single suggestion from the academic community that tribalism is our national bane number one – leave alone how to tackle it.
If our professors are the ones who have created this straitjacket of thought during the 43 years in which we have been independent – probably uttering the bosh in front of their co-tribal students – how could we possibly have avoided December 27 and its aftermath? I ask you, my brothers and sisters: Is this what is called intellectual leadership?
The government says glibly that, economically, we have grown by six per cent. But I would be much prouder to hear that we have grown even by one per cent in our mentality, in our national awareness, in our sense of justice in governance, in our dedication to skill and experience alone when hiring cadres.
No, December 27 has not intensified our parochialism. It has merely removed the outer coating of our small-mindedness. It has merely laid us bare. It has merely made us the laughing stock among the comity of nations.
But, clearly, we cannot blame it on any absence of law or any shortage of policemen. We can blame it only on the refusal by our government and other institutions of moral upbringing to face tribalism full-throttle, to hound the behemoth by every weapon to us, till we slay it.
It is a crime for a Taita to prevent a Teso from putting up a home in Taitaland, unless the Teso has acquired the land illegally. Yet that is precisely the law that we are now so busy breaking. Kenyans are chasing Kenyans with the civility of a cheetah pursuing a gazelle in the Maasai Mara.
WHAT CAN IT MEAN? SURELY, THIS – THAT THE “betterness” of a piece of law lies not in its wording but only in whether it is achieving its purpose. There are two ways in which it can do this. One is through the police – both to prevent flouting and to punish flouters.
But by far the cheaper and more effective one is to obviate the need for policing. Why waste resources -- which might be direly needed in vastly more important social areas -- on what Dostoyevsky called Crime and Punishment?
It is important to catch felons and bring them to book. Yet this can deal only with “manual crime.” But, as Jacob Bronowski remarks in The Ascent of Man, the hand is not an independent agent. The hand is merely “? the cutting edge of the mind?”
It is the mind that instigates the crimes that we commit, including the chauvinism which leads you to attack your neighbour on account of his ethnic affiliation. The upshot is that, in the war on crime, mental education is a hundred times more effective than a hundred manacles.
The chief failing of all our upbringing – including the classroom formality that we claim to be “education” – is that it does not attempt to remove from our minds any of the groundless assumptions, sentiments and thoughts that we hold against one another as ethnic communities.
THE CHIEF CULPRITS ARE OUR PARENTS, OUR teachers, our priests and – by the favouritism with which they hire and fire – our government officials. If these are members of our most “educated” elite, how can we expect our mass of peasants and proletarians to know any better?
That is why it is not surprising that, as we cut one another’s throats, most of us clamour merely for a greater police presence.
The police may have prevented much of what has happened. They may arrest us and the courts may sentence us to stiff punishment.
But they cannot arrest and detain or jail the parochialism that hag-rides us as races, tribes, genders and religions. It is not their duty. Appalling is the revelation, since December 27, that, since independence, Kenyans have not moved even a flea-hop in the direction of mental education, uplift and refinement.
Nothing is more embarrassing than to listen to PhDs from one community, seated at the counter of a pub, uttering the most fetid drivel about other tribes. They demand “revolutionary changes” in the body politic but only if these changes are manned by members of their tribe. At the counter – that’s why I call them counter-revolutionaries.
FOR IT IS THEY WHO OUGHT TO PLAY THE VANGUARD role in our seemingly insuperable task of creating a single national mind out of a conglomeration of disparate ethnic minds. Yet since December 27, I have not seen even a single suggestion from the academic community that tribalism is our national bane number one – leave alone how to tackle it.
If our professors are the ones who have created this straitjacket of thought during the 43 years in which we have been independent – probably uttering the bosh in front of their co-tribal students – how could we possibly have avoided December 27 and its aftermath? I ask you, my brothers and sisters: Is this what is called intellectual leadership?
The government says glibly that, economically, we have grown by six per cent. But I would be much prouder to hear that we have grown even by one per cent in our mentality, in our national awareness, in our sense of justice in governance, in our dedication to skill and experience alone when hiring cadres.
No, December 27 has not intensified our parochialism. It has merely removed the outer coating of our small-mindedness. It has merely laid us bare. It has merely made us the laughing stock among the comity of nations.
But, clearly, we cannot blame it on any absence of law or any shortage of policemen. We can blame it only on the refusal by our government and other institutions of moral upbringing to face tribalism full-throttle, to hound the behemoth by every weapon to us, till we slay it.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The Mboya Obama Kennedy link (Courtesy The Guardian)
(Obama on the campaign trail: the Kenyan flag)
(Mboya at Kenya Independence ceremony)
(Mboya and Kennedy)
In his command of the US political stage over the past year, Barack Obama has inspired many a comparison to John F Kennedy. Both young senators brought a lofty message, an appealing young family and a movie-star aura to the presidential race. But the two men forged a less known link - before Obama was even born.
The bond began with Kenyan labour leader Tom Mboya, an advocate for African nationalism who helped his country gain independence in 1963. In the late 1950s, Mboya was seeking support for a scholarship program that would send Kenyan students to US colleges - similar to other exchanges the US backed in developing nations during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Mboya appealed to the state department. When that trail went cold, he turned to then-senator Kennedy.
Kennedy, who chaired the senate subcommittee on Africa, arranged a $100,000 grant through his family's foundation to help Mboya keep the program running.
"It was not a matter in which we sought to be involved," Kennedy said in an August 1960 senate speech. "Nevertheless, Mr Mboya came to see us and asked for help, when none of the other foundations could give it, when the federal government had turned it down quite precisely. We felt something ought to be done."
One of the first students airlifted to America was Barack Obama Sr, who married a white Kansas native named Ann Dunham during his US studies. Their son, born in 1961 and named for his father, has only once mentioned his Kennedy connection on the campaign trail.
"[T]he Kennedys decided: 'We're going to do an airlift,'" senator Obama said during a March speech in Selma, Alabama. "We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama [Sr] got one of those tickets and came over to this country."
Many of the airlifted students worked their way up to elite universities in America before returning to help Kenya adjust to independence, and Obama Sr was no exception. He left the family to take a Harvard scholarship when the young Obama was only 2 years old, beginning the future presidential candidate's remarkable personal journey to Indonesia, New York and Chicago and Capitol Hill.
"Obama is hailed in Kenya as one of the great results of the airlift," said Cora Weiss, who led the US group that helped Mboya organise the airlift. At a recent reception for alumni of the program, she recalled, one Kenyan journalist made a rousing toast to the student exchange that produced "the next president of the United States". Thanks to a bizarre twist in the airlift saga, Kennedy ended up discussing his Obama connection much more openly than Obama mentions the late president's role in his life.
The bitterly fought presidential campaign of 1960 pitted Kennedy against Richard Nixon, then the vice president, who tried to steal his opponent's thunder by winning state department money for the airlift before the Kennedy family's grant could go through. A thoroughly modern political scuffle erupted over who would claim credit for supporting Obama's father and the other Kenyan students. Kennedy ultimately prevailed.
Joel Barkan, an Africa scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Kennedy's gift to Kenya helped forge a relationship with America that has remained strong for decades.
"There's no other African country where there is such admiration for the US ... There has always been a disproportionate number of Kenyan students in America to study. Their children come here, their grandchildren come here," Barkan said.
Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel peace prize, also studied in America thanks to the airlift.
Obama has made his own offering to Kenya in recent days, as a tide of violence unleashed by disputed election results threatens to topple one of Africa's most stable governments. In the midst of his grinding campaign schedule, the Illinois senator taped a radio message urging an end to the fighting and reached out personally to opposition leader Raila Odinga and Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki.
Strangely, the same weight of political dynasty that Obama is seeking to lift in America - putting a name other than Bush or Clinton in the White House - links the senator to both sides in the current Kenyan struggle.
Odinga stood beside Obama during stops on the latter's Kenyan homecoming in 2006, and the Kenyan presidential hopeful claimed on Tuesday to be a cousin of the US candidate. Odinga is also tied to airlift organiser Mboya, who was a political rival of his father during the 1960s.
All of the men belong to the Kenyan Luo tribe, which takes a particular pride in senator Obama's astounding rise in America. But the jubilation at the Obama victory in Iowa has been matched by anger at president Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu tribe. The election was called for Kibaki on December 27 despite strong evidence on the ground of an Odinga win, prodding both sides to bloody clashes and riots that have killed as many as 1000 people, according to opposition estimates.
"Before the Kenya elections occurred ... there was a popular question circulating among Kenyan intellectuals: 'Which country will be first to have a Luo president, Kenya or the United States?'" wrote Dr Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan academic who directs the global studies program at Binghamton university in New York.
"The question was only half in jest," Mazrui added. "Raila Odinga supporters are now convinced Kenya would have been the first, but for the electoral fraud by Kibaki supporters."
Meanwhile, Kibaki has asserted his own tie to the White House race: he recalls working with the elder Obama in the Kenyan planning ministry in the 1970s, after the senator's father returned home following the airlift.
While a spokesman for the Obama campaign declined to comment further on Kennedy's role in the airlift, the senator discussed the instability in Kenya with reporters in New Hampshire on primary day.
"[I]t's important to me, obviously, because my father was from there, and I still have family that lives there," Obama said, according to the pool transcript. "I think it's important to the United States as well, though. Kenya is, has been a stable democratic government in a region that, uh, you know could end up being a base for, you know, terrorist activity, for ethnic violence that results in refugees. It could be very destabilising if the violence there is not contained."
Weiss, the airlift organiser who now leads the Hague Appeal for Peace campaign, has begun researching how many members of the newly elected Kenyan parliament are alumni of the exchange program.
"Airlift students became the nation builders of the new Kenya and a handful of other countries in Africa," Weiss said, adding: "It was all because of Tom Mboya's vision. If it helped to produce the next president of the US, hooray."
The other Obama-Kennedy connection
How a Kenyan airlift that brought a young scholar named Obama to America in 1960 - where he met a wife and fathered a son - was saved by a young senator from Massachusetts.
Elana Schor in WashingtonThursday January 10, 2008Guardian Unlimited
A woman holds a Kenyan flag as Barack Obama greets supporters in Austin, Texas.
In his command of the US political stage over the past year, Barack Obama has inspired many a comparison to John F Kennedy. Both young senators brought a lofty message, an appealing young family and a movie-star aura to the presidential race. But the two men forged a less known link - before Obama was even born.
The bond began with Kenyan labour leader Tom Mboya, an advocate for African nationalism who helped his country gain independence in 1963. In the late 1950s, Mboya was seeking support for a scholarship program that would send Kenyan students to US colleges - similar to other exchanges the US backed in developing nations during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Mboya appealed to the state department. When that trail went cold, he turned to then-senator Kennedy.
Kennedy, who chaired the senate subcommittee on Africa, arranged a $100,000 grant through his family's foundation to help Mboya keep the program running.
"It was not a matter in which we sought to be involved," Kennedy said in an August 1960 senate speech. "Nevertheless, Mr Mboya came to see us and asked for help, when none of the other foundations could give it, when the federal government had turned it down quite precisely. We felt something ought to be done."
One of the first students airlifted to America was Barack Obama Sr, who married a white Kansas native named Ann Dunham during his US studies. Their son, born in 1961 and named for his father, has only once mentioned his Kennedy connection on the campaign trail.
"[T]he Kennedys decided: 'We're going to do an airlift,'" senator Obama said during a March speech in Selma, Alabama. "We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama [Sr] got one of those tickets and came over to this country."
Many of the airlifted students worked their way up to elite universities in America before returning to help Kenya adjust to independence, and Obama Sr was no exception. He left the family to take a Harvard scholarship when the young Obama was only 2 years old, beginning the future presidential candidate's remarkable personal journey to Indonesia, New York and Chicago and Capitol Hill.
"Obama is hailed in Kenya as one of the great results of the airlift," said Cora Weiss, who led the US group that helped Mboya organise the airlift. At a recent reception for alumni of the program, she recalled, one Kenyan journalist made a rousing toast to the student exchange that produced "the next president of the United States". Thanks to a bizarre twist in the airlift saga, Kennedy ended up discussing his Obama connection much more openly than Obama mentions the late president's role in his life.
The bitterly fought presidential campaign of 1960 pitted Kennedy against Richard Nixon, then the vice president, who tried to steal his opponent's thunder by winning state department money for the airlift before the Kennedy family's grant could go through. A thoroughly modern political scuffle erupted over who would claim credit for supporting Obama's father and the other Kenyan students. Kennedy ultimately prevailed.
Joel Barkan, an Africa scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Kennedy's gift to Kenya helped forge a relationship with America that has remained strong for decades.
"There's no other African country where there is such admiration for the US ... There has always been a disproportionate number of Kenyan students in America to study. Their children come here, their grandchildren come here," Barkan said.
Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel peace prize, also studied in America thanks to the airlift.
Obama has made his own offering to Kenya in recent days, as a tide of violence unleashed by disputed election results threatens to topple one of Africa's most stable governments. In the midst of his grinding campaign schedule, the Illinois senator taped a radio message urging an end to the fighting and reached out personally to opposition leader Raila Odinga and Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki.
Strangely, the same weight of political dynasty that Obama is seeking to lift in America - putting a name other than Bush or Clinton in the White House - links the senator to both sides in the current Kenyan struggle.
Odinga stood beside Obama during stops on the latter's Kenyan homecoming in 2006, and the Kenyan presidential hopeful claimed on Tuesday to be a cousin of the US candidate. Odinga is also tied to airlift organiser Mboya, who was a political rival of his father during the 1960s.
All of the men belong to the Kenyan Luo tribe, which takes a particular pride in senator Obama's astounding rise in America. But the jubilation at the Obama victory in Iowa has been matched by anger at president Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu tribe. The election was called for Kibaki on December 27 despite strong evidence on the ground of an Odinga win, prodding both sides to bloody clashes and riots that have killed as many as 1000 people, according to opposition estimates.
"Before the Kenya elections occurred ... there was a popular question circulating among Kenyan intellectuals: 'Which country will be first to have a Luo president, Kenya or the United States?'" wrote Dr Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan academic who directs the global studies program at Binghamton university in New York.
"The question was only half in jest," Mazrui added. "Raila Odinga supporters are now convinced Kenya would have been the first, but for the electoral fraud by Kibaki supporters."
Meanwhile, Kibaki has asserted his own tie to the White House race: he recalls working with the elder Obama in the Kenyan planning ministry in the 1970s, after the senator's father returned home following the airlift.
While a spokesman for the Obama campaign declined to comment further on Kennedy's role in the airlift, the senator discussed the instability in Kenya with reporters in New Hampshire on primary day.
"[I]t's important to me, obviously, because my father was from there, and I still have family that lives there," Obama said, according to the pool transcript. "I think it's important to the United States as well, though. Kenya is, has been a stable democratic government in a region that, uh, you know could end up being a base for, you know, terrorist activity, for ethnic violence that results in refugees. It could be very destabilising if the violence there is not contained."
Weiss, the airlift organiser who now leads the Hague Appeal for Peace campaign, has begun researching how many members of the newly elected Kenyan parliament are alumni of the exchange program.
"Airlift students became the nation builders of the new Kenya and a handful of other countries in Africa," Weiss said, adding: "It was all because of Tom Mboya's vision. If it helped to produce the next president of the US, hooray."
Monday, February 4, 2008
'de-tribalize yourself'
(picture: the 1,000 foot drop to the floor of Suguta valley. Home to the Pokot)
Why is it that we do the ‘musical chairs’ whenever the issue of tribalism arises. Even after seeing its devastating effects in full colour for weeks through various media we still can’t seem to put our ‘finger’ on the button. I have read my brain full, scoured documents and articles from media and the web. Still, I puzzle over us. An article on Rwanda, please read it here:
http://www.grandslacs.net/doc/2812.pdf
about the ‘Mutual genocide’ in Rwanda in the 90’s is insightful. Released by the ‘The International Center of Peace And Conflicts Reconciliation Initiative for Africa (ICPCRIA), it seeks to explore the root cause of the Rwandan conflicts and its possible remedies.
I am reluctant to delve into this topic actually because while I see the complications and contradictions in trying to unravel the root cause of the chaos that has engulfed us I also see a very simple solution.
De-tribalize yourself. That’s all there is to it. That does not mean you will cease to be from an ethnic community or practice your customs. What I intend it to mean is that we (you and I) must divorce ourselves from focusing on the ethic divisions among us as Kenyans and instead see all that unites us and agree as individuals, communities, regions and indeed as a nation that we are much better off united than divided.
Ultimately, my argument can be better versed in the words of the Apostle Paul when he says, ‘for who makes you different from anyone else, what do you have that you did not receive, and if you did receive it why do you boast as though you did not’,
None of us determined (or pre-) who we would be? Nor what clan we would belong to, nor what ethnic group, nor even what race. So what are we all arguing about anyway?
How much better can a Luo be than a Kikuyu? Or worse, or a Kalenjin from a Maasai or a Kamba from a Kisii or a Luyha? How much richer or poorer and ultimately so what?
We are all individuals thrown together in this ‘State’ called Kenya. Maybe our beef is that we didn’t want to be together. Okay. So what do we do now? Split up? Into how many pieces? Will that improve our condition? Then we may get to fighting about which clan or family is better or richer and simply move the argument to a different plane and take up our arms from there.
Really what I’m trying to say is that the only losers are US. And what’s the point of that.
Back to the beginning……. From the time of Kenya’s independence we became two things almost at one. A state (Republic) that is a self governing entity, and a Nation, a tightly-knit group of people which share a common culture. So in effect we are now supposedly a ‘Nation-State’ which is a nation which has the same borders as a State.
Or something like that.
We can blame colonialism all we like, or blame our own ignorance as a young independent nation, or the deviousness and malice of our early leaders but somehow we ended up systematically and deliberately weakening the very institutions that could and should have educated us on what Nations are and how they function. The result of this is that as we went along we became more polarized as ethnic communities and as such much more susceptible to the machinations of the increasingly corrupt political elite.
Unfortunately for the Kikuyu community, they as a group have inherited that dubious tag of being the group that initiated this moral regression because the Government at the time was largely controlled by a Kikuyu elite.
Other communities watched as various other factors combined to endow the Kikuyu with a clear economic advantage. Because of the perception that this advantage was gained more by political manipulation of Kenya’s economic opportunities a disproportionate fixation with politics took hold.
As time went on, we, the nation, instead of gaining an identity, lost our values. Money and power became the tools of trade to be negotiated fought over and killed where need be.
After the 1960’s Kikuyu elite sidelined Jaramogi and killed Mboya they inadvertently set a dangerous precedent that is still haunting us today. The Luo may visibly have recovered from these setbacks but are collectively traumatized nonetheless. This same impunity allowed them (the elite) to even take the life of their own who threatened the status quo, JM Kariuki.
In Moi’s time the Kikuyu were pacified while the Kalenjin set about creating their own political elite through largely the same though somewhat more sophisticated methods. But when the going got tough they resorted to the same brutal methods, hence the murder of Dr Robert Ouko. Yet another casualty for the Luo psyche.
During this period the ruling Kalenjin elite perfected the art of pacifying (read carrot and stick approach) any discontented or belligerent groups through what they learnt from the previous elite. In particular the single, simplest ‘carrot’ was land or the allocation thereof.
This flaw in the constitution empowered the executive to do what in my opinion may have caused more destruction to the fabric of Kenyan society than anything else. The ‘Ndungu report’ testifies to the absolute chaos that irresponsible land allocation has caused.
Meanwhile it was not lost on other smaller ethic communities that the quickest way to improve their lot would be to combine ‘forces’ to improve their bargaining position with the Government of the day, hence the revival of ‘Gema’ and the formation of the ‘Kamatusa’ group.
In the early 80’s a loose group of Luo and Kikuyu ‘old’ guard, disenchanted with the Moi regime staged a coup that was poorly executed and put down with not much difficulty. This though brought a new angle to the institutionalized corruption as the Kalenjin then sought to consolidate their grip on power and in the process subverted most of the institutions of Government.
Mega corruption became the order of the day. Dissent was not tolerated. Kenyans collectively as both individuals and communities suffered indignity and humiliation perpetrated by the ‘State’. As this culture became entrenched state resources, economic opportunity and hard cash went to the highest bidder and or the politically expedient groups or individuals. This period also witnessed unprecedented inflation and the attendant increase in the ratio of disparity between rich and poor further entrenching the perception, somewhat justified, that executive power was the ticket to ethnic/community empowerment.
By the end of the eighties, waning popularity and disillusionment from the masses allowed for the re-introduction of multi party politics. Again this was headed by a Kikuyu, Luo alliance, yet carrying with it a large portion of all other ethnic groups in the country. Moi probably rigged the 1992 election and with the two largest voting blocks going their own way in 1997 Kenya was ensured of another five years of economic hemorrhage.
Come 2002 and Kenya was prepared for change. Again it took an alliance of communities to create a loose coalition that took the battle to Moi and Kanu. That same Kanu of old now facing a collection of its own prodigal brood. A fallout in Kanu and the spoils to the new alliance (party) NARC swept Moi out of power and with it, thought Kenyans, the old order.
Under an MOU (whatever that is) Kenyans ushered in a new order that spelt freedom and prosperity and a reversal of fortunes for the poor and needy. This was not to be. As they say, ‘old habits die hard’. The MOU (needless to say, the masses did not see it or know its contents) was trashed early enough partly because Kibaki was in poor health and his lieutenants took the cue to make up for lost opportunities in the traditional Kenyan way.
Circa 2007 and were back to where we started, Kikuyu (Gema) on one side and Luo, Kamatusa on the other, but a flawed election between them and bloodshed. Plenty of bloodshed and very little sense.
This is what we need to talk about. These are the cards that we need to put on the table. This is why we MUST have a properly constituted, credible and expansively mandated ‘Truth and Reconciliation process’ (a committee or commission) that will allow Kenyans of all walks of life to come out openly, without fear and voice their concerns, their anger and bitterness. Their frustration and pain, their sorrow and loss. This and this alone will pave the way to the regaining of our values and the creation of a Kenyan identity and ultimately the healing of the Kenyan psyche and the growth of a real not merely convenient, ‘Nation’.
There is much more in terms of injustices real or perceived that need to be brought out. Massacres, killings, economic sabotage, corruption, poverty, favoritism and all other manner of anti social vices that we as Kenyans have committed against each other.
Ultimately this process should lead to the strengthening and re establishment of institutions that will give Kenyans the means to deal with issues about our Nationhood so that we come together instead of tear apart.
How we will deal with the immediate devastation that has befallen us is harder. To ask those who have lost loved ones and been terrorized on account of their ethnicity to forgive is a tough call. Yet the perpetrators of the violence be it spontaneous or organized are already known to the victims and will eventually come to light. Their shallowness is evident in that they seem to think that they and their families (because they do have them) can exist in a perpetual state of anarchy and commit atrocities against fellow Kenyans (indeed any humans) without retribution.
A stop to the violence is a prerequisite for any meaningful dialogue to deliver a political solution to the crisis. Hopefully this will include a period of stability that will allow for any Constitutional changes that may be required and the enactment of legislation to explore the flawed elections and reconstitute the Electoral Commission of Kenya.
To me it’s a foregone conclusion. We must save our country because it’s the only one we have. We must also save it, because we can. Kenya is only viable as one ‘State’ and one ‘Nation’. Much as we need to re examine our history to discover ourselves it is clear that the significance of Kenya both economically and politically to the continent of Africa and its future behooves us to dig deep within ourselves and pull together. If we don’t owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children.
Lucas mboya
Why is it that we do the ‘musical chairs’ whenever the issue of tribalism arises. Even after seeing its devastating effects in full colour for weeks through various media we still can’t seem to put our ‘finger’ on the button. I have read my brain full, scoured documents and articles from media and the web. Still, I puzzle over us. An article on Rwanda, please read it here:
http://www.grandslacs.net/doc/2812.pdf
about the ‘Mutual genocide’ in Rwanda in the 90’s is insightful. Released by the ‘The International Center of Peace And Conflicts Reconciliation Initiative for Africa (ICPCRIA), it seeks to explore the root cause of the Rwandan conflicts and its possible remedies.
I am reluctant to delve into this topic actually because while I see the complications and contradictions in trying to unravel the root cause of the chaos that has engulfed us I also see a very simple solution.
De-tribalize yourself. That’s all there is to it. That does not mean you will cease to be from an ethnic community or practice your customs. What I intend it to mean is that we (you and I) must divorce ourselves from focusing on the ethic divisions among us as Kenyans and instead see all that unites us and agree as individuals, communities, regions and indeed as a nation that we are much better off united than divided.
Ultimately, my argument can be better versed in the words of the Apostle Paul when he says, ‘for who makes you different from anyone else, what do you have that you did not receive, and if you did receive it why do you boast as though you did not’,
None of us determined (or pre-) who we would be? Nor what clan we would belong to, nor what ethnic group, nor even what race. So what are we all arguing about anyway?
How much better can a Luo be than a Kikuyu? Or worse, or a Kalenjin from a Maasai or a Kamba from a Kisii or a Luyha? How much richer or poorer and ultimately so what?
We are all individuals thrown together in this ‘State’ called Kenya. Maybe our beef is that we didn’t want to be together. Okay. So what do we do now? Split up? Into how many pieces? Will that improve our condition? Then we may get to fighting about which clan or family is better or richer and simply move the argument to a different plane and take up our arms from there.
Really what I’m trying to say is that the only losers are US. And what’s the point of that.
Back to the beginning……. From the time of Kenya’s independence we became two things almost at one. A state (Republic) that is a self governing entity, and a Nation, a tightly-knit group of people which share a common culture. So in effect we are now supposedly a ‘Nation-State’ which is a nation which has the same borders as a State.
Or something like that.
We can blame colonialism all we like, or blame our own ignorance as a young independent nation, or the deviousness and malice of our early leaders but somehow we ended up systematically and deliberately weakening the very institutions that could and should have educated us on what Nations are and how they function. The result of this is that as we went along we became more polarized as ethnic communities and as such much more susceptible to the machinations of the increasingly corrupt political elite.
Unfortunately for the Kikuyu community, they as a group have inherited that dubious tag of being the group that initiated this moral regression because the Government at the time was largely controlled by a Kikuyu elite.
Other communities watched as various other factors combined to endow the Kikuyu with a clear economic advantage. Because of the perception that this advantage was gained more by political manipulation of Kenya’s economic opportunities a disproportionate fixation with politics took hold.
As time went on, we, the nation, instead of gaining an identity, lost our values. Money and power became the tools of trade to be negotiated fought over and killed where need be.
After the 1960’s Kikuyu elite sidelined Jaramogi and killed Mboya they inadvertently set a dangerous precedent that is still haunting us today. The Luo may visibly have recovered from these setbacks but are collectively traumatized nonetheless. This same impunity allowed them (the elite) to even take the life of their own who threatened the status quo, JM Kariuki.
In Moi’s time the Kikuyu were pacified while the Kalenjin set about creating their own political elite through largely the same though somewhat more sophisticated methods. But when the going got tough they resorted to the same brutal methods, hence the murder of Dr Robert Ouko. Yet another casualty for the Luo psyche.
During this period the ruling Kalenjin elite perfected the art of pacifying (read carrot and stick approach) any discontented or belligerent groups through what they learnt from the previous elite. In particular the single, simplest ‘carrot’ was land or the allocation thereof.
This flaw in the constitution empowered the executive to do what in my opinion may have caused more destruction to the fabric of Kenyan society than anything else. The ‘Ndungu report’ testifies to the absolute chaos that irresponsible land allocation has caused.
Meanwhile it was not lost on other smaller ethic communities that the quickest way to improve their lot would be to combine ‘forces’ to improve their bargaining position with the Government of the day, hence the revival of ‘Gema’ and the formation of the ‘Kamatusa’ group.
In the early 80’s a loose group of Luo and Kikuyu ‘old’ guard, disenchanted with the Moi regime staged a coup that was poorly executed and put down with not much difficulty. This though brought a new angle to the institutionalized corruption as the Kalenjin then sought to consolidate their grip on power and in the process subverted most of the institutions of Government.
Mega corruption became the order of the day. Dissent was not tolerated. Kenyans collectively as both individuals and communities suffered indignity and humiliation perpetrated by the ‘State’. As this culture became entrenched state resources, economic opportunity and hard cash went to the highest bidder and or the politically expedient groups or individuals. This period also witnessed unprecedented inflation and the attendant increase in the ratio of disparity between rich and poor further entrenching the perception, somewhat justified, that executive power was the ticket to ethnic/community empowerment.
By the end of the eighties, waning popularity and disillusionment from the masses allowed for the re-introduction of multi party politics. Again this was headed by a Kikuyu, Luo alliance, yet carrying with it a large portion of all other ethnic groups in the country. Moi probably rigged the 1992 election and with the two largest voting blocks going their own way in 1997 Kenya was ensured of another five years of economic hemorrhage.
Come 2002 and Kenya was prepared for change. Again it took an alliance of communities to create a loose coalition that took the battle to Moi and Kanu. That same Kanu of old now facing a collection of its own prodigal brood. A fallout in Kanu and the spoils to the new alliance (party) NARC swept Moi out of power and with it, thought Kenyans, the old order.
Under an MOU (whatever that is) Kenyans ushered in a new order that spelt freedom and prosperity and a reversal of fortunes for the poor and needy. This was not to be. As they say, ‘old habits die hard’. The MOU (needless to say, the masses did not see it or know its contents) was trashed early enough partly because Kibaki was in poor health and his lieutenants took the cue to make up for lost opportunities in the traditional Kenyan way.
Circa 2007 and were back to where we started, Kikuyu (Gema) on one side and Luo, Kamatusa on the other, but a flawed election between them and bloodshed. Plenty of bloodshed and very little sense.
This is what we need to talk about. These are the cards that we need to put on the table. This is why we MUST have a properly constituted, credible and expansively mandated ‘Truth and Reconciliation process’ (a committee or commission) that will allow Kenyans of all walks of life to come out openly, without fear and voice their concerns, their anger and bitterness. Their frustration and pain, their sorrow and loss. This and this alone will pave the way to the regaining of our values and the creation of a Kenyan identity and ultimately the healing of the Kenyan psyche and the growth of a real not merely convenient, ‘Nation’.
There is much more in terms of injustices real or perceived that need to be brought out. Massacres, killings, economic sabotage, corruption, poverty, favoritism and all other manner of anti social vices that we as Kenyans have committed against each other.
Ultimately this process should lead to the strengthening and re establishment of institutions that will give Kenyans the means to deal with issues about our Nationhood so that we come together instead of tear apart.
How we will deal with the immediate devastation that has befallen us is harder. To ask those who have lost loved ones and been terrorized on account of their ethnicity to forgive is a tough call. Yet the perpetrators of the violence be it spontaneous or organized are already known to the victims and will eventually come to light. Their shallowness is evident in that they seem to think that they and their families (because they do have them) can exist in a perpetual state of anarchy and commit atrocities against fellow Kenyans (indeed any humans) without retribution.
A stop to the violence is a prerequisite for any meaningful dialogue to deliver a political solution to the crisis. Hopefully this will include a period of stability that will allow for any Constitutional changes that may be required and the enactment of legislation to explore the flawed elections and reconstitute the Electoral Commission of Kenya.
To me it’s a foregone conclusion. We must save our country because it’s the only one we have. We must also save it, because we can. Kenya is only viable as one ‘State’ and one ‘Nation’. Much as we need to re examine our history to discover ourselves it is clear that the significance of Kenya both economically and politically to the continent of Africa and its future behooves us to dig deep within ourselves and pull together. If we don’t owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children.
Lucas mboya
Roots of a crisis
Kenya: roots of crisis
by Gérard Prunier
(picture of Mboya with Markham Singh)
To many people in the world - and even to many Kenyans themselves itself - the violence which followed the elections in Kenya on 27 December 2007 has come as a surprise. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have. The combination of economic and ethno-political factors in Kenya had created an explosive mix which was just waiting for the right - or rather “wrong” - circumstances to explode. The 2002 elections had been a lucky near-miss; this time, the favourable configuration that operated then did not repeat itself.
Kenya’s “democratic” politics
To understand the Kenyan crisis in the context of its national, regional and global situation, it is necessary to examine the regime which followed independence in 1963. Britain’s withdrawal from the country had taken place amidst a considerable fear that the Mau Mau anti-colonial insurrection of 1952-1960 might impinge upon the politics of the new state and lead to further violence. Nothing of the sort happened - partly because of the elevation to the presidency of the leader of the nationalist movement Jomo Kenyatta, who once in power swerved from radical nationalism to conservative bourgeois politics.
Kenyatta was a Kikuyu (or Gikuyu) and the enigmatic Mau Mau movement had largely been a Kikuyu phenomenon (most of the 12,000 rebels or “suspects” killed by colonial forces in a brutal campaign were Kikuyu). This had caused the British wrongly to conclude that Kenyatta was the leader of the Mau Mau. But in any case, on becoming president Kenyatta - head of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) in an effectively one-party state - embraced extreme tribalistic politics and packed the new “Kenyan” bourgeoisie he promoted with Kikuyu and members of related tribes such as the Embu and the Meru. At the time of his death in 1978 most of the country’s wealth and power was in the hands of the organisation which grouped these three tribes: the Gikuyu-Embu-Meru Association (GEMA).
Kenya has forty-eight tribes, with three - the Kikuyu, the Luo and the Luhyia - together representing almost 65% of the population. Meanwhile, the GEMA tribes during Kenyatta’s time (1963-78) composed perhaps 30% of Kenyans, almost all concentrated in the highlands of the central province. These figures meant that in order to square the ethno-political circle in Kenya, power-brokers had to forge deals between the three big groups and somehow relate to the shifting gaggle occupying the fourth corner.
In Kenyatta’s time the deal was simple: the Kikuyu and their smaller relatives, after making an agreement with the minority tribes, ran everything. The Luo, who eventually tried to challenge this ordering, were forcefully marginalised as the prudent Luhyia looked on. After Kenyatta died in 1978, his vice-president Daniel arap Moi - who was from the Kalenjin minority tribe - inherited the mantle of power on the understanding that he would not upset the arrangement designed to keep the two other large tribes (and particularly the Luo) out of power.
But Daniel arap Moi proceeded to use his new status to cleverly divide his Kikuyu allies (amongst them the man who would be his successor as president, Mwai Kibaki), so as progressively to sideline them. By 1986, Moi had concentrated all the power - and most of its attendant economic benefits - into the hands of his Kalenjin tribe and of a handful of allies from minority groups (see Peter Kimani, “A past of power more than tribe in Kenya’s turmoil”, 2 January 2008).
But Kikuyu ascendancy had been reined in only, not destroyed. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu - claiming martyr status for their sufferings during the Mau-Mau “emergency”, and relying on tacit government support - had spread beyond their traditional territorial homelands and “repossessed lands stolen by the whites” - even when these had previously belonged to other tribes. Thus Kikuyu “colonists” had fanned out all over Kenya, often creating strong rural antagonisms.
Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, used a consummate juggler’s skill to keep the ethno-political balance working in his favour. At the same time, the first two multi-party elections after other movements emerged to challenge Kanu (in 1992 and 1997) were occasions for carefully state-managed ethnic violence designed to achieve two objectives: keep the dangerous Kikuyu underfoot, and pit the Kalenjin’s minority allies against each other in order better to control them.
By the time of the 2002 election, however, the system had run its course: foreign donors were alienated, President Moi (having ruled for twenty-four years) was getting old, and a “democratic” opposition was gaining momentum. But if everybody agreed on the principle of ridding Kenya of its Kalenjin-based authoritarian state, the question of who and what would be the replacement remained open.Moi had a brainwave: he thought that the best way for him to maintain his influence over politics after leaving the presidency would be to pick as the governing party candidate Kenyatta’s own son, Uhuru. This artful move, Moi calculated, would rally the Kikuyu behind a prestigious but empty symbol (Uhuru was not overly bright and his name spoke louder than his personality). But the stratagem backfired completely and the opposition united behind the veteran Kikuyu politician, Mwai Kibaki, thus creating a unique situation in which both leading candidates were Kikuyu.
In other ways, however, they were very different: one embodied the ghost of yesterday’s near-dictatorship while the other was seen as offering the hope of a democratic opening. This contrast felicitously de-ethnicised the election, turning it into a contest between the old and the new. At the time Raila Odinga, the leading Luo politician, tirelessly campaigned for Kibaki and deployed his tribal followers behind a man who - albeit a Kikuyu and a Kikuyu with a past - was seen as the candidate for change. The economic stagnation of previous years meant that many of the expectations that were invested in Kibaki were of an economic nature: Kibaki, it was hoped, would restart the economy and then proceed to share out its benefits more equally.
The Kibaki administration
Mwai Kibaki was elected president in December 2002 with over 62% of the vote. The country’s foreign backers were only too quick to salute the polls as “a triumph for democracy”. In a way they were right - the polls had been free and fair, and the candidate for change had been elected. But in another way this was a hasty form of wishful thinking because the ostensible “de-tribalisation” of the election had been due more to a series of fortuitous coincidences than to a real decline in the appeal of ethnic politics.
The key words in the campaign, however, had been “hope” and “change”, and to some extent the new Kibaki administration managed to deliver the goods. The economy did pick up and Kenya witnessed a spectacular economic recovery, largely based on Keynesian economic recipes and helped by a favourable international environment.
This can be illustrated by the annual rate of growth in 2002-07, which reveals a gradual improvement from -1.6 % in 2002 to 2.6% by 2004, 3.4 in 2005, and an estimated 5.5% in 2007. But this was only one side of the economic coin. Social inequalities also increased; the fruits of economic growth went disproportionately to the already well-off (and, among those, to the Kikuyu well-off); and corruption reached new heights, matching some of the excesses of the Moi years. When John Githongo, the man appointed by President Kibaki to fight corruption, blew the whistle in January 2005, he had to flee to Britain in fear of his life (see Michael Holman, “Kenya: chaos and responsibility”, 3 January 2007). Githongo is himself a Kikuyu, and his denunciation of a massive series of financial scandals in which hundreds of millions of dollars had vanished was seen as a betrayal of his tribe as well as of the government he served.
Moreover, the security situation in Kenya deteriorated steadily in these years, with the ordinary people bearing the brunt of a triple process:
* a growing wave of routine crime in urban areas
* rival agrarian claims leading to pitched battles between ethnic groups fighting for land, particularly around Mount Elgon and in Kisii
* a running feud between the police and the Mungiki sect, which left over 120 people dead in May-November 2007 alone.
Mungiki is a bizarre cross between pre-Christian Kikuyu neo-traditionalism and an extortionist gang. The sect ran protection rackets on the matatu (collective taxi) routes, helping it to prosper among the poorest urban neighbourhoods and among the landless-peasant squatters in central province; it also has a tradition of hiring its muscle-boys to political candidates during election campaigns. In 2002, the Mungiki had backed the losing Uhuru Kenyatta camp. This cost it dearly in terms of political clout, and it had desperately tried to recover the lost ground by intensifying its terroristic hold on the slum population and on the matatu owners.
The accumulating result of these various processes was a feeling of deep dissatisfaction - not so much with President Kibaki as a person but with his entourage, with his robbing cronies, and with his incapacity to sympathise and do something about the plight of poor Kenyans (made all the more shocking by the level of economic growth the country was enjoying). Raila Odinga, the candidate of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), was then able to capitalise on that frustration in a way that fused various types of motivation:
* ethnic (the Kikuyu have grabbed everything and all the other tribes have lost)
* political (Kibaki betrayed his promise for change)
* social (crime and violence are out of control)
* economic (what is the point of economic growth when it does not bring any benefits to the ordinary citizen).
As the electoral campaign neared its climax in December 2007, the ODM opposition enjoyed a widespread lead in opinion polls and seemed ready to sweep Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU) out of power.
The December 2007 election
The election on 27 December 2007 was both a parliamentary and a presidential one. At the legislative level, 2,548 candidates from 108 parties were vying for 210 seats; at the presidential level, three candidates - the incumbent Mwai Kibaki , ODM leader Raila Odinga and former foreign minister Kalonzo Musyoka (who had split from the ODM) - were competing.
Everybody (including himself) knew that Kalonzo Musyoka had no chance of winning and that he was simply angling for the position of a strategic post-election ally who could sell his support to a probable minority victor in need of additional backing. Kalonzo Musyoka is a Kamba, and the Kamba - although closely related to the Kikuyu - had chosen the British camp during the Mau Mau emergency. This gives them a hybrid status in the Kenyan ethno-political landscape, in which they hold the capacity to swing either with the Kikuyu or against them.
The polls were a messy business for a number of reasons. The voters’ rolls had been poorly updated or at times not updated at all. Some dead people were still on the rolls and electors who had changed residence had not been properly struck off in one place and re-registered at their new address. The rules governing the help which could be given to illiterate voters (up to 80% of the electoral body in some remote constituencies) were poorly enforced. Foreign and national observers were not always given free access to the polling stations, and later to the ballots.
But all in all, the parliamentary segment of the election proceeded smoothly. The definitive results have not at the time of writing been officially posted, but a provisional tally (based on 181 out of 210 seats) is possible. Twenty-two parties won seats, although only four can be considered as “serious” (the eighteen others have between one and three MPs, sharing twenty-eight seats between them): :
But all in all, the parliamentary segment of the election proceeded smoothly. The definitive results have not at the time of writing been officially posted, but a provisional tally (based on 181 out of 210 seats) is possible. Twenty-two parties won seats, although only four can be considered as “serious” (the eighteen others have between one and three MPs, sharing twenty-eight seats between them): :
* Raila Odinga’s ODM, which won ninety-two seats
* Mwai Kibaki’s PNU, which won thirty-four seats
* Kalonzo Musyoka’s splinter ODM-K, which won sixteen seats
* Uhuru Kenyatta’s Kanu, which won eleven seats.
The results speak for themselves: with 45% of the MPs, the opposition has a clear majority over the incumbent administration .
This is what makes the results of the presidential election definitely suspect. Kenya’s electoral commission (ECK) declared on 30 December that Kibaki had garnered 4,584,721 votes against 4,352,993 for his rival Raila Odinga, and immediately proceeded to inaugurate the incumbent president as the winner. This tight margin (little more than 230,000 votes, about 2.5% of those cast) is very fragile in view of the following facts.
In seventy-two of the constituencies, the figures on the ballot forms signed by the ECK returning officers and the agents of the candidates differ from the figures released by the national counting centre. At Ole Kalou constituency, for example, local ECK figures gave Mwai Kibaki 72,000 and Raila Odinga 5,000 out of 102,000 registered votes. But by the time the figures for that same constituency were released at the central level, Kibaki’s winning tally had jumped to 100,980 votes (i.e. 99% of the registered voters).
The pattern was repeated elsewhere. In Elmolo constituency, Kibaki was said by local ECK officials to have won by 50,145 votes, which then translated itself into 75,261 votes at the national level. In Kieni the discrepancy was between 54,337 (local level) and 72,054 (national tally). In various other constituencies (Lari, Kandara, Kerugoya) thousands more had “voted” in the presidential election than in the legislative one, even though the two ballots had been held concurrently .
All this points to a limited but widespread form of rigging which would not have had such catastrophic consequences had not the race been so closely contested. (After all, if several constituencies have probable rigging levels of 10,000-30,000 votes, there is no way a victory by 230,000 votes be considered solid.) On 1 January, Samuel Kivuitu - the respected chairman of the ECK - admitted : “I don’t know who won the election and I won’t know till I see the original records, which I can’t for now until the courts authorise it”.
It seems that what happened was that the Mwai Kibaki vote was artificially inflated rather than that Raila Odinga’s vote was tampered with. The evidence seems clear: even if gerrymandering had distorted the legislative vote vis-à-vis the presidential one (during the Moi years, the “enemy” Kikuyu constituencies had seen their demographic weight systematically eroded in this way), how could the pro-ODM trend at the parliamentary level turn itself into a contradictory support for the anti-ODM president? The possibility of such a split-personality vote is remote, as it requires that almost all those voting for minority parties would also have voted for Kibaki.
The bloody aftermath
The results of this manipulation have been disastrous. Almost as soon as the ECK hastily proclaimed Kibaki to be the winner, both the Nairobi slums and the western province exploded - the violence of the slum-dwellers reflecting their social frustration and the westerners’ arson-cum-machete attacks stemming from their hatred of the Kikuyu “colonists”. The political violence should thus be seen as both tribal and socio-economic; because, even if far from all Kikuyu are rich beneficiaries of the regime, many rich beneficiaries of the regime are Kikuyu. Such a situation recalls - especially for the Luo - the frustrations of the 1960s and 1970s.
The vote itself was primarily anti-establishment rather than crudely anti-Kikuyu, however: only six members of the cabinet survived the landslide, and many of the victims - including vice-president Moody Awori, planning minister Henry Obwocha, roads minister Simeon Nyachae, and tourism minister Moses Dzoro - were not Kikuyu. Even the few Luo or other westerners who were also PNU members lost their seats. Several Moi administration survivors - such as former minister Nicholas Biwott or Moi’s own son Gideon Moi - were also axed, often by nearly unknown candidates who took their seats with ease. This is one reason why the minority parties won so many seats: incumbency was a distinct liability and voters appeared ready to elect anybody who seemed ready to promote change.
It is when that trend towards long-awaited change appeared about to be blocked once more by the man who had already betrayed it after 2002 that violence exploded. The configuration of two relationships - Luo-Kikuyu, and Kikuyu with power - meant in the circumstances that it could not but be anti-Kikuyu. At the time of writing there have been at least 600 “official” deaths (as registered in hospitals and by other reliable sources); but this total is almost certainly an underestimate, especially if information from all the isolated rural areas where old scores are being settled were available.
While Luo have slaughtered Kikuyu settlers in their midst in the west, Mungiki thugs have rallied to the tribe and have been busy killing Luo in the Nairobi slums, hoping to ingratiate themselves with the big bosses of Kiambu, Nyeri and Murang’a. There are already as many as 250,000 internally-displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees (into Uganda). Factories are idle, many roads are closed, and food and humanitarian crises loom. In Uganda, Rwanda and the eastern DR Congo, the interruption of fuel supplies coming from Mombasa is threatening transport. Even Tanzania is beginning to feel the economic aftershocks of the disturbances. By a conservative estimate, the Kenyan economy is losing $30 million a day and the loss for the whole region - though anybody’s guess - must be far greater.
On 2 January 2008, President Kibaki announced that he was “ready to have a dialogue with the concerned parties”. This was a good start but, once more, the 76-year-old president seemed to be a prisoner of his past (and, perhaps, of his entourage). He stalled Desmond Tutu on the bishop’s arrival from South Africa in the effort to mediate (in contrast to Raila Odinga, who had immediately met Tutu); and when on 3 January attorney-general Amos Wako announced the creation of three committees designed to find a solution to the crisis (on peace and reconciliation, on the media aspects of the situation and on legal affairs), they were packed with burned-out politicians like Simeon Nyachae, Njenga Karume or George Saitoti, most of whom had just lost their seats in the election.
On 7 January, it is reported that Kibaki has invited Ghana’s president, John Kufuor, to re-engage in the mediation effort that was proposed as the violence first escalated; and that he has offered to create a government of national unity with the opposition which (an official statement says) “would not only unite Kenyans but would also help in the healing and reconciliation process”.
It is an artful departure from the boast of his precipitous acceptance speech of 30 December, when President Kibaki had declared: “Fellow Kenyans, you have given us a vote of confidence in the values and principles…that we began five years ago. You have chosen the leaders you wish to serve you during the next five years”.In the circumstances, the claim was neither truthful nor realistic. It is unclear whether Mwai Kibaki’s latest manoeuvres represent a genuine shift of position or a tactical adjustment to desperate conditions. In any case, the creation of a government of national unity is now the sole, albeit painful compromise available if Kenya’s violence is to be contained and some sort of progress beyond this nightmare made. After that, a just and truthful reckoning with what has happened in Kenya must be attempted.
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