Post by abdulmote on Nov 24, 2012 17:31:44 GMT 3
‘Kanu damu’, ‘TNA DNA’ – it all sounds rather depressingly familiar, doesn’t it? So, is history repeating itself? More importantly, do we really want to go back there – or shall we be better off choosing leaders with a national outlook that values and cares for everyone equally? That is a question this nation must seriously ask itself.
They say history repeats itself. Let’s take a look and see whether that might be true in Kenya’s politics. First, let’s briefly go back to the beginning. In the beginning, there was Kau. And Kau was with the people.
And Kau was the people. Kau, the Kenya African Union, was the very first national African political organisation permitted by the colonial government to operate in Kenya.
It was founded in 1942 as the Kenya African Study Union (Kasu) and renamed in 1947. It united Africans all over the country. Then the Kenya Independence Movement and the Kenya National Party emerged. In 1960, the KIM was more or less renamed the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), while members of the KNP and others formed themselves into the Kenya African Democratic Union (Kadu).
Some of the smaller parties in Kadu were the Kalen- jin Political Alliance, the Buluhya Political Union, the Kenya African People’s Party, the Maasai United Front, the Coast African People’s Union, and the Somali National Association.
They came together in Kadu largely for fear of the dominant Kikuyu and Luo presence in Kanu. Kadu was favoured by the colonial authorities, and they proposed a devolved system of government, which was dubbed ‘majimbo’ (‘regions’ in Swahili, because it would benefit all the regions of the country).
Kanu leaders were horrified at this idea and they set out to demonise it – because they wanted to keep power and wealth centrally in their own hands.
The thought of giving out some of that wealth to the regions was, in their view, completely unacceptable. But Kanu at first agreed to the idea, in order to speed Independence.
The party knew it would most likely win the first elections, and its leaders cunningly planned then to use their newly acquired power to destroy Kadu – along with Kadu’s devolution Constitution (with which Kenya became indepen- dent). And that is what happened.
Within a year of Independence, Kanu had ensured that Kadu and devolution were dead and buried. Kanu swallowed up all the smaller parties and Kenya became a de facto one-party state.
Today, half-a-century later, we see the result, in the enduring marginalisation and poverty affecting millions of Kenyans. And now we have come full circle.
Once again we have a devolution Constitution, and once again we have powerful people working to destroy it. With our own eyes, we have already witnessed shameless, self-seeking legislation that has grossly mutilated some of the Constitution’s intentions. More such mutilation is planned. And it is not only our new Constitution some people are intent on destroying.
To ensure that many of its provisions never see the light of day involves in addition destroying politically anyone who is determined to see the new Constitution fully implemented.
That’s where the contemptible campaign platform of ‘Anybody But Raila’ comes in, and that is why people are desperately trying to form alliances in any and every direction, to try to ensure their objective becomes reality.
And the reason for this desperation is the same reason as way back in 1964: some people have acquired wealth, power and privilege, and they are grimly determined to hang on to every last bit of it.
Their bid for more power has nothing to do with the noble concept implied in the much-touted notion of ‘uniting Kenyans’. That’s just a cover story to sanitise the whole business for public consumption. (Why, otherwise, would it be ‘Anybody But Raila’ – and by extension his millions of supporters all over the country? Aren’t they Kenyans too?) Let’s go back a bit.
From 1964 onwards, Kanu proceeded to take away almost all the civil liberties that had been enshrined in the Independence Constitution. By the late 1980s, the ruling party had the entire nation in a state of abject terror.
Those who were adult at the time can remember the frightening feeling of not knowing who was a state agent, of looking fearfully over their shoulders before speaking in nervous whispers about anything remotely political.
People in bars grumbling into their beers that they were fed up with the government found themselves the next morning hauled before equally intimidated magistrates and jailed for five years. State repression had its eyes and ears everywhere and people were cowed into submission.
The infamous Nyayo House had been constructed, and people had experienced the horror of its torture chambers. Terrified people abased themselves as they passionately cried out to then president Daniel arap Moi, “Mtukufu Rais, juu, juu, juu zaidi”, clearly feeling their lives and futures depended on it.
To give him his due, even Moi several times said he was uncomfortable with this kind of servile adulation. But his all encompassing power was a reality and everyone wanted to be in his good books.
So everyone desperately tried to outdo all others in singing the praises of Moi’s self-styled ‘Nyayo’ philosophy. Politicians fell over themselves in fren zied attempts to prove they were more ‘Nyayo’ than the next person.
It was imperative to be ‘Kanu damu’. One of the more excruciating sycophants was then Kanu national chairman Peter Oloo Aringo, whose fawning outpourings included referring to Moi as “the prince of peace”.
On one occasion, he declared, “Your Excellency, the standards you set for us are so high, we cannot attain them, we can only emulate them.” On another occasion, he himself set an unbeatable new standard for grovelling, with, “Your Excellency, even the trees, the maize and plants sway to the sound of ‘Nyayo, Nyayo’.
The modes of repression that led to this kind of obsequious self-abasement took many forms. And today, we are seeing some of those forms emulated by those hell-bent on the ‘ABR’ campaign.
Look at this. In June 1989, a number of political detainees were released from detention. Several of them, unrepen- tant, said they would sue the state for damages.
The garrulous Shariff Nassir, at the time MP for Mvita and one of Moi’s leading praise-singers and bellwethers, said that those opposing the government were wasting their time and would achieve nothing. Many Kanu hawks echoed his views, as on many other occasions.
Oppositionists had no chance. Is history repeating itself? Last week, Uhuru Kenyatta voiced similar sentiments with regard to his political party, TNA.
He was reported in the press as saying that his rivals in Central Province must join TNA to save their political careers. “They are either in TNA or nowhere and must be given total blackout by voters,” he was quoted as having said.
TNA apparently wants to swallow up all the smaller parties, just as Kanu did in 1964. A well-known perennial political tourist is also telling candidates from other parts of the country to subsume themselves into TNA. Is the idea first to bully Central Province into submission and then to do like- wise with the rest of the nation?
To paraphrase an old saying, it seems you can take the boy out of Kanu, but you can’t take Kanu out of the boy – and that applies to several people.
Imenti North MP Silas Muriuki, defecting last week to TNA from the Mazingira Green Party of Kenya, reinforced the message when he was reported as having said that “TNA is the way to go in Upper Eastern, we have no choice”. No choice? What was 1991 all about, then? The repeal of Section 2(a) and the reintroduction of multi-party politics .... remember all that? But if this is the way people are think- ing and feeling, are we in danger of being en route back to a single-party system? Is history repeating itself?
One person who has voiced such fears is South Imenti MP, energy minister and Alliance Party of Kenya leader Kiraitu Murungi. Speaking last week, he said of TNA, “I can’t join a party that is a reincarnation of Kanu, whose agenda is to take us back to where we were when freedom of expression [was] curtailed.”
Democratic Party legal affairs secretary CN Kihara was likewise reported as pointing out that the DP had been part of the struggle for multi-party democracy and “it would be a sad day if DP were to be a party to undermining the same by resolving to join TNA”.
The one big difference between Kanu and TNA is that, nominally at least, Kanu had representatives from all over the country (granted, favoured protégés were forced on to the electorate – and let’s not get into what happened in Luo Nyanza).
TNA does not have that kind of national representation. But recent convert Kitui Central MP and Narc leader Charity Ngilu made clear that she understood TNA’s focus to be similar to old Kanu’s, when she said last week that Central Province leaders “need all of us to come to G7 [read, under TNA’s leadership] in order to negotiate as a bloc for the good of our people. Short of this, we will be politically doomed.” Doomed? Yes, that is exactly what happened to anyone with opposing views in the bad old days of Kanu and its shameless hawks.
They were politically doomed. There has rarely been a more overtly ethnic statement than Ms Ngilu’s, nor a more polarising one. Implicit in her remarks is that she sees TNA as primarily representing the interests of Central Province – “our people”.
Indeed, it was his rivals in Central Province – nowhere else – whom Uhuru threatened with oblivion. Representing primarily the interests of Central Province people – at least, the interests of a favoured few (most people in Central remain just as poor as those in the rest of the country) – is exactly what Kanu did, in the years before Moi took over. It’s no wonder that some people don’t want us to look in the rear-view mirror. ‘Kanu damu’, ‘TNA DNA’ – it all sounds rather depressingly familiar, doesn’t it? So, is history repeating itself? More importantly, do we really want to go back there?
Or are we better off choosing leaders with a national outlook, leaders who are not forced to stoop to threatening people in order to gain their ‘support’, leaders who don’t keep talking about their ethnic back yards, and leaders who are committed to valuing everyone equally? These are questions this nation must seriously ask itself.
The writer is a freelance journalist
www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-96911/are-we-looking-reincarnation