Why do Kenyans tolerate this kind of politics? Rutolitics

By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted  Saturday, April 9 2011 at 19:58

I have coined the term rutolitics for whatever masquerades as politics in Kenya.

For just about everything political has revolved around William Ruto ever since Senor Ocampo publicly cited him among six Kenyans to be charged with gross crimes against mankind.

Yet if rutolitics is a sad commentary, the commentary is not about Mr Ruto himself. It is about Kenya as a whole.

How can 45 million people deliberately sacrifice their entire future at the altar of an individual who faces serious cases of crime against those very same 45 million?

If the MPs – the self-styled representatives of those very same 45 million – are engaged in the most acrimonious bickering, the bickering is about Mr Ruto.

It is about a man yet to clear himself of allegations of mass-murder and charges of gross fraud.

Oral missiles

If our very Principals are again throwing oral missiles at each other, it is about Mr Ruto. It is about a man who – as even Daniel arap Moi will testify – has betrayed every political trust ever since he entered politics 20 years ago.

The entry itself – as the chief instigator of Youth for Kanu’92 – raised questions which either he or Mr Moi will have to answer one of these days – namely, when we have drummed up the political will to slay the dragon of impunity.

Of course, the oral skirmishes are also about Uhuru Kenyatta and Francis Muthaura, not to mention Henry Kosgey, Hussein Ali and Joshua Sang.

But Mr Ruto is their moving spirit. He is the most colourful and most loquacious of them all. None is nearly as pugnacious and as chest-thumping in his heroics.

My own heart goes for Hussein Ali because I have always found him gentlemanly and full of bonhomie.

But that doesn’t answer the vital question: why does anybody think that Kenya will cease to exist – and go on to thrive – if six Kenyans are tried and convicted by the International Criminal Court?

Why do the two Principals and Kalonzo Musyoka – the third triumvir – make statements which suggest that Kenya’s entire future depends precariously on whether or not the six and any others are tried in The Hague or in Nairobi?

Why do we allow the MPs – a group so deficient in moral and intellectual resources – to be our major arbiters on such matters?

Especially when our country is marching with Tennysonian “alacrity” into “the Valley of Death”, the question is ineluctable: what happened to our intelligentsia? Why is the academic community silent? Where are the professionals – the scientists, teachers, lawyers, doctors, architects, editors?

The youngsters for whom we pay through the nose to acquire a refinement of the mind from university education, to rise above the self and the tribe, and to commit themselves to knowledgeable unification of and service to this country, are too busy promoting selfish and ethnic interests – and destroying public property into the bargain – to be bothered.

In God’s name

Apart from an expatriate called Father Dolan – the still small voice crying out in the “wilderness” of Eldoret – where are all those who, in God’s name, fulminate endlessly from the “high places” of Canaan about everything except our dire need for abnegation, abstemiousness, altruism, brotherhood, sorority, kindness, justice, moderation and a sense of community here on earth?

But, just – for purely metaphysical arguments borrowed from sacerdotal Europe – a section of the Church tried to sabotage our new Constitution recently – so I hear, to my utter disgust, that, on the question of Ruto and Uhuru, our priests are equally divided on the apparently inevitable ethnic lines.

I ask again: how can we tolerate rutolitics? How can we allow our whole national political thinking to be sabotaged by and revolve around a couple of individuals whose moral, intellectual and social probity is now not clear to any reputable national or international institution?

ochiengotani@gmail.com