Commentary (by James N Kariuki) - The way forward for our leadership

Ref: http://www.eastandard.net/news/?id=1143983334&cid=190

Published on March 16, 2008, 12:00 am

By James N Kariuki

Commentators have suggested that the Kenya crisis was a confrontation among the rich who used the poor as their foot soldiers.

If this is the case, we need to be cautious not to rejoice too soon by masking the disease and believing that we have treated it.

Power sharing may calm down the political elites but the basic problem remains.

It is critical that Kenya’s leadership faces the problem of youth. Show me a country that is saturated with unemployed, able-bodied and substantially educated youth and I will show you a country that is sitting on a time bomb.

As it stands now, that country is Kenya. Visit any Kenyan town and, invariably, you will witness awesome unemployment.

Perhaps the politicians are so preoccupied with the "bigger picture" that they are blinded to the fact that at 10am when most people are at work, town streets are smothered by jobless youth. These are healthy people desperate to merely survive legitimately. Who would blame them if they supported any demagogue that promises them jobs?

When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, the US exploded in violent anger. Many cities were burned down and looting was rampant. Black Americans perpetrated the damage, usually in Black neighbourhoods, in the same manner that the Luo visited destruction upon Kisumu in the post-election skirmishes.

US President Lyndon B Johnson faced an ugly situation of violent, racially tinged civil unrest. But, unlike Kenya, he had two critical advantages. First, his Black rioters were not organised behind identifiable leadership. Second, he had convincing power at his disposal to smother force with force.

Affirmative action

But LBJ certainly was averse to the notion of Americans killing fellow Americans. His long-term answer to the crisis: he invented affirmative action to correct racial bias of the past.

Brazil is another country, which, until recently, was headed for major racial fiasco. In terms of population, Brazil is the second largest Black nation in the world, second only to Nigeria. Of all the African slaves exported to the western world, 37 per cent went to Brazil, a total of eight million. Yet, Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.

Brazil handled the reality of its racial mix by wishing the Black presence away. For three centuries it deluded itself that it did not have a perceptible Black population, or that it was the paragon of racial relations, the so-called "racial democracy".

But it was impossible to hide the Brazil’s Black presence. It is generally accepted that soccer is the world sport. Arguably the best-known and most adored soccer player worldwide is Pele. The soccer icon is Brazilian, racially indistinguishable from any African. Unwittingly, Pele became a loud global assertion of Brazil’s Black presence.

Additionally, Brazil has its Kiberas and Mathares. The occupants of the Brazilian ghettos are exclusively Black. Job positions, too, told of potent racial discrimination. The higher up the job ladder, the whiter the entire hierarchy became.

The realisation that Brazil had a brewing racial problem struck Brazilians with a bang at the turn of this century. Like the Americans before them, Brazilians responded by embarking upon their own version of affirmative action.

Coincidentally, President Lula da Silva entered the Brazilin political equation about the same time in 2003. Like Cuba’s Fidel Castro, President Lula believes that contemporary Brazil is deeply indebted to Africa. In addition to quotas and other advocacy measures, his government embarked upon institutionalising the budding affirmative action and insisting on compulsory dispersal of knowledge in the educational system about the history of African-Brazilians.

Since President Johnson launched the US version of affirmative action in the late 1960s, African-Americans have come a long, long way in upliftment. There is little doubt that President Lula will leave African-Brazilians and Brazil better off than he found them. The moral is clear: state intervention does work for social remedy.

President Kibaki faces a daunting challenge. First, Kenya’s economy needs to be reoriented to absorb the youth.

Second, if Kenya has been discriminatory against the non-Kikuyu, he needs to face the problem and combat it. Some kind of affirmative action needs to be engineered to correct the ethnic sins of the past.