By ABABU NAMWAMBA
Posted Saturday, December 31 2011 at 15:52
Posted Saturday, December 31 2011 at 15:52
No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of “Spiritus Mundi” troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds....”
This is an extract from a famous poem by William Yeats, the same one that inspired the title of celebrated Nigerian literary icon, Chinua Achebe’s stirring masterpiece of African literature — “Things Fall Apart”.
The poem is one of my all time best reads. Indeed it is the last piece of literature I read in 2011. And it got my mind to replay, in astonishing lucid images, reflections of the year just gone by.
Yes, we have just closed a year that was dominated by myriad challenges, ranging from high octane temperatures from The Hague and the classical Kenya-style political intrigues to the ferocious devastation caused by the natural forces of droughts and floods.
It was also the year of a dramatic if not highly suspicious collapse of the Kenya shilling to unprecedented lows, and of course the sharp spiral in the cost of living, which ripped through the ceiling and hit the blue skies, literally.
Throw into the mix the excruciating pains from the Sinai fire tragedy and Syokimau, and you complete a mosaic of a truly challenging year, one when things truly threatened to fall apart.
But rather than focus on tribulations that are now buried in the sands of time and filed away as our “past”, we must, like the proverbial Phoenix, rise again, each of us playing our rightful role to turn MV Kenya around.
As the institution that represents the collective popular will of the people, Parliament must lead the way in providing a compass to guide this vessel into safe harbour.
The August House will have to live up to such high standards as that expressed by 18th Century British Statesman and Philosopher, Edmund Burke, who wrote that: “Parliament is not a Congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation with one interest, that of the whole; where not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a Member of Bristol but a Member of Parliament”.
Government, on the other hand, must borrow a leaf from the book of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd US President, who famously displayed on his desk in the Oval Office these four immortal words on the sublime reality of leadership: “The buck stops here”.
Government must take every measure possible to jealously protect and uphold the human dignity of every Kenyan, which they have been robbed of by sub-normal existence.
In the liberal moral philosophy, human dignity is regarded as what gives a person their intrinsic worth.
In the words of Emmanuel Kant, it is “above all price and so admits of no equivalent”. It is the foundation of our innate rights to freedom and to physical integrity from which all other rights flow.
The South African Constitutional Court famously declared in the 1995 case of S v. Williams that the State must be foremost in upholding those values which are the guiding light of civilised societies, including respect for human dignity... even the vilest criminal remains a human being possessed of common human dignity.
Ultimately, we must aim to attain some irreducible minimum of certainty in respect of basic expectations of our people.
In the words of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, “to attain this end we must secure a preponderance of virtue over vice and must endeavour to secure that the honest man may, even in this world, receive a lasting reward for his virtue”.
Otherwise we would regress to a jungle existence reminiscent of the scenario described by Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat” where he shares this illuminating African proverb: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up, it knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a gazelle or a lion. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”
Blessed, sane 2012 fellow countrymen and women.
namwamba@gmail.com
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