By sponsoring Gor, Uhuru may destroy gall between tribes

By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted  Saturday, April 23 2011 at 17:54

I am informed that Uhuru Kenyatta’s Brookside — a milk firm that already controls the thinking of every household — has enlarged its domestic pasture by acquiring Tuzo.

Indeed, Uhuru’s national influence may intensify from the fact — recently reported by the newspapers — that Tuzo is sponsoring Gor Mahia, one of Kenya’s most vital football clubs.

I radically disagree with those who read only a sinister motive in the latter event. What good — they seemed to ask — can be served by that personification of “Kikuyu domination” adopting a sporting organisation whose fans are often so militantly Luo?

My answer is unequivocal. If managed properly — that investment can yield every kind of profit for this country. Surely, it is impossible to exaggerate the benefits that the private sector can bring to Kenya’s soccer, a game whose fortunes are now approaching their nadir.

Ethnic animosity

But, although I am an ardent football fan, I do not confine myself to that kind of benefit. As we used to see between the Luo and Luhya, football can be an instrument of destructive ethnic animosity. But, equally, it can help remove all the tribal divisiveness that now beleaguers our country.

We have chosen capitalism as our chief mode of tenure, production, appropriation, exchange and consumption.

Despite my well known predilection for association in all these spheres, a keen sense of realism makes it impossible for me to entertain any illusion that I will ever live to see my ideals.

The best I can hope for is that we will use the market in such a way as to put paid to all the social factors that now frustrate our dream of a united and thriving nation.

Negative ethnicity is the leading factor in this. Despite my dislike of capitalism, I must admit one or two positive things it has done for mankind.

Because of its disrespect for tribal borders — in its inevitable quest for new sources of raw material, cheaper labour and larger markets — it has the tendency to weld ethnic entities into larger ones. That was how the large nations of Europe were created.

Nation question

As the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia — and as we still see among the Basques of Iberia and the Irish of Great Britain — Europe has by no means solved all of what used to engage Lenin’s mind as “The Nation Question” — namely, the question of how to deal with the disparate tribes that the Bolsheviks were about to inherit from the Romanov House.

But Europe is far ahead of Africa in its quest — though this is often objective only — to rid itself of the narrower and frequently heavily burdensome social entities that we, here in the Third World, call “tribes”.

One way in which they did it was through corporate adoption of parochial interests and employing them in the creation of the larger interests, which came to stand for and express the nation.

The European nations evolved through market identification of parochial talents and deployment of the talents in the development of the larger causes.

Understands capitalism

I know at least one Kenyan entrepreneur — S.K. Macharia of Royal Media Services — who seems to recognise the importance of tapping talent and expertise from all of Kenya’s ethnic communities and paying them well.

In this way, “SK” understands capitalism much more than all our barons in the private sector and, especially, in the parastatal corporations.

The talents help him to make money. But, in the same process, he builds a company in which all communities invest at least some goodwill and trust.

S.K. Macharia fights tribalism in this country much more tangibly than all our teachers, politicians and priests together.

By sponsoring Gor Mahia — and internalising the criticisms to which we have recently subjected him — Uhuru Kenyatta may help destroy the gall between Luo and Kikuyu and do this country a great deal of good.

ochiengotani@gmail.com