Post by Onyango Oloo on Apr 11, 2006 21:01:57 GMT 3
A Digital Essay by Onyango Oloo in Nairobi
Three of the Nairobi English-language dailies had replica headlines about a nation in mourning this morning. The fourth one echoed the overwhelming melancholic contents of the first three.
A friend of mine- someone we shared beans and sugarless uji with in Kamiti for years- was distraught because his cousin was among the fourteen dead.
Earlier yesterday afternoon one of my comrades was the first to let me know when his cell-phone smsed him a breaking alert about the plane which jolted him especially as one of his former University of Nairobi lecturers was among those confirmed dead.
The somber reality of the people of Marsabit and Moyale waking up today deprived of all of their parliamentary representatives and of dozens of children and spouses robbed of their fathers and husbands is gut-wrenching to say the least.
Let us spare a thought for the pilots and other non- politicians on that fateful flight who have been reduced to nameless ciphers as the Kenyan mass media focuses on the dead wanasiasa who are being sanitized and canonized as we speak.
In short, mkono wa tanzia and rambi rambi to the bereaved and viciously robbed, overwhelmed and forlorn with this shocking, sudden abbreviation of lives still in their early afternoons rather than late evenings.
Very deliberately I have refrained from commenting publicly about the northern Kenya air-crash tragedy for over twenty-four hours as my mind swirled with a range of emotions and reflections at the deaths of a clutch of Kenyan politicians who boarded a plane in more than a symbolic peace mission to a community which witnessed the savage brutalization among villagers who had more in common than the pent up fury that exploded in a bizarre orgy of mass killings, reprisals and counter-attacks.
At eight o six pm Nairobi time, Tuesday, April 11, 2006, I feel settled enough to offer candid and honest reactions to the tragedy.
The first thing I would like to say is this:
Stop with the hypocritical tears already!
Are all Kenyans really engulfed in inconsolable grief because this or that politician has died?
On the other hand, those who are celebrating these deaths in raucous online Kenyan forum after raucous online forum- are they really dancing with joy?
I feel that the true emotions of Kenyans are much more nuanced.
Take the case of the late Mirugi Kariuki who remained on my mailing list, despite my repeated denunciations at his betrayal of his earlier democratic and human rights principles.
Am I glad that the former Nakuru MP has perished in a frightening aeroplane inferno?
Of course not.
But am I overwhelmed with sorrow that he is no longer alive?
I would be LYING THROUGH MY TEETH if I claimed that.
There is no doubt that the death of Mirugi Kariuki is a devastating blow not only to his immediate family and circle of friends, but to the Kibaki regime. He was probably one of the most intelligent, eloquent and astute defenders of the NAK tribal cabal- a fact which earned him the title of the most accomplished debater in Kenya National Assembly. In his public television appearances he exuded supreme self- confidence as he went to bat for an increasingly isolated and alienated regime- doing so with gusto even on the eve of the devastating banana loss at last year’s referendum stand off.
In today’s papers Mirugi Kariuki is going through a rapid beatification process which may culminate in an instant canonization before this week is out going by the gushing testimonials and eulogies from journalists and opposing politicians who only yesterday wanted to pulverize him in seconds. A mythological revisionist depiction of the former internal security minister is in progress even as I pound out these lines.
Conveniently forgotten is the ferocious commerce in name-calling and finger pointing that characterized the real-life relationships between the politicians from northern Kenya who lost their lives yesterday. In some macabre way, it would appear that their untimely deaths has done more to foster peace in the region than anything they ever did whilst alive in putting on the building blocks for conflict transformation in the region.
Let me ask a few uncomfortable and discomfiting questions:
1. What was the government thinking when they piled all these MPs and public administration officers in the same plane? I mean, was it not only three and a quarter years ago when NARC suffered a serious tragedy because they transformed a small aircraft into a flying matatu? One would have thought that this regime which is sometimes so zealous about public security as to unleash hooded commandos on hapless journalists would have thought through the logistics of stuffing all these crucial players onto the same plane. They say hind sight is 20/20 but perhaps one can say in retrospect that it was a very hoary security gaffe and gap to put a key internal security person, ALL the MPs of Marsabit and Moyale, a PC, senior police officers on the same flight. I mean northern Kenya is in some respects a war zone- for years the Kenyan government waged war on its own citizens and then there are the spill over blood-baths from across the Kenya-Ethiopia border. One fervently hopes that this flight was not sabotaged by enemies of the peace process in the communities affected.
2. Which Kenyan lives are worthy to be mourned? We all remember the brutal phenomenon of Kenyan state troops torching the homes of innocent villagers in Rift Valley recently- an operation endorsed by the likes of the late Mirugi Kariuki . Just the other day I was transfixed as I watched a grown man- a pastor who had been away from Kenya for almost twenty years coming back home to find he had been rendered homeless by his own so called government. Why was that tale of woe confined to the back and inside pages of the newspapers? Whose pain is greater? Are those villagers made of wood and stone or are they also human beings who are on the brink of deprivation, starvation and possibly physical elimination? Who is shedding tears for them? How about the children who are being defiled by their own parents even as we speak? How about the women who are being knifed to death by their irate and insecure spouses? Who is condoling the parents of the victims of police brutality? How about the workers who are among the living dead because of IMF policies that have made them victims of retrenchment and candidates for the unemployment lines? In the aftermath of the KCSE examination results, who is sparing a thought for the kids whose academic dreams lie in ruins, or the parents and relatives who cannot educate offspring and siblings because of their parlous economic circumstances? Are these Kenyans suffering less than the families of the victims of the Marsabit crash? Why do we valorize a Mirugi or a Godana simply because they happen to be a recently expired politician?
3. Have Kenyans forgotten how the Mirugis and other reformers of yesteryear have betrayed their democratic ideals? A survivor of the notorious Nyayo torture chambers, Mirugi Kariuki graduated to be one of the most notorious obstacles to the setting up a truth, justice and reconciliation commission thus directly depriving survivors of Moi’s dictatorship of historical redress and condemning them to a life of squalor from which several have already succumbed. This is the man who was very quick to issue threats of arrests to his political opponents some of whom fellow Nyayo and Kamiti inmates. Here is a fellow who justified the killing of a primary school pupil in western Kenya and countenanced arbitrary state terrorism on more than a half a dozen occasions. Today he has become the crown prince of peace and reconciliation in Kenya? Give me a frigging break!
4. As to the peace mission itself. I think it was more of a propaganda and public relations exercise than anything else. As I stated in an essay I wrote at the time of the North Horr carnage, I am convinced that the Kenya government itself is the CHIEF CULPRIT indicted in the conflict in northern Kenya by its adamant refusal to treat these Kenyans as citizens in their own country and colluding with imperialist forces in ossifying these communities as quaint cultural museum pieces for the entertainment of bemused and often borderline racist tourists. For more on this, consult this link:
demokrasia-kenya.blogspot.com/2005/07/northern-kenya-should-be-invited-into.html
5. The Kenyan mass media- both electronic and print- must desist from being a vulture drinking the blood of the victims of the crash by the carpet bombing coverage of this carnage. They should step back and allow the families to grieve, the living to bury their dead.
6. Now, if you are a politician reading this, let me tell you to your face: why are you pretending to weep over politicians you probably loathed deeply while they breathed. Stay away from the cameras; stop grand-standing trying to demonstrate that you are the most devastated human being in Kenya at this very second.
7. For me the real lesson of this tragedy is to find lasting solutions to deeply rooted historical ills rather than condemning politicians to early graves via rashly thought out public relations exercises and woeful band-aid solutions. It will take more than a plane-load of well-meaning members of parliament to solve the problems in northern Kenya.
Enuff Sed.
Peace.
Onyango Oloo
Nairobi, Kenya
Three of the Nairobi English-language dailies had replica headlines about a nation in mourning this morning. The fourth one echoed the overwhelming melancholic contents of the first three.
A friend of mine- someone we shared beans and sugarless uji with in Kamiti for years- was distraught because his cousin was among the fourteen dead.
Earlier yesterday afternoon one of my comrades was the first to let me know when his cell-phone smsed him a breaking alert about the plane which jolted him especially as one of his former University of Nairobi lecturers was among those confirmed dead.
The somber reality of the people of Marsabit and Moyale waking up today deprived of all of their parliamentary representatives and of dozens of children and spouses robbed of their fathers and husbands is gut-wrenching to say the least.
Let us spare a thought for the pilots and other non- politicians on that fateful flight who have been reduced to nameless ciphers as the Kenyan mass media focuses on the dead wanasiasa who are being sanitized and canonized as we speak.
In short, mkono wa tanzia and rambi rambi to the bereaved and viciously robbed, overwhelmed and forlorn with this shocking, sudden abbreviation of lives still in their early afternoons rather than late evenings.
Very deliberately I have refrained from commenting publicly about the northern Kenya air-crash tragedy for over twenty-four hours as my mind swirled with a range of emotions and reflections at the deaths of a clutch of Kenyan politicians who boarded a plane in more than a symbolic peace mission to a community which witnessed the savage brutalization among villagers who had more in common than the pent up fury that exploded in a bizarre orgy of mass killings, reprisals and counter-attacks.
At eight o six pm Nairobi time, Tuesday, April 11, 2006, I feel settled enough to offer candid and honest reactions to the tragedy.
The first thing I would like to say is this:
Stop with the hypocritical tears already!
Are all Kenyans really engulfed in inconsolable grief because this or that politician has died?
On the other hand, those who are celebrating these deaths in raucous online Kenyan forum after raucous online forum- are they really dancing with joy?
I feel that the true emotions of Kenyans are much more nuanced.
Take the case of the late Mirugi Kariuki who remained on my mailing list, despite my repeated denunciations at his betrayal of his earlier democratic and human rights principles.
Am I glad that the former Nakuru MP has perished in a frightening aeroplane inferno?
Of course not.
But am I overwhelmed with sorrow that he is no longer alive?
I would be LYING THROUGH MY TEETH if I claimed that.
There is no doubt that the death of Mirugi Kariuki is a devastating blow not only to his immediate family and circle of friends, but to the Kibaki regime. He was probably one of the most intelligent, eloquent and astute defenders of the NAK tribal cabal- a fact which earned him the title of the most accomplished debater in Kenya National Assembly. In his public television appearances he exuded supreme self- confidence as he went to bat for an increasingly isolated and alienated regime- doing so with gusto even on the eve of the devastating banana loss at last year’s referendum stand off.
In today’s papers Mirugi Kariuki is going through a rapid beatification process which may culminate in an instant canonization before this week is out going by the gushing testimonials and eulogies from journalists and opposing politicians who only yesterday wanted to pulverize him in seconds. A mythological revisionist depiction of the former internal security minister is in progress even as I pound out these lines.
Conveniently forgotten is the ferocious commerce in name-calling and finger pointing that characterized the real-life relationships between the politicians from northern Kenya who lost their lives yesterday. In some macabre way, it would appear that their untimely deaths has done more to foster peace in the region than anything they ever did whilst alive in putting on the building blocks for conflict transformation in the region.
Let me ask a few uncomfortable and discomfiting questions:
1. What was the government thinking when they piled all these MPs and public administration officers in the same plane? I mean, was it not only three and a quarter years ago when NARC suffered a serious tragedy because they transformed a small aircraft into a flying matatu? One would have thought that this regime which is sometimes so zealous about public security as to unleash hooded commandos on hapless journalists would have thought through the logistics of stuffing all these crucial players onto the same plane. They say hind sight is 20/20 but perhaps one can say in retrospect that it was a very hoary security gaffe and gap to put a key internal security person, ALL the MPs of Marsabit and Moyale, a PC, senior police officers on the same flight. I mean northern Kenya is in some respects a war zone- for years the Kenyan government waged war on its own citizens and then there are the spill over blood-baths from across the Kenya-Ethiopia border. One fervently hopes that this flight was not sabotaged by enemies of the peace process in the communities affected.
2. Which Kenyan lives are worthy to be mourned? We all remember the brutal phenomenon of Kenyan state troops torching the homes of innocent villagers in Rift Valley recently- an operation endorsed by the likes of the late Mirugi Kariuki . Just the other day I was transfixed as I watched a grown man- a pastor who had been away from Kenya for almost twenty years coming back home to find he had been rendered homeless by his own so called government. Why was that tale of woe confined to the back and inside pages of the newspapers? Whose pain is greater? Are those villagers made of wood and stone or are they also human beings who are on the brink of deprivation, starvation and possibly physical elimination? Who is shedding tears for them? How about the children who are being defiled by their own parents even as we speak? How about the women who are being knifed to death by their irate and insecure spouses? Who is condoling the parents of the victims of police brutality? How about the workers who are among the living dead because of IMF policies that have made them victims of retrenchment and candidates for the unemployment lines? In the aftermath of the KCSE examination results, who is sparing a thought for the kids whose academic dreams lie in ruins, or the parents and relatives who cannot educate offspring and siblings because of their parlous economic circumstances? Are these Kenyans suffering less than the families of the victims of the Marsabit crash? Why do we valorize a Mirugi or a Godana simply because they happen to be a recently expired politician?
3. Have Kenyans forgotten how the Mirugis and other reformers of yesteryear have betrayed their democratic ideals? A survivor of the notorious Nyayo torture chambers, Mirugi Kariuki graduated to be one of the most notorious obstacles to the setting up a truth, justice and reconciliation commission thus directly depriving survivors of Moi’s dictatorship of historical redress and condemning them to a life of squalor from which several have already succumbed. This is the man who was very quick to issue threats of arrests to his political opponents some of whom fellow Nyayo and Kamiti inmates. Here is a fellow who justified the killing of a primary school pupil in western Kenya and countenanced arbitrary state terrorism on more than a half a dozen occasions. Today he has become the crown prince of peace and reconciliation in Kenya? Give me a frigging break!
4. As to the peace mission itself. I think it was more of a propaganda and public relations exercise than anything else. As I stated in an essay I wrote at the time of the North Horr carnage, I am convinced that the Kenya government itself is the CHIEF CULPRIT indicted in the conflict in northern Kenya by its adamant refusal to treat these Kenyans as citizens in their own country and colluding with imperialist forces in ossifying these communities as quaint cultural museum pieces for the entertainment of bemused and often borderline racist tourists. For more on this, consult this link:
demokrasia-kenya.blogspot.com/2005/07/northern-kenya-should-be-invited-into.html
5. The Kenyan mass media- both electronic and print- must desist from being a vulture drinking the blood of the victims of the crash by the carpet bombing coverage of this carnage. They should step back and allow the families to grieve, the living to bury their dead.
6. Now, if you are a politician reading this, let me tell you to your face: why are you pretending to weep over politicians you probably loathed deeply while they breathed. Stay away from the cameras; stop grand-standing trying to demonstrate that you are the most devastated human being in Kenya at this very second.
7. For me the real lesson of this tragedy is to find lasting solutions to deeply rooted historical ills rather than condemning politicians to early graves via rashly thought out public relations exercises and woeful band-aid solutions. It will take more than a plane-load of well-meaning members of parliament to solve the problems in northern Kenya.
Enuff Sed.
Peace.
Onyango Oloo
Nairobi, Kenya