Commentary (by Charles Onyango-Obbo) - Don’t give up, Tusker beer may yet save this country

Ref: http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=116765

WHAT OTHERS SAY:

Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 2/14/2008

I AM A TOTALLY OBSESSED motorsport fan, so I was devastated by the cancellation of this year’s [Paris]-Dakar Rally following the murder of four French tourists in Mauritania on December 24.

Eight of the rally’s 15 stages were due to pass through Mauritania.

Despite my fanaticism, I am not blind to the subscript of the appeal of the Dakar Rally. The international audience loves the sight of the mean cars zooming through villages with grass thatched huts, and half naked “natives” sometimes watching apprehensively from behind ant hills and bushes.

It would seem that Africa has lost in the area where most of the rest of the world just couldn’t compete against us: in offering a touch of the primitive, and lots of the exotic.

It is that bad.

In many ways, Kenya’s post-election frenzy of violence is equivalent to Africa losing the Dakar Rally. Kenya, to many, had come to be viewed as “immune” to the worst forms of failure that had visited many African countries.

The mayhem of recent weeks has changed all that, and spawned a wave of revisionism. An article in The Times by Ben MacIntyre is typical: “Our fatally rose-tinted view of Kenya: The post-election disaster was sadly predictable”.

“Just as [the West] tends to view so much of Africa through dark glasses, as a place of violence and corruption, so Kenya has too often been seen through rose-tinted spectacles, as the African exception, a bright spot on the dark continent.”

It was a flawed view, argues MacIntyre. “Today, far too late, [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown wags his fingers at Kenya’s leaders for failing to live up to our expectations,” he writes, “but it takes a rare British politician to see the reality behind the wishful thinking” .

Then he serves up the punchline: “[Winston] Churchill was one such. Back in 1907, while admiring the climate, he noted that the question of ethnic tensions in Kenya was one of a herd of rhinoceros — awkward, thick-skinned and horned, with a short sight and an evil temper, and a tendency to rush blindly upwind on any alarm.”

So, concludes MacIntyre, “The Kenyan rhinoceros is now on the rampage with tragic consequences, and we should have seen it coming”.

Reflecting on the same gloomy view, Vitalis Oduor, a kiosk owner in Kibera who fled after it was robbed and burnt down, told The Independent’s correspondent in Nairobi: “We used to say ‘Kenya hakuna matata’ (Kenya no problem). Right now, there is a lot of matata”.

One person who doesn’t approve of the West wagging fingers at Kenya politicians is Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

HE TOLD THE GUARDIAN IN AN EXCLUSIVE interview: “The threat of Western sanctions as a response to the current crisis is very, very misguided,” he said. “If it is presumed that the Kenyans will democratise in order to eat the peanuts of development assistance from the European Union, for example, it would be a mistake”.

It is not just Zenawi’s colourful imagery that is striking. His statement, actually, implies that Kenya has not democratised. Still, I can only think of a few African leaders who are capable of similar flowery turn of phrase. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is definitely one of them.

When he was being threatened with loss of donor aid over his lousy democratic record, he told Parliament that aid that was offered with unpleasant conditionalities was like “giving a hungry man food and asking him to eat in a latrine”.

Not everyone loses faith as quickly as MacIntyre. From his base in the Rift Valley, Kenya author Aidan Hartley (he of The Zanzibar Chest fame) and a columnist for The Spectator magazine in the UK, wrote, this time in the New York Times:

“Still, and despite all the talk of another Rwanda, I think Kenya will pull back from the brink. This is mainly thanks to the basic decency of ordinary Kenyans — whose priorities are to work hard, educate their children, fear God, and enjoy a few Tusker beers.”

He explains why he thinks everything went so terribly wrong at elections:

“Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe that the process in, and of itself, could bring change. So Kenya’s leaders — and often international observers — interpret democracy simply in terms of the ceremony of multiparty elections. Polls bestow legitimacy on politicians to pillage for five years until the next depressing cycle begins.

“In the campaign rallies I attended, I heard no debate about policies, despite the country’s immense health, education, crime and poverty problems. The Big Men arrived by helicopter to address the voters in slums and forest clearings.

‘‘When they spoke English for the Western news media’s benefit, they talked of human rights and democracy.

But when they switched to local languages, it was pure venom and ethnic chauvinism.

‘‘Praise-singers kowtowed to the candidates, who dozed, talked on their mobile phones, and then waddled back to their helicopters, which blew dust into the faces of the poor on takeoff.”

A Tusker, anyone?