Such venom only serves to poison children’s minds

By PHILIP OCHIENGPosted Saturday, March 5 2011 at 18:31

Negative ethnicity comes in two forms. One is to cite a harmless habit of a certain ethnic community as the “evidence” that that community is the source of your personal misfortunes.

The other is to transfer those misfortunes from yourself as a person to your ethnic people.

For instance, the William Ruto camp has managed to sell to a large number of his Kalenjin followers the fraudulent story that, in the criminal court cases facing their political idol, the whole community is what is on trial.

The question is: If it is morally and intellectually compulsory for you to come to the defence of your ethnic idols every time one of them is accused of a crime – as the Meru leaders reiterated recently about Mr Francis Muthaura – why do you accuse the government of perpetuating impunity in our country?

For, if you have any brain, you should know that, because you behave, we shall never extirpate high-level crime in Kenya – not even if we hire a thousand P.L.O. Lumumbas.

Principal accusers

But the fact is that Mr Ruto’s identification of the Luo as the manufacturers of his misfortunes is totally libellous. The Luo have nothing to do with it.

None of Mr Ruto’s principal accusers – Philip Waki, Kofi Annan and Luis Moreno-Ocampo – is a Luo. Two of them are not even Kenyans.

But the Luo come into it only because Raila Odinga, their leader at the national centre, is Mr Ruto’s deadliest “enemy” in the race for State House. To him, the words “Odinga” and “Luo” are synonyms.

But Mr Odinga and Mr Ocampo have something else in common which powerfully drives them into a conspiracy against Mr Ruto and the Kalenjin.

According to a notoriously uneducated mind called Kuttuny, this “something else” is to be found in their surnames.

The Luo malice against the Kalenjin seems obvious from the very same “O factor” that once made the famous ‘‘Double O” – Oginga Odinga – such a dreaded devil among the Kikuyu elite.

Yet Mr Kuttuny’s Kalenjin audience ululated when he affirmed our ethnic evil lies right inside that “O”.

I am simply dismayed that we, Kenyans, continue to allow so many men and women with such tiny grey matter to fulminate freely every day in and out of our National Assembly.

Do Mr Kuttuny and his ilk have any idea about what the ethnic filth which pours out of their mouths day in and day out does to the nation’s children?

Of course, he does not know that, if “O” is the problem, then, even as a Kisii, Luhya or Teso, you were born with deadly Augustinian Original Sin if you carry such a name.

Gehenna is your inevitable destination if you are called Obure, Ojamong, Ojiambo, Okemo, Okubasu, Ongeri, Oniang’o and Onyonka.

Irish nation

Mr Kuttuny has no idea that, by his dictum, he has condemned the entire Irish nation and many individuals among other Celtic communities to everlasting fire. Your sin is simply incurable if your name is Ogilvy, O’Neill, O’Hara and O’Donovan.

Indeed, if the “O” can so devilishly work the mind of an Ocampo or Obiero against Mr Ruto and the Kaleniin, why mightn’t it haunt you if you carry even a biblical name like Obed and Onesmus?

And mightn’t the virus affect you if you come from a place called Othaya. Surely, Mr Ruto should insist on a tad more intelligence from his propagandists.

But the question goes to Mzalendo Kibunja and Mary Onyango (though I do not know how anybody could be so thoughtless as to make an Onyango a judge in these things!).

But, if we want a united Kenya as so urgently, why does the twain allow such dangerous bigotry to poison our children’s minds with such powerful ethnic venom?

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