Adongo,
I hope the pictures inform you of the horror that has been Kenya and why any further calls for violence by ODM are ill-advised. I also hope that the healing you call for overrides your continued wish to see a Raila president. I expect that you will dig a bit deeper to see the damage in Kisumu and the horror that is the lives of those who live there.
Kamale
I do not wish to see a Raila Presidency. I wish to see a president for my country who is duly elected by Kenyans not a thief who is rigged in and sworn in at dusk surrounded by his cohorts and partners in the same crime against the nation.
I do not wish to see a president in Kenya whom the ECK chairman himself Mr. Samuel Kivuiti, says he does not know whether he won the election or not.
I do not wish to see a president who is a pariah among the international community and whose actions are threatening to sink the economy into a rat hole.
I do not wish to see a president who orders the police and the GSU to abuse the laws of the land attack and kill innocent Kenyans.
I do not wish to see a political fraud and conman sitting at State House and if that fraud was Raila Amolo Odinga I would say exactly the same thing I am saying now.
Kenya must have a president who respects the laws of Kenya and those laws provide for the freedom of assembly. Why does Kibaki insist on sending police and other security agents including illegal militia teams to attack Kenyans who want to engage in peaceful demonstrations and then turn around and say those who are calling for demonstrations are calling for violence.? What kind of perverted logic is that?
The citizens have a right to assemble, to criticize and even condemn any government. Kenyans died for those rights. Why does Kibaki want to take those rights away from the citizens of the nation and take our country decades back?
And yes, I do not wish to see, like any other citizen of our beloved country, a Kenya where neighbours hack each other, burn properties and engage in wanton destruction in the name of politics, or even old grudges. Why are we here? We must ask that question; all of us. It is actually a national question to who are we as Kenyans?
As for the healing those pictures in Karoki's blog including everything else we know about the tragedy in Kenya in the last two weeks, it is clear to me that we are not going to solve these problems by merely having Kibaki shaking hands with Raila in front of Koffi Annan or anybody else.
People are hurting. People have been wronged. Many have been killed. There is probably close to one million people barely sustaining themselves.
I am appalled really, that there is no practical stuff to address this crippling humanitarian crisis. Kibaki has made it clear he is only interested in the people who support him. Maina Kiai yesterday was at the Kisumu mortuary and asked Kibaki and his people to go to Kisumu and see what is going on there and why people are mad. I am not holding my breath.
Kiai also asked the ODM to visit the displaced and aggrieved families in Rift Valley and talk to them. If they get an earful, so be it. But have the guts to go there. Personally I am bothered that the RV team of ODM M.P's and opinion leaders as well as the ODM leadership has not made an extensive tour of RV to talk to all communities. Starting tomorrow I wish to see that happen. And don't stop there go a round the country.
Kenya will need a bill introduced in parliament very soon to create a National Reconstruction Fund under the Treasury to comprehensively help rebuild destroyed communities. We could get donors to help and ask Kimunya and his gang to keep their hands out of it. It should be managed separately under the auspices of parliament.
Before that we need a National Relief Program to get people off sports stadia, open parks and all that suffering into reasonable places to live even if temporary. It is nice to hear the government saying they will provide open air education facilities for the primary school kids who are internally displaced.
In Nairobi they have said they are 1,300 students just at Jamhuri park alone. This is a good initiative. But the bigger issue is where do those kids go after school. Nowhere. They live for now at the open fields of the city, with no access to food, no access to water, no access to toilets and no access to medical services. Even for those with injuries. That is a sentence to poor health and near death. OK. so they were poor before yada yada. Yes. But they had a terrain to live in, a human and social network, in fact a community that has now been destroyed. That is an issue we have to deal with.
So yes, let us take the kids to the open air school but for god sakes, let us get them out of their parks or police station camps into homes. Remember slums are impossible things to rebuild. Ones you burn parts of Kibera and Mathare Valley slum down, you cannot build them back.
Urban slums are products of the human genius and natural instincts for survival that human beings exercise to extract a living in the harsh conditions of our cities and towns.
Slums are creations of poverty and the need to survive among the discarded sectors of urban human settlements in our country who form the bulk of much needed cheap labour in Kenyan towns and manufacturing centres and the growing service sectors in all branches of the national economy. Those who live in these communities come from everywhere in the economic workings of those towns.
We have the daily factory workers, the loaders, truck drivers, the mechanics, the millions of self employed in the informal sector, the street merchants, the office clerks, the messengers and secretaries, the medical assistants, the bank tellers, the taxi and bus drivers to the security guards. A good number of them live in these complicated urban settlements often called the slums.
Needless to say, there are layers to these communities. But the most deprived people of the slums live under and on top of each other. Somebody builds a shack at the door of the previous shack. People build structures on top of other structures and somehow they live there.
There is a system however awful and underfunded to meet the needs of the community. When that goes in fire, you can't just put it back like that even with all the money in the world, and I am not even talking about the ethnic undertones, I am talking just about the physical structures. A slum is one thing you cannot rebuild. Slums build themselves.
My point here anyway is that, just the Nairobi tragedy alone, which sections of the middle class are pretending is nonsense to them ( just the poor killing the poor down there in Kibera etc), we should at least know that these masses of homeless poor people from Kibera, Mathare Valley and elsewhere are not going back to those structures that were burnt down. And one more thing. They are not leaving the city. This is just within one city. Imagine the complicated land issues and criminal events in in Rift Valley. How do we address that? I need to hear from others about what can be done.
Another frightening fact is that it is these same now internal refugees of the cities and urban centres who do the dirty work to run the economy. They turn manufacturing industries around and get paid peanuts. They are the ones who clean the filth of the cities and urban centres and go back to live on their filthy slums. Those are just some realities we have to deal with. These people are not irrelevant to our country and its economy. In fact they are the core of our nation.
Back to the calamity in Nairobi City in the aftermath of the Kibaki Dec 30th junta.. I think the displaced people and their families working with all branches of government and the donor community as well as local volunteers have to find something new to revive the souls and livelihoods of these communities using the resources that are available.
It would seem to me that we are going to need some major social housing projects in the affected areas of the city to provide long opportunities for resettlement and collective growth as vibrant communities.
We need money to get these initiatives started like yesterday. These are things that both Raila and Kibaki can support with their parties and have them passed in parliament. We do not need Kofi Annan or anybody else to help us with that one. Let us hope our leaders can at least get their act together on that basic front.
But the pictures from the Joseph Karoki blog also tells you of just sheer destruction everywhere. Peoples' lives foremost, peoples' shops, houses, livestock everything. The wananchi are doing it to each other and the police and "law enforcement" are also doing it to the citizens. Gruesome acts of brutality and just total destruction. I suspect there is less fire burning in hell than the amount of fire in these pictures of the Kenyan reality in just one New Year Week in 2008!
The human toll is immeasurable and I think the human spirit particularly in the kids is very present and moving.
It beats me why things are so sluggish in relation to dealing with the humanitarian aspect of this whole mega problem. The government of Kenya has something called the the Special Projects Ministry or something like that which is doing nothing and saying nothing. May be this is not part of their mandate, but if they are the ones dealing with drought hit areas and natural disasters one would think they would be in the midst of this crisis. Even our National Disaster Fund. Where are they? Everything is just the Red Cross. Where the heck is Kibaki and his so-called government. Busy suppressing peoples' rights I guess!
What exactly are people, particularly that fake government of Kibaki doing to confront the crisis at hand. Almost nothing. It is as if all these will just solve themselves and we will all live happily thereafter.
The beginning of the solution is for Kibaki to acknowledge, he cannot run his so-called government without a political settlement, with justice of course, with his main adversary, the ODM.
The mere fact that Kibaki's key operatives are still joking around talking about how firm in control they are and how they don't need mediators is what convinces a lot of people that Kibaki and his lot will never get it unless and until Kenya come face to face with them. Today it was humiliating for Kibaki to sit in parliament for hours and hours almost fall off with sleep, vote I don't know how many times and still lose the position the House Speaker which they wanted so badly.
They knew they could or more likely were going to lose. They knew such a circus in front of the whole country and the international media would be embarrassing and humiliating to president Kibaki and his fragile hold on power. They Knew all that.
But instead of working out a deal with ODM before to support there candidate with some conditions and say get the Deputy Speaker, they were at their arrogant best. Kalonzo was in charge and everything was great. They had to be slapped back and forth in parliament to concede. That is what worries me about this government. Kenyans have to fight them at every step of the way to get what they want. Well do they ever have a fight in their hands! Yes, they do.
adongo
