Kenyans will need more of the Rudisha therapy

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By OTIENO OTIENO
Posted  Saturday, August 11  2012 at  19:56

Most of the big modern media have had a problem trying to justify their preference for escapist light entertainment to more serious content like politics.

Confronted with criticism by hardnosed scholars, few have been able to rebut the notion that they simply exist to make money.

But Emilio Azcarraga, the billionaire founder of Mexico’s Televisa, was outright unapologetic.

He once described Mexico as a country of a modest, very traumatised class, which will never stop being traumatised.

His choice word for ‘traumatised’ was actually too strong to be reproduced in a family newspaper. Television, he argued, had the obligation to bring diversion to these people and remove them from their sad reality and difficult nature.

The reaction of Kenyans to David Rudisha’s victory in the 800m race at the London Olympics on Thursday night suggests that Azcarraga had a point. As a nation, we have yet to recover from the trauma of the post-election violence of 2007 and 2008.

You can tell it from the way we take to quarrelling, grievance mongering, scare mongering or public lynching over just about every small issue in public debates.

From the blogs to the little agora next to City Hall in Nairobi and the rice fields of Ahero in Kisumu you come across very irritable people looking to lynch anyone with a differing opinion.

Efforts initially thought to have the magic bullet for national healing like the ICC trials have had quite the opposite effect: traumatising the peoples to which the suspects belong.

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Days before Rudisha’s victory, we had picked a quarrel with the electoral commission, the government, the rival party — and of course with ourselves — over, er, biometric registration system.

In between, our American friends walked into secret meetings with the President, the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice probably thinking they were helping and walked out to discover they had instead added to our national trauma.

Amid this tension, we were due some time to exhale. And David Lekuta Rudisha provided it.

In that short one minute, 40.91 seconds we were glued to the TV screens, we were all Kenyans — distracted from real and imagined grievances, rival tribes, rival parties and political enemies.

Escapism isn’t always bad after all.

With the anxiety building up in the run-up to the next election, Kenyans will surely need more of this Rudisha therapy.

jkotieno@ke.nationmedia.com