Stop MPs before they sow mayhem

Posted  Saturday, April 2 2011 at 17:40

Evidence that the political elite learnt little from the 2007-2008 post-election crisis has been on stark display over the past fortnight.

At rallies held at several locations across the country, MPs have spoken to their supporters in bald language that can only serve to incite ethnic hatred and threaten the relative peace the country has enjoyed since the National Accord was signed.

One of the criticisms of civil society, the media and other national institutions was that they had missed — or ignored — early warning signs that the nation was heading toward disaster before the General Election, meaning preventive measures were not taken.

Some of the indicators of looming ethnic conflict include the depiction of opposing groups as having inferior cultural mores, the use of coded language and negative labels to refer to ethnic groups and the whipping up of a siege mentality among communities to achieve the electoral ambitions of politicians.

The language deployed at recent rallies, including one in Kiambu on Friday, falls squarely into the category of hate speech as defined in Section 62 of the National Cohesion Act.

The section describes hate speech as words designed to incite feelings of contempt, hatred, hostility, violence or discrimination against a person, group or community on the basis of ethnicity or race.

In light of that definition, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission should take more than a passing interest in statements made in Kiambu likening Prime Minister Raila Odinga to a “hyena” and a “mad man”.

One MP warned that an ethnic community must work to protect itself from the PM’s possible rise to power while threatening that a citizen’s arrest might be one of the options they could use.

The accusations of hate speech have not been levelled just against politicians on one side of the political divide.

Mr Odinga has himself been accused of playing the ethnic card to win political support at the last elections, including using analogies that painted one ethnic group as an enemy that needed to be combated.

The upshot is that the crisis last time informed the drafting of various pieces of legislation designed to avert a return to violence at the next polls.

The conduct of politicians in recent months indicates that the political elite are showing little respect for those laws. The sanctions prescribed for these crimes do not seem to have had the desired deterrent effect.

In such circumstances it is up to commissioners and the secretariat of the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, working with the police, to justify their salaries by applying the law, issuing warrants and prosecuting those involved in hate speech, whatever their political affiliation.

The commission should also have a programme of civic education to combat the distortions and falsehoods spread by various politicians, including the highly poisonous insinuation that whole communities are on trial at The Hague.

These misleading statements can only serve to whip up emotions and stir disputes that may ultimately not be contained within still-fragile institutions with disastrous consequences.

It is testimony to the self-serving nature of members of the political elite that they are gleefully engaged in acts of hate speech less than five years after the nation was gripped in a wave of murderous unrest that left over a thousand dead and ruined the livelihoods of thousands of others.

Their behaviour is an advertisement of the fact that the monster of impunity is yet to be slain.

The institutions expected to deal with these offenders must act fast to save the nation from a return to the depths into which it plunged in 2007-2008.