This week there was a flare up of violence in Tana River and
Baragoi districts. Since it was also the week of Christmas, what were instead
given priority in the media are Christmas messages from our political gods. Yes
gods, because we worship these beings so much that while our fellow citizens
are being cut to pieces by “cattle rustlers” we watch in adoration how our
politicians went to church and prayed.
Let’s face it we are lost without the political
rhetoric. It just mesmerizes Kenyans to
talk of providing employment by simply being in power and we just swallow it
whole. Never mind that ALL these presidential candidates have been in
government at some point in the last 10 years. Never mind that some are still ministers.
Never mind that none of them have ever directly increased employment for the
populace even in their own constituencies nor do they have any tangible
economic plan.
Obviously when they are talking about increasing employment
by being in office, they mean for themselves. All the promises made in the next
3 months will make even the greatest skeptics among us believe in the
wonderland they claim they will create. Luckily I will still be here to help
the brokenhearted face reality soon after the vote, when the electorate goes
back to being insignificant.
I blame religions and whoever brought those religions here
for the way these Africans think. Our indigenous beliefs were based on a
universe we lived in, where if you get swallowed by a giant fish you die,
simple, factual, dead, reality. Along
came a missionary with a bible that taught us that a man can be swallowed whole
and live to tell the tale. Ever since then, anything that comes out of the
mouths political class has the exact same effect of bending reality, such that
if you just believe, then Kenya will change into heaven on earth.
Of all the promises that come of out the politician’s mouth,
the most denigrating is the promise of employment. First of all, these
politicians are standing, as usual, on a tribal platform. Thus the promise of
employment is specifically directed at their tribesmen. Let’s just examine this
for a minute. The tribesman has never been employed by his politician in the
first place, despite electing him to MP and thereafter seeing him become a
minister. So it’s the most defiling lie ever to come out of the politician’s
mouth, because it corrupts the truth of his plain refusal to employ his
tribesmen. I say refusal, because obviously when in power the politician simply
hires his cronies and not the tribal voter. They don’t do anything that will
lead to more viable jobs for the general population. Jobs to them are farces
like digging trenches just because you are a “Kijana” yet you have a degree.
You can tell that we are being mesmerized because every
single channel except KBC has a live broadcast of a political rally each
weekend. We are so “high,” so drunken with the rhetoric that even foolish
comments slip past us. Anything that the politician says is golden. They are
“human” after all. That a politician needs to say he or she is human, oh my,
it’s like they have just discovered that fact.
We rushed, last minute to register as voters, to the relief
of the IEBC. The rhetoric is foolish, the voters are even more so. For starters, we can’t count.
12 million people
with the power to elect into office their tribesmen who have promised day and
night to employ all of us, and we think we are intelligent. 290 MPs, 47
Senators, 47 Governors and their deputies, one President and his deputy and all
the county representatives in Kenya cannot be able to employ 12 million voters.
Come on!
If such a feat was possible, it would have happened by now. We would rightly call that a miracle,
performed by our “gods”.
If a nation, of so many different cultures only finds a
commonality in divisive politics then truly we are a doomed failed state. It is
our divisive and separatist nature that prevents us from responding humanely
when our fellow citizens are attacked mercilessly in their homes in the dead of
the night. We allow ourselves the comfort of indulging in meaningless tribal
politics when our neighbors sleep in the rain and wake up to find their children
dead. Worst of all, is how we allow ourselves the pleasure of fantasies like
being employed by virtue of a single vote.
It is hard work, and no other way, that will get our people
into employment. When you vote you will only give some politician a job. So
please, snap out of the haze, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Only
zombies and snakes are charmed for so long, if you are human you can discard
the ridiculous ideas that the politician is trying to sell you. Economic
empowerment is about you, as an individual, getting up and going out there and
creating opportunity for yourself, no one will give you that opportunity, the
world owes you nothing and you are entitled to nothing, regardless of
‘historical injustices’ regardless of your past, regardless of your tribe. You,
dear Kenyan, must make it happen for yourself. That is the cold hard reality.
We, as citizens, must expand our economy ourselves.
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