Commentary (by Barrack Muluka) - Grass wallows in agony as elephants dance

Ref: http://www.eastandard.net/news/?id=1143983635&cid=190


Published on March 22, 2008, 12:00 am

By Barrack Muluka

The serpent hisses where sweet birds sing. And the grass suffers with bitterness, regardless of whether elephants fight, or make love.

But Prof Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o thinks otherwise. Speaking in Parliament this week, the ODM Secretary-General took issue with this column’s expression of mistrust, two weeks ago, of erotic elephants. The Kisumu Rural MP thinks "the grass suffers without bitterness" when elephants do their love dance in the jungle. In such circumstances, "the elephants produce sweet music," he says.

It was Jomo Kenyatta who, upon being released from colonial detention, told his jailers that he had suffered without bitterness. He was even ready to forgive them, although he would not forget what they had done to him.

But there is no such thing as "suffering without bitterness". Suffering and sweetness are counter-indicated. They are forever mutually exclusive.

The matter of elephants at war and in love is a different cup of tea, altogether. If you are in doubt, ask the people of Nairobi’s Eastlands.

Together with the matatu operators, who serve that part of the city, they will tell you a different story. They will tell you that before the political elephants began their romance and honeymoon on golf courses, Uhuru Kenyatta could never have tear-gassed them and got away with it, the way he did this week, without a whimper from the political opposition. The Opposition would have been all over the place reminding him that he had never walked from one end of Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue to the other. They would have told him that he had never seen the inside of a matatu all his life, or paid for car parking. He did not, therefore, qualify to pretend to manage the public transport system in the city.

They would have accused Uhuru of exiling the children of lesser gods from the city centre so the children of privilege could enjoy the space alone. Then they would have told President Kibaki a few things of his own — like how he has never slept hungry from the day he left Othaya for Makerere in the 1950s. Now he was looking on as Uhuru messed up the poor and hungry. Together with assorted abracadabra, they would have threatened to storm Uhuru’s office, the Attorney-General’s chambers and, of course, State House.

Abandoned the masses

Nobody delights in the kind of political clatter Kenya has been accustomed to over the past 15 years. But, all too often, we bury the baby together with the afterbirth. For the grass that is internal refugees (euphemistically referred to as internally displaced persons — IDPs) is today suffering in domestic refugee camps. Nobody is speaking for this grass. Some other grass is wallowing in agony in Uganda. The President, the Prime Minister designate and sundry bigwigs have asked all the displaced grass to go back home. But nobody is asking, which home? I have taken time off these past few days to visit the entire Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza provinces. I can confirm that those asking the grass to go back home do not know what they are talking about. What we did to the grass is hard to believe. There are simply no homes to go back to. Just where do you begin?

But of course the romantic elephants are still sorting out questions of who will sit in which eating position at the combined dinning table. They stroll on golf courses, canvassing for high office. CVs are polished up and pushed about in exclusive hotels. The fellows who burnt each other’s houses were only cannon fodder. Now they are spent gunfire and empty cartridges. They must remain in IDP camps, even as the heavy rain season sets in, in earnest.

Youth unemployment, pathetic roads, insecurity, deep ethnic suspicions and resentment among ordinary citizens — all these and more continue to bite. Meanwhile money changes hands both in ODM and PNU. Hunters of fortune buy strategic positions on the new gravy train. They are buoyed on with the confidence that this time round, they will be dealing with a neutered Parliament, as in the good old Kanu days.

Yes, the serpent hisses where sweet birds sing. Indeed, we have brought down the fever. But we have not cured the mortal ailment behind the fever. If the canvassing elephants should beguile themselves with the belief that all that the common grass ever wanted was just to see how jumbos make love, the romance makers will be coming in for a most rude awakening. As the reigning dreamer of dreams, I can promise you that the next time the grass catches fire, the winds of pent-up resentment shall transport it from the slums of Kibera and Korogocho. They shall lift it to the elite and salubrious suburbia. As Wole Soyinka would say in the play The Lion and the Jewel, take care my masters; they will scorch you in the end. Suburbia shall burn with everybody else. That is unless the focus shifts to the ordinary Kenyan, today.

okwaromuluka@yahoo.com