Post by Onyango Oloo on Dec 10, 2006 17:15:18 GMT 3
From the December 9, 2006 edition of the Sunday Standard:
Left Unchecked, Rulers Reign by the Sword
By James Orengo
Politics cannot be left to politicians. With some power every politician shows the little Machiavelli in him or her. With a lot more power they become a tyrannical crossbreed of hounds and vultures.
Left unchecked rulers have a notorious inclination towards reigning by the sword and corruption. Governments cannot therefore be left to operate on the basis of the goodness we see in human beings. The laws of nature themselves put us in universal and endless of struggles of man against nature and man against man. The dialectics of these struggles are ever antagonistic and many times violent. But they can be overcome so that in the wombs of these struggles can be conceived and born a suitable harmony between man and nature and between ourselves as human beings.
Nobody ever thought that a Kibaki government could use brute force as was evidenced by the confrontations over the registration of the Biwott Group in Kanu. That with four years of his rule Kenya would still find itself deeply mired in corruption. And above all, that a year to the elections, there would be no Constitution and no roadmap to attain one either.
The Kibaki leadership has probably read The Prince. But backwards. Take this. The distinction is made about using cruelty well or badly. Well, I think the violence at the Uhuru Park and at the Registrar-General’s office was a case of using cruelty badly. Take another. Apply cruelty at the beginning and once and for all because Machiavelli advises the Prince "whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him." Have you not seen the knife unleashed a little too often? We have not forgotten the midnight scenes at KTN and NTV, rallies violently disrupted, the mayhem and killings in Kisumu during the referendum campaigns, and during the evictions in the Rift Valley. Of course, there is the case of the poor hawkers. What a life!
My biggest worry right now is what Prof Okoth Okombo told KTN Newsline the other week. And you cannot do justice to the good Professor’s ominous delivery and eloquent language because his passion and depth is lost in my printed words and style. And it was this. Politicians of the genre we have will indubitably manipulate our identities to attain and secure power. It need not be ethnic identity. Religion, race, language, culture and the list is endless. And we are in a terrible bind if negative ethnicity is the banner of our electoral politics and coalitions. Flying this flag has enabled the most backward and corrupt politicians to emerge in the centre of politics with political might and vigour, all their past sins forgotten. We are thrown into a collective trance of amnesia to the extent that political sense and choices are informed by tribalism.
When you board a matatu you would be least concerned about whether or not the owner or the driver comes from Gatundu. I have never been at the Casualty Department in Kenyatta Hospital and hear a patient from Nyanza asking for a Siaya doctor on call. Every patient just wants any doctor and decent medical care.
Yet we are often driven into sexism, parochialism and bigotry, our responses many times over compounded by tribalism and hubris.
Tribalism is a product of fear for those who are excluded and expropriated.
In Kenya the political class cannot come out of this foggy cloud because we are election-driven and power-driven every day and every reason. There is not only a dearth of ideology in our politics but in the realm of our power games there are no principles or values or scruples. We are prepared to accept politics as a dirty game. The Constitution acknowledges political parties as an imperative organ of government. But we kill political parties, mismanage them and in the words of the Gatundu North MP, political parties are just political underwear. Change them every day. It does not matter as long as you get elected. Power and mainstream political leadership will therefore continue to drive us into the same hole and we need urgently to look elsewhere for solutions.
Great inventions and systems have always been predicated on great ideas. And over the ages history has always provided great thinkers. The American and French Revolutions were predated by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Hobbes. The Industrial Revolution came after Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and the discovery of the steam engine. We can write about the history of knowledge by summarising the biographies of the sages and philosophers from antiquity to the present day winners of the Nobel Prize.
And hence history has been shaped by Marx and Engels, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Che Guevara and Mandela, Amilcar Cabral and Nyerere, Mother Teresa and Aung San Suu Kyi who inspire or have inspired controversy, rebellion, revolution and human progress that have made many places in the globe kinder and caring.
Back to Machiavelli. And read The Prince forwards this time. His model prince, Cesare Borgia, the warlord son of Pope Alexander VI, who was a professor of politics like our man from Baringo and whose motto was Aut Cesar aut nihil (Either Cesar or nothing), died by the sword, in the end not knowing whether "to love the fox less or love the hound more". We cannot build a society based on fear, hatred and prejudice. No. We need to grab our country back and give it modernity democracy and justice.
The writer is an Advocate of the High Court and former Ugenya MP.
Left Unchecked, Rulers Reign by the Sword
By James Orengo
Politics cannot be left to politicians. With some power every politician shows the little Machiavelli in him or her. With a lot more power they become a tyrannical crossbreed of hounds and vultures.
Left unchecked rulers have a notorious inclination towards reigning by the sword and corruption. Governments cannot therefore be left to operate on the basis of the goodness we see in human beings. The laws of nature themselves put us in universal and endless of struggles of man against nature and man against man. The dialectics of these struggles are ever antagonistic and many times violent. But they can be overcome so that in the wombs of these struggles can be conceived and born a suitable harmony between man and nature and between ourselves as human beings.
Nobody ever thought that a Kibaki government could use brute force as was evidenced by the confrontations over the registration of the Biwott Group in Kanu. That with four years of his rule Kenya would still find itself deeply mired in corruption. And above all, that a year to the elections, there would be no Constitution and no roadmap to attain one either.
The Kibaki leadership has probably read The Prince. But backwards. Take this. The distinction is made about using cruelty well or badly. Well, I think the violence at the Uhuru Park and at the Registrar-General’s office was a case of using cruelty badly. Take another. Apply cruelty at the beginning and once and for all because Machiavelli advises the Prince "whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him." Have you not seen the knife unleashed a little too often? We have not forgotten the midnight scenes at KTN and NTV, rallies violently disrupted, the mayhem and killings in Kisumu during the referendum campaigns, and during the evictions in the Rift Valley. Of course, there is the case of the poor hawkers. What a life!
My biggest worry right now is what Prof Okoth Okombo told KTN Newsline the other week. And you cannot do justice to the good Professor’s ominous delivery and eloquent language because his passion and depth is lost in my printed words and style. And it was this. Politicians of the genre we have will indubitably manipulate our identities to attain and secure power. It need not be ethnic identity. Religion, race, language, culture and the list is endless. And we are in a terrible bind if negative ethnicity is the banner of our electoral politics and coalitions. Flying this flag has enabled the most backward and corrupt politicians to emerge in the centre of politics with political might and vigour, all their past sins forgotten. We are thrown into a collective trance of amnesia to the extent that political sense and choices are informed by tribalism.
When you board a matatu you would be least concerned about whether or not the owner or the driver comes from Gatundu. I have never been at the Casualty Department in Kenyatta Hospital and hear a patient from Nyanza asking for a Siaya doctor on call. Every patient just wants any doctor and decent medical care.
Yet we are often driven into sexism, parochialism and bigotry, our responses many times over compounded by tribalism and hubris.
Tribalism is a product of fear for those who are excluded and expropriated.
In Kenya the political class cannot come out of this foggy cloud because we are election-driven and power-driven every day and every reason. There is not only a dearth of ideology in our politics but in the realm of our power games there are no principles or values or scruples. We are prepared to accept politics as a dirty game. The Constitution acknowledges political parties as an imperative organ of government. But we kill political parties, mismanage them and in the words of the Gatundu North MP, political parties are just political underwear. Change them every day. It does not matter as long as you get elected. Power and mainstream political leadership will therefore continue to drive us into the same hole and we need urgently to look elsewhere for solutions.
Great inventions and systems have always been predicated on great ideas. And over the ages history has always provided great thinkers. The American and French Revolutions were predated by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Hobbes. The Industrial Revolution came after Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and the discovery of the steam engine. We can write about the history of knowledge by summarising the biographies of the sages and philosophers from antiquity to the present day winners of the Nobel Prize.
And hence history has been shaped by Marx and Engels, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Che Guevara and Mandela, Amilcar Cabral and Nyerere, Mother Teresa and Aung San Suu Kyi who inspire or have inspired controversy, rebellion, revolution and human progress that have made many places in the globe kinder and caring.
Back to Machiavelli. And read The Prince forwards this time. His model prince, Cesare Borgia, the warlord son of Pope Alexander VI, who was a professor of politics like our man from Baringo and whose motto was Aut Cesar aut nihil (Either Cesar or nothing), died by the sword, in the end not knowing whether "to love the fox less or love the hound more". We cannot build a society based on fear, hatred and prejudice. No. We need to grab our country back and give it modernity democracy and justice.
The writer is an Advocate of the High Court and former Ugenya MP.
