Commentary (by Charles Onyango-Obbo) - WHAT OTHERS SAY: It’s ‘better’ to be president of dogs than humans

Ref: http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=118875

Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 3/13/2008

IT IS A COLD AND WET TUESDAY afternoon in Berlin – The last kind of weather you need if you want to check out a city and its people.

But it is the perfect excuse for taking the lazy way out. I am advised that since I don’t speak German, if I wanted to get a peek into the belly of Berlin from the comfort of my hotel room, one place to start is to buy myself a copy of the English-language magazine, Exberliner.

The main story in the latest issue is pets in Berlin; the strangest pets that Berliners keep; the latest hi-tech gadgets for pets, and fancy pet salons; five-star pet hotels; a disturbing story about zoophiles, people whose love for animals sometimes takes intense romantic forms, and pet cemeteries that are better looked after than the ones for humans.

Berlin is Germany’s pet-crazy capital. In no other German city are so many pets -- nearly one million. And these are only the registered ones.

The country spends over €3.15 billion (Sh390 billion) every year pampering its pets. Pets have become substitutes for children among many couples. Thus, in Berlin, there are roughly double as many pets as children under 16.

One of the pet articles, with tongue-in-cheek, argues that pets might, after all, actually be a good substitute for children.

First, they cost less to raise. Secondly, most of the time, they don’t answer you back. Pets rarely disappoint you – they don’t get drunk, and don’t do drugs.

A commentary by Kenya’s former anti-corruption Czar, John Githongo, in Time magazine, however brought me back to our very different reality in Africa.

For us, there still are just too many children and young people on the streets, going hungry, sick, without jobs, and who are very angry.

And, even more urgent, how to turn back countries like Kenya from, to use Githongo’s words, “a near-death experience” that it witnessed in the post-election violence.

Githongo notes that there are cynics who are saying that the recent President Kibaki-Odinga coalition government deal “has pooled all of Kenya’s rotten political eggs into one noxious basket, and is therefore bound to fail.

“On the other hand, Kenya stared in the abyss and was finally pulled back. That presents a chance to refashion the Kenyan state itself and to address the systemic issues – inequality, land rights, corruption and the constitution – that gave rise to the crisis in the first place”.

He also makes the case for the need to return home more than 300,000 (recent figures put it at 600,000) displaced Kenyans from all ethnic groups.

Yet, for anyone who has covered and studied political conflict in Africa, even if all the things Githongo writes of are fixed, there will still be a lot of work to be done.

THIS IS BECAUSE THE VIOLENCE was partly the instrument of a more far-reaching remake of Kenya. At election time, the Rift Valley was touted as the diverse area of Kenya outside Nairobi.

Since the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s, and most importantly the recent “troubles”, the Rift Valley is not as diverse. To compound matters, many of the areas in Kenya where “outsiders” were evicted, are also less diverse.

This huge demographic shift means that Nairobi is perhaps now the only region in the country in the country where someone who does not have “ancestral roots” in the area can stand and hope to win an election. The violence, therefore, effected the most extended redrawing of Kenya’s electoral map ever.

Recent events have also increased the power of so-called tribal warlords. In future, it will be very difficult to stand for president without a running mate, as Raila did with Musalia Mudavadi.

But even that won’t be enough. It will be political suicide not to present a bigger ticket, a Hexagon, Pentagon, or even Octagon of leaders, whom you shall appoint as prime ministers, deputy prime ministers, and senior ministers.

Thirdly, the election was so nasty because, with the power-sharing deal, it represented the first generational (partial) transfer of power in Kenya politics from the independence generation.

These include Daniel arap Moi, Kibaki, Njenga Karume) to what we might call the “intermediary generation” (Raila and other politicians in their 60s).

This intermediary generation, will have the shortest stint in power, and might not even take complete power in the 2012 elections.

The torch will soon pass on to the young generation proper (the Kalonzo Musyokas, William Rutos, Uhuru Kenyattas, the leaders in their late 30s and 40s).

Without the crisis and negotiated settlement, the Raila generation might well have been consigned to the cold without tasting any power at all, even shared power.

Finally, to ask the uncomfortable question. What use is it to give a poor man or woman land? The land reform proposal sounds sexy, and people love it. But it’s little more than a placebo.

Maybe Exberliner is right, after all. It’s much easier to raise pets than deal with all these complex human problems