Commentary (by Philip Ochieng) - Fifth Columnist - Taking forward Thursday's agreement

Ref:http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=118058



Story by PHILIP OCHIENG
Publication Date: 3/2/2008

What Kofi Annan has helped give us is only a stopgap measure. For, apparently, the crisis out of which the inimitable international functionary could help steer Kenya had only short-term ramifications.

If we implement the pact with thoroughness, we should soon get out of the abyss into which the incredible ineptitude of Samuel Kivuitu’s outfit plunged this country in December. But the indefatigable Ghanaian has repeatedly reminded us that the perceived ballot manipulations were a mere trigger.

The violence and imbroglio that reigned in January had been coming as inexorably as the sun sets in the Underworld. Langston Hughes, a former slave, asks in his poem “Harlem”: “What happens to a dream deferred?”

His answer: The unfulfilled dream may “sugar over” or “sag” and then “explode.” Foreseeing the Big Bang of the early 1970s, James Baldwin, another black American protest writer, called it The Fire Next Time.

AFRICA’S NATIONAL EXPLOSIONS – ESPECIALLY KENYA’S - have two related roots. The first are composed of certain cynical promises made by the nationalists at independence and repeated by their comprador successors at every election time.

The second are composed of direct crimes committed against the people by the comprador regimes – most of them sponsored by the former colonial powers to protect and perpetuate European exploitation of Africa’s resources as the people sink into abject poverty.

The neo-colonial agents – our ruling cliques - use their inordinate political powers to commit two kinds of crime. The first is the ferocity with which they grab wealth – especially land and cash – as the mass writhes in deepening material wretchedness.

The second is the clique’s contumacious refusal to overhaul the instrument – the constitution - through which the former colonial powers legitimise their siphoning off of the proceeds of our labour and natural resources to enrich Europe and North America and impoverish our people.

These factors have ensured that post-colonial Africa is composed only of what a critic has called “eggshell states.” For, although our rulers are extraordinarily powerful – because these individuals think only of their pockets and vigorously repress every form of protest – all these states sway for ever on a sand foundation. If they rest at all, it is on a powder keg.

The mass disillusionment with Uhuru is thus permanent. In The Reds and the Blacks, journalist William Attwood admits that he busily watered its roots when he was US ambassador to Jomo Kenyatta at independence.

He was thus in a good position to diagnose the damage it later caused in Kenya. As if apologising, he wrote in The Nation of Manhattan of March 20, 1982, that what was unfolding in Africa was a “...revolution of rising expectations...”

SCHOLAR EUGENE STALEY HAS WRITTEN: “POVERTY... hunger, disease, and lack of opportunity for self-development ... have been the lot of the ordinary people in the underdeveloped countries ... The new thing is that now this poverty has become a source of active political discontent...

“It is one of the most profoundly important political facts of the mid-20th century that among the people ? a ferment is at work which has already produced ? irresistible demands for a speeded-up pace of economic and social change.”

Harold Butler of the ILO has commented: “The consciousness of misery has been created by the growing realisation that it is not the inescapable lot of the poor and that chances of a better life now exist...

“The immemorial passivity and fatalism of the Orient are beginning to yield to the desire for higher standards of [life and to the] determination to acquire them ...” If these desires are not met, they will inevitably build up to the same revolutionary anger as has occasionally besieged the black American.

What insures the ruling clique is that the masses - because of their anger - do not know the real structure of these sources of their miseries. Why? Because of yet another sin of commission perpetrated by the ruling clique.

It deliberately sings tribal songs to play our ethnic communities against one another in order to seal their minds against all social comprehension, so that, at elections, the people are forced to support only the candidates of their tribes - even where a candidate is a known murderer, thief or rapist.

Thus – although the anger has long-standing economic and constitutional roots – whenever it is triggered by many a Samuel Kivuitu, it eggs the victims to rush for one another’s necks on the basis of tribe while the real culprits (of all tribes) enjoy their wealth padlocked in maximum security in their suburban homes.

Kofi Annan’s lesson is terse. Thursday’s treaty will solve nothing unless its implementation is part of a deliberate systematic attack on tribalism and its natural concomitants like land grabbing, bank looting and the flouting of election regulations and other institutions of good governance.