‘It is our turn to eat’ philosophy is the tragedy of African politics
8 min readBarrack Muluka
Political campaigns that hinge on feelings of relative deprivation can only bring about spurious change. At the very best, they can bring about a change of guard, who carry on with the same bad old order. Change of this kind only generates fresh problems, where it should be providing solutions. Put loosely, relative deprivation is about perceptions of being denied something that you feel you are entitled to. Unhappiness wells up in you as you compare your situation to that of others.
You swell with negative and destructive energy. It violently drives you towards those you perceive to have deprived you of equal opportunities, in quest for retribution. You seek to redistribute opportunities to your relative advantage. You may even want to call it pursuit for redistributive justice. However, when you take charge, the only difference becomes that you are now in charge. Nothing else changes.
Africa has had more than its fair share of social upheaval emanating from perceptions of relative deprivation. The military coups that informed life on the continent in the 1960s and ‘70s often derived their impetus from the energy of relative deprivation. A military junta would arrive, citing all manner of sins by the previous regime.
It would promise heaven. The soldiers would tell the world how they were going to remedy things and crown it all with a pledge to return power to civilian within the shortest time possible. However, this would never come to pass. Jerry Rawlings of Ghana and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria were the aberrations in the 1970s. Both returned power to civilians in 1979. Rawlings, however, rolled back into power on New Year’s Eve in 1981.
He accused the deposed Hilla Limann regime of much the same ills he had levelled against Ignatius Achaempong and Fredrick Akuffo, ahead of lynching them in public in 1979. Obasanjo had another go at power when he was elected in 1999 to head a civilian government for two successive terms.
The critical point, however, is that Africa’s military regimes were guilty of the same ills they had arrived proclaiming to sort out. In fact, they committed more atrocious things than those before them. The regime coming to power was, in essence, not unhappy about what the previous governors were doing. They were only unhappy that someone else was doing it. Such is the tragedy of sentiments of relative deprivation. They drive the deprived not to the path of true reform but rather to that of substitution and replacement. Ultimately, there is no objective change. Such is the reality that the Kenyan nation must wrap its collective mind around as we orbit towards the next General Election.
There has indeed emerged in some quarters convoluted wisdom to the effect that the Kenyan nation is in the grip of Kikuyu-Kalenjin State House fatigue.
The ideologues behind this thinking have suggested “the Kikuyu and Kalenjin communities should support a candidate from another tribe for the Presidency.” National Cohesion and Integration Commission recently grilled Hassan Omar formely of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights Commission (KNCHR) for publishing strong sentiments in this regard. Vindicating himself against accusations of a hate campaign, Omar reeled off a catalogue of names of Kikuyu people in key public offices in Kenya. On account of this, he thinks, “it is time for another tribe to rule.”
The tragedy is that tribes don’t rule. They have never ruled in Africa, at any rate. What you often witness is a tribal elite, posturing as if it is presiding over a tribal regime. When they wallow in the good things of life, they claim that the whole tribe is “eating.” Their competitors from other tribes amplify this perception. They make you believe that your tribe should also have its turn at the table of hope. However, eating can never be vicarious. You can never eat on behalf of someone else; least of all eat for a tribe.
We must worry, therefore, when our intelligentsia elects to address not the problem but its symptoms. If a person of Hassan Omar calibre thinks that the challenges independent Kenya has faced have been simply because we have had Kikuyu and Kalenjin presidents then we need more than prayers.
The urgency and hopelessness of our situation is compounded when Muthui Kariuki, who works – or has worked – as Director of Communications in the Vice-President’s office, shares the same sentiments. For Kariuki wrote a lengthy tirade in The Standard on Wednesday urging the Kikuyu and Kalenjin to support someone from a different tribe for the topmost executive position in the country. Kariuki even suggests that there could be an upheaval in Kenya if a Kikuyu offers himself or herself for the presidency. That between them, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Mwai Kibaki have made Kenyans tired of the Kikuyu.
This kind of thinking is dangerous, misleading and retrogressive. If the regimes of the three presidents that Kenya has so far had have been blemished, this has had nothing to do with the fact that they have belonged to certain tribes.
Bad leadership is bad of itself, regardless that the man in charge is a Muyoyo, Illchamus, Kikuyu or whatever. Our intellectuals should be helping us to reflect objectively on the anatomy of bad leadership and how we could place this behind us.
We are not about to get to Canaan by demonising whole ethnic communities and denying members of the communities their fundamental rights and basic freedoms. Worse still, this kind of wretched philosophy drives the nation towards unnecessary ethnic tensions.
I should excuse it if the sentiments were coming from ordinary riff rough. Hassan Omar made the remarks when he used to work for KNCHR while Kariuki is a senior official in the Office of the Vice President. Both are highly educated men, charged with onerous responsibilities. Can they rethink their volatile anti-Kikuyu sentiments and offer Kenyans a public apology?
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/columnists/InsidePage.php?id=2000050422&cid=&
Baraza has helped to revive the art of nose pinching as the ultimate insult
By PETER MWAURA
Friday, January 20 2012
In all cultures, grabbing someone’s nose and pinching it, pulling it, or tweaking it, is intended to insult, affront, demean and humiliate.
In African cultures, when it is done to a child it is less of an insult and more of a disciplinary action that falls short of beating. When it is done to an adult, it is the ultimate insult.
In the celebrated case of Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Baraza and Village Market security guard Rebecca Morara Kerubo, nose pinching — real or imagined — became more than the ultimate insult.
In recorded history, there has not been such a potentially life changing act of nose pinching — again real or imagined — outside the duels of Europe and America increasingly fought with pistols.
In medieval Europe and early America, duels were often fought by men to protect their honour because another person had tweaked their nose.
Besides threatening to blot out Ms Baraza’s judicial career, the Village Market drama on New Year’s eve has popularised nose pinching as the ultimate insult, even as a joke.
In the Village Market nine-days’ wonder, nose pinching was everything. Claims that Ms Baraza also ordered her bodyguard to shoot Mrs Kerubo (but he refused), that she then went to her car and returned with a gun and threatened to shoot her, pale in comparison with nose pinching.
If true, they were nothing more than swashbuckling heroics. The real clincher for the cause célèbre is the claim of nose pinching.
In law, nose pinching is common assault, which is punishable with imprisonment for one year, or five years if the assault causes “actual bodily harm”, according to sections 250 and 251 of the Penal Code.
But the claim of nose pinching in the Village Market theatrics on December 31 carry the possible loss of a judicial career, including the possibility of becoming a future chief justice.
The sensational claims have also put new life into the ancient art of tweaking the nose.
Nose pinching is an art because, apart from delicate manoeuvres, it is also often accompanied by some well-chosen terse words of a warning, or final warning, or of a lesson, counsel, ultimatum, admonishment or reprimand.
Sample Mrs Kerubo’s claim that during the alleged nose pinching, Ms Baraza told her “to know people.’’
That was a cryptic and poetic way of saying “Do you know who you are dealing with?”
Nose pinching is also an art because it requires superior skills, though anybody can learn them through practice and observation.
The Baraza sensation provides important lessons. One, probably the most important to learn, is that you must take into account your height relative to that of the owner of the nose.
It is almost impossible to tweak the nose of a person much taller than you. The Baraza-Kerubo confrontation was a near-perfect match, though with dire consequences.
It would be a tall order, for example, for Garsen MP Danson Mungatana to tweak the snout of six-footer Jeremiah Kioni, no matter how despicable he thinks it is for the Ndaragwa MP to plan to introduce a Bill in Parliament to abolish the Senate.
Equally, it would be futile for diminutive Joshua arap Sang to try to pinch Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s long and almost aquiline beak — assuming he can get anywhere near him — for roping him in with the politicians accused of post-election violence.
Even if you are of the same height with the owner of the nose, tweaking requires dexterity.
The owner can easily ward off your pinching fingers. Nose tweaking works best if you can catch a person by surprise, such as flinging your hand to catch his nostrils with the speed of a chameleon darting its tongue to catch a fly.
If the nose owner is shorter than you, it is easier. That is why children are so much easier to pinch and pull by their schnozzles.
The object lesson is that the pincher should have a nose for sizing up people — for their height and standing (in society) before attempting a squeeze.
The owner of the nose matters, just as much as the tweaker, and always there are consequences.
http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Baraza+has+helped+to+revive+the+art+of++nose+pinching/-/440808/1310982/-/item/1/-/98iadez/-/index.html
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