Post by Onyango Oloo on Sept 30, 2005 3:13:59 GMT 3
I read Professor Makau wa Mutua's opinion piece calling for a boycott of the referendum (http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=58257)
jukwaa.proboards58.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1128032600
eight times to make sure that I understood what he was saying.
I will now endeavour to give him my feedback.
Briefly, the Chair of the Kenya Human Rights Commission predicts a catastrophe if the referendum votes goes ahead on November 21, 2005. He sees a possible disintegration of the state and an assault on our citizenship rights. He thinks that Kenyan voters are blinded by tribalism. He lays blame for that squarely at the feet of what he refers to as the "political class". He states that none of the protagonists in the referendum campaign will accept the verdict of the vote itself.
Quite frankly most of this is balderdash heavily sprinkled with a good deal of fear mongering, half-truths and outright contempt for the intelligence of the ordinary Kenyan.
To begin with, most Kenyans who are now in the NO campaign DID NOT want this referendum in the first place- especially if it was going to be a referendum on a document cobbled in top secrecy by a cabal determined to rob Kenyans of their right to a people-driven constitution.
Prof. Makau wa Mutua is a Kenyan lawyer who chairs this country's premier human rights organization- the Kenya Human Rights Commission.
How come he did not mount any kind of legal challenge to this referendum when his old pal and my former lawyer Kiriatu Murungi and other NAK mandarins first mooted it?
I remember some people in the civil society dismissing the first significant legal attempt to stop the referendum dead in its tracks as a "KANU-LDP affair"- after which they retreated to the shadows. Makau wa Mutua should lay responsibility where it lies with the forces around Mwai Kibaki and NAK who have dragged this country through this process.
What they may not have anticipated is the groundswell of opposition to the Wako Draft that has brought a broad array of forces ranging ideologically from scions of the KANU ancien regime on the right to veterans of the Kenyan Marxist underground on the left.
With all due respect, I do not think that some of us have any lessons to learn from Makau wa Mutua on ideological clarity, commitment to social justice principles or having an unbroken history of democratic activism.
Are those of us who are part of the NO campaign also part of the so called "political class"?
And what is this nebulous animal called the "political class"?
Speaking as a Marxist-Leninist, I do not recognize this strange appellation.
Is there any imputation that there is a certain stratum in Kenyan society whose sole pregorative is "politics"?
Who are the members of this class?
When he wrote his opinion piece, Prof. Makau wa Mutua was intervening in an overtly political manner.
When he asks Kenyans to boycott the referendum he is launching an overt political campaign. Is he aware of that?
Is he therefore also a member of the "political class"?
Along the same vein, when millions of ordinary wananchi united in their determination to kick out KANU from power were they or were they not acting politically? Were they ordered at gun point by members of this sinister class to show up at the polling stations to vote in their preferred candidates? Were they bribed to attend those massive Unbwogable rallies? Were they paid to show up at JKIA to give a tumultous Karibu Nyumbani to Mwai Kibaki when he came back from the UK after his accident?
The other thing which is regrettable is Prof. Makau's open contempt for the intelligence of the average Mwananchi who, according to our Buffalo-based legal beagle, are either "hapless" or have their minds permeated through and through with ukabila.
But does evidence of Kenya's actual electoral history bear him out?
Not by a long chalk.
If we restrict ourselves to the last elections held in 2002, Kenyans were presented with a range of Presidential candidates, with the two main ones being from the Agikuyu community. The Luos and the Abagusii who allegedly vote as a tribal bloc also had candidates from their ethnic communities running.
Yet here is a breakdown of the votes the respective Presidential candidates received in Nyanza ( bearing in mind that this province, like others is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural as well):
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20Nyanza%20Province.pdf
In summary, out of 848,746 valid votes cast (with 16,412 spoilt ballots) Mwai Kibaki received a total of 61.391 % of the votes, followed by James Orengo with 29.748%, Uhuru with 7.596%, Nyachae with 1.133% and Ngethe Waweru with 0.131% .
Another way of looking at these results is that in the predominantly Luo and Kisii populated Nyanza province, the Kenyan voters there gave the three Kikuyu candidates a total of 69.118% of the vote while the two "native sons" of Nyanza could only manage between the two of them a pathetic sum of 30.881%- less than half of the total votes cast.
These non-tribal voting patterns become clearer when you go to Western, North Eastern
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20North%20Eastern%20Province.pdf
Coast
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20Coast%20Province.pdf
, large parts of the Rift Valley
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20Rift%20Valley%20Province.pdf
and Eastern
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20EasternProvince.pdf
where the ethnicity of the candidates did not coincide with presumed ethnic make ups of those regions, nor does it explain the fierce competition between the two leading candidates who happen to come from the same tribe.
In the current referendum campaign it is simply insulting to imply that the Somalis and the Mijikenda, the Luos and the Maasai, the Nandis and the Dawidas, the Maragoli and the Akamba and the millions of Kenyans who are opposed the Wako Draft are driven and united by "tribalism" rather than a conscious and very politically literate reading of the democratic imperatives in Kenya today.
But speaking of tribalism, how come I have not seen Makau wa Mutua condemn the noxious nyamu cia ruguru hate speech on some FM station or written an op-ed condemning John Michuki for reassuring the Agikuyu to sleep soundly because "their President" Mwai Kibaki and "their minister" Njenga Karume are taking care of business?
I am by turns confounded and deeply amused to read Prof. Makau wa Mutua suddenly championing the dictatorial and coercive powers of the Kenyan neo-colonial state. Here are his exact words:
"The bottom-line is that the exercise of democratic rights should not jeopardise the very existence of the state. Quite the opposite: Open political choices, when fairly and freely exercised, ought to forge a more stable polity....There is another reason why the referendum will hurt Kenya. The theory and practice of democracy are not supposed to ridicule the State and render it irrelevant. The idea of democracy is not to cultivate loss of faith by the citizenry in the State. Nor is it to neuter public political offices. We still live in a State-centric world through which international relations are conducted. The State is particularly important in Third World countries such as Kenya, that do not have a strong military or multinational corporations to project its power and defend or promote its interests. Protagonists in the referendum act as though the dignity and authority of the Kenyan State is not important, no matter who is in charge..."
Excuse me?
Is the same human rights campaigner who made a career of exposing the tyranny of the same Kenyan state when another politician was residing in State House barely three years ago?
Is this author of Human Rights and State Despotism in Kenya: Institutional Problems, 41 Africa Today, pp 50-56(1994)?
Suddenly the unreformed neo-colonial state in Kenya has become a hallowed institution that must be protected at all costs from the conscious activity of millions of politically conscious Kenyans showing up at the polls to exercise their democratic rights at a referendum, which flawed as it is, will at least give them an opportunity of saying Yes or No?
I do not know who the good professor is addressing but from his arguments, it would appear is if he assumes that we are dimwits.
One needs to remind Makau wa Mutua that as a Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo and the Chair of one of the best funded NGOs in the country he qualifies as a member of the very same "elite" that he so readily castigates today. He should also be reminded that it is not such a closely guarded secret that barely two years have passed since a secret letter he sent to his friend Kiraitu asking NAK to dismiss their LDP opponents was intercepted by inteprid muckrackers and circulated around the world. At that point, Makau wa Mutua who then headed a Kibaki appointed sinecure was an actual ideologue of the same NAK faction which has today come up with this odious Wako Draft that has evoked so much opprobium from Malindi to Malaba, not bypassing Makau's Mwingi hometown.
Urging Kenyans to boycott the upcoming referendum is Makau wa Mutua's democratic right and I am sure millions of Kenyans who were not planning to vote anyway will heed his stay away call.
What Makau wa Mutua should not do is curtail the exercise of the same democratic freedoms that he so obviously cherishes.
Those Kenyans who support the Wako Draft and want to vote Yes in November should be accorded their right do so- not all of them will be Merus, Agikuyu, Kisiis or Bukusus- picking at random the ethnicities of Kiraitu, Kibaki, Nyachae and Kombo- and we know there are millions of Kenyans from those very same communities who will vote NO as well.
Likewise those Kenyans who have chosen to campaign and mobilize for the NO side should not be rubbished by Makau wa Mutua as "hapless" and "gullible".
How come all those millions of Kibaki supporters who were lauded and applauded by the Makaus of this world for striking a big blow for uhuru na haki, usawa na demokrasia by voting in Kibaki in 2002 have suddenly become "hapless" voters held hostage by ukabila?
I could say more, but let me pause here...
Onyango Oloo
Toronto
jukwaa.proboards58.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1128032600
eight times to make sure that I understood what he was saying.
I will now endeavour to give him my feedback.
Briefly, the Chair of the Kenya Human Rights Commission predicts a catastrophe if the referendum votes goes ahead on November 21, 2005. He sees a possible disintegration of the state and an assault on our citizenship rights. He thinks that Kenyan voters are blinded by tribalism. He lays blame for that squarely at the feet of what he refers to as the "political class". He states that none of the protagonists in the referendum campaign will accept the verdict of the vote itself.
Quite frankly most of this is balderdash heavily sprinkled with a good deal of fear mongering, half-truths and outright contempt for the intelligence of the ordinary Kenyan.
To begin with, most Kenyans who are now in the NO campaign DID NOT want this referendum in the first place- especially if it was going to be a referendum on a document cobbled in top secrecy by a cabal determined to rob Kenyans of their right to a people-driven constitution.
Prof. Makau wa Mutua is a Kenyan lawyer who chairs this country's premier human rights organization- the Kenya Human Rights Commission.
How come he did not mount any kind of legal challenge to this referendum when his old pal and my former lawyer Kiriatu Murungi and other NAK mandarins first mooted it?
I remember some people in the civil society dismissing the first significant legal attempt to stop the referendum dead in its tracks as a "KANU-LDP affair"- after which they retreated to the shadows. Makau wa Mutua should lay responsibility where it lies with the forces around Mwai Kibaki and NAK who have dragged this country through this process.
What they may not have anticipated is the groundswell of opposition to the Wako Draft that has brought a broad array of forces ranging ideologically from scions of the KANU ancien regime on the right to veterans of the Kenyan Marxist underground on the left.
With all due respect, I do not think that some of us have any lessons to learn from Makau wa Mutua on ideological clarity, commitment to social justice principles or having an unbroken history of democratic activism.
Are those of us who are part of the NO campaign also part of the so called "political class"?
And what is this nebulous animal called the "political class"?
Speaking as a Marxist-Leninist, I do not recognize this strange appellation.
Is there any imputation that there is a certain stratum in Kenyan society whose sole pregorative is "politics"?
Who are the members of this class?
When he wrote his opinion piece, Prof. Makau wa Mutua was intervening in an overtly political manner.
When he asks Kenyans to boycott the referendum he is launching an overt political campaign. Is he aware of that?
Is he therefore also a member of the "political class"?
Along the same vein, when millions of ordinary wananchi united in their determination to kick out KANU from power were they or were they not acting politically? Were they ordered at gun point by members of this sinister class to show up at the polling stations to vote in their preferred candidates? Were they bribed to attend those massive Unbwogable rallies? Were they paid to show up at JKIA to give a tumultous Karibu Nyumbani to Mwai Kibaki when he came back from the UK after his accident?
The other thing which is regrettable is Prof. Makau's open contempt for the intelligence of the average Mwananchi who, according to our Buffalo-based legal beagle, are either "hapless" or have their minds permeated through and through with ukabila.
But does evidence of Kenya's actual electoral history bear him out?
Not by a long chalk.
If we restrict ourselves to the last elections held in 2002, Kenyans were presented with a range of Presidential candidates, with the two main ones being from the Agikuyu community. The Luos and the Abagusii who allegedly vote as a tribal bloc also had candidates from their ethnic communities running.
Yet here is a breakdown of the votes the respective Presidential candidates received in Nyanza ( bearing in mind that this province, like others is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural as well):
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20Nyanza%20Province.pdf
In summary, out of 848,746 valid votes cast (with 16,412 spoilt ballots) Mwai Kibaki received a total of 61.391 % of the votes, followed by James Orengo with 29.748%, Uhuru with 7.596%, Nyachae with 1.133% and Ngethe Waweru with 0.131% .
Another way of looking at these results is that in the predominantly Luo and Kisii populated Nyanza province, the Kenyan voters there gave the three Kikuyu candidates a total of 69.118% of the vote while the two "native sons" of Nyanza could only manage between the two of them a pathetic sum of 30.881%- less than half of the total votes cast.
These non-tribal voting patterns become clearer when you go to Western, North Eastern
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20North%20Eastern%20Province.pdf
Coast
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20Coast%20Province.pdf
, large parts of the Rift Valley
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20Rift%20Valley%20Province.pdf
and Eastern
www.eck.or.ke/Kenya%202002%20Presidential%20Results%20-%20EasternProvince.pdf
where the ethnicity of the candidates did not coincide with presumed ethnic make ups of those regions, nor does it explain the fierce competition between the two leading candidates who happen to come from the same tribe.
In the current referendum campaign it is simply insulting to imply that the Somalis and the Mijikenda, the Luos and the Maasai, the Nandis and the Dawidas, the Maragoli and the Akamba and the millions of Kenyans who are opposed the Wako Draft are driven and united by "tribalism" rather than a conscious and very politically literate reading of the democratic imperatives in Kenya today.
But speaking of tribalism, how come I have not seen Makau wa Mutua condemn the noxious nyamu cia ruguru hate speech on some FM station or written an op-ed condemning John Michuki for reassuring the Agikuyu to sleep soundly because "their President" Mwai Kibaki and "their minister" Njenga Karume are taking care of business?
I am by turns confounded and deeply amused to read Prof. Makau wa Mutua suddenly championing the dictatorial and coercive powers of the Kenyan neo-colonial state. Here are his exact words:
"The bottom-line is that the exercise of democratic rights should not jeopardise the very existence of the state. Quite the opposite: Open political choices, when fairly and freely exercised, ought to forge a more stable polity....There is another reason why the referendum will hurt Kenya. The theory and practice of democracy are not supposed to ridicule the State and render it irrelevant. The idea of democracy is not to cultivate loss of faith by the citizenry in the State. Nor is it to neuter public political offices. We still live in a State-centric world through which international relations are conducted. The State is particularly important in Third World countries such as Kenya, that do not have a strong military or multinational corporations to project its power and defend or promote its interests. Protagonists in the referendum act as though the dignity and authority of the Kenyan State is not important, no matter who is in charge..."
Excuse me?
Is the same human rights campaigner who made a career of exposing the tyranny of the same Kenyan state when another politician was residing in State House barely three years ago?
Is this author of Human Rights and State Despotism in Kenya: Institutional Problems, 41 Africa Today, pp 50-56(1994)?
Suddenly the unreformed neo-colonial state in Kenya has become a hallowed institution that must be protected at all costs from the conscious activity of millions of politically conscious Kenyans showing up at the polls to exercise their democratic rights at a referendum, which flawed as it is, will at least give them an opportunity of saying Yes or No?
I do not know who the good professor is addressing but from his arguments, it would appear is if he assumes that we are dimwits.
One needs to remind Makau wa Mutua that as a Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo and the Chair of one of the best funded NGOs in the country he qualifies as a member of the very same "elite" that he so readily castigates today. He should also be reminded that it is not such a closely guarded secret that barely two years have passed since a secret letter he sent to his friend Kiraitu asking NAK to dismiss their LDP opponents was intercepted by inteprid muckrackers and circulated around the world. At that point, Makau wa Mutua who then headed a Kibaki appointed sinecure was an actual ideologue of the same NAK faction which has today come up with this odious Wako Draft that has evoked so much opprobium from Malindi to Malaba, not bypassing Makau's Mwingi hometown.
Urging Kenyans to boycott the upcoming referendum is Makau wa Mutua's democratic right and I am sure millions of Kenyans who were not planning to vote anyway will heed his stay away call.
What Makau wa Mutua should not do is curtail the exercise of the same democratic freedoms that he so obviously cherishes.
Those Kenyans who support the Wako Draft and want to vote Yes in November should be accorded their right do so- not all of them will be Merus, Agikuyu, Kisiis or Bukusus- picking at random the ethnicities of Kiraitu, Kibaki, Nyachae and Kombo- and we know there are millions of Kenyans from those very same communities who will vote NO as well.
Likewise those Kenyans who have chosen to campaign and mobilize for the NO side should not be rubbished by Makau wa Mutua as "hapless" and "gullible".
How come all those millions of Kibaki supporters who were lauded and applauded by the Makaus of this world for striking a big blow for uhuru na haki, usawa na demokrasia by voting in Kibaki in 2002 have suddenly become "hapless" voters held hostage by ukabila?
I could say more, but let me pause here...
Onyango Oloo
Toronto
