Saturday, March 24, 2012

Politicians pushing Kenyans back to the precipice



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Photo/FILE  A politician addressing the crowd at political rally. Politicians’ public statements in recent weeks have triggered panic across the country.
Photo/FILE A politician addressing the crowd at political rally. Politicians’ public statements in recent weeks have triggered panic across the country. 
By DOROTHY KWEYU dkweyu@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Friday, March 23  2012 at  20:55
Politicians’ public statements in recent weeks have triggered panic among wananchi, who fear we could be hurtling down the slippery slope of poll violence.
Nowhere has this sense of alarm and despondency been better expressed than in the Nation mailbox, where readers’ letters show a nation gripped by fear.
The following is a typical letter to the editor: “It is about time anarchy-inclined Kenyans stopped using the ICC court process to cause chaos by making statements that may easily slide us into social strife.
“This goes to all the political forces both for and against the Ocampo Four. For the umpteenth time, the country is not under trial at The Hague. No ethnic community is on trial,” Onyiego Felix wrote from Nairobi.
Negative ethnicity has defined Kenyan politics since Independence. It is no secret that Kenya’s rulers have dished out plum positions to members of their ethnic communities, which fact underlies the cutthroat competition for the Presidency, with the infamous ‘it’s our turn to eat’ as the overriding justification.
With hate speech as one of its worst manifestations, negative ethnicity is an issue political and human rights activist Njeri Kabeberi raises in a new survey by the German foundation, Heinrich Böll, whose excerpts are to be published in the next issue of Perspectives, a compilation of political analyses and commentaries from Africa.
Titled: ‘African Legislatures: New Trends, Old Challenges’, the survey that covers several African countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Benin, has Ms Kabeberi make a stinging attack on mostly politicians from Kenya’s larger communities, who invoke ethnic sentiments to marginalise smaller communities.
Ms Kabeberi, who is also the executive director of the Centre for Multiparty Democracy, claims to have been on a hit lift of 12 like-minded Kenyans from the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru communities, who stood by their country rather than their ethnic communities at the height of post-election chaos.
Describing the PEV as “one of the darkest spots in our history”, Ms Kabeberi says: “I was in trouble for supporting my nation, Kenya.
“And my ethnic group is the one that threatened me for standing in the gap for this country while everybody else was trying to run with their ethnic group.”
A report of the Independent Review Commission on Post-Election Violence (Irec), better known as the Kriegler Commission, lends credence to Ms Kabeberi’s claim of the 2007 elections as being highly ‘ethnicised’.
It also explains why the ethnic factor has made elections in Kenya a life and death matter.
The Kriegler report sheds light on why negative ethnicity and hate speech, which have grabbed media attention in recent weeks, go hand-in-hand.
Most disconcerting perhaps is that the media were found to be in cahoots with politicians in fomenting ethnic tensions that brought Kenya to the brink of the precipice.
Most blame was directed at media serving the big ethnic groups, the Kriegler report says. Even the titles of the programmes allowed one to sense the message was bound to be divisive.
Against such background, the Kabeberi group stood up to be counted at Kenya’s darkest moment. 
Working at peace-building among the different ethnic communities, “we had to tread very carefully not to be obvious in places where we thought we could be attacked because there were leaflets across the country saying we are traitors to our community,” Ms Kabeberi says.
Such a situation, and which is replaying itself in the ongoing campaigns for the next general elections, prompted Ms Kabeberi to say “this nation is still very far” with “very highly educated and exposed persons… behaving in a very crude manner when it comes to ethnic alliances and biases.”
Although the HBF survey was conducted in December 2011, only last Monday, Housing minister Soita Shitanda said his New Ford Kenya Party would only work with the G7 Alliance, which groups Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and Eldoret North MP William Ruto, if its leaders were prepared to back a presidential candidate from western Kenya.
Western Kenya is a Luhya stronghold and the Malava MP put it bluntly: “Communities from western are tired of being used as ladders for those seeking to get to State House.” The ethnic overtones are obviously explicit.
Most worrying, perhaps, is that during the PEV, the media, and especially vernacular FM radio stations, fell easy prey to ethnic manipulation by politicians.
How else would they have been used as channels for communicating words and phrases captured in theKriegler report?
The offensive phrases including “settlers”, “let’s claim our land”, “mongoose has come and stolen our chicken”, “madoadoa” and “get rid of weeds” and songs such as “talking very badly about beasts from the west”, “Kiiji” and the song by Miuga Njoroge sung in Kikuyu which implied that (Raila) Odinga is a murderer, power hungry and does not care about other tribes but only his own tribe, and that Luos are lazy, do not work, do not pay rent and are hooligans, were received by Kenyans with mixed feelings. Luo stations also played a song “the leadership of the baboons” that vilified the Mount Kenya people.
Although Ms Kabeberi describes herself as “a very proud Kikuyu”, she takes greater pride in being Kenyan.

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