My dearly beloved Prof Makau Mutua:
“When the madness of a nation disturbs a solitary mind, it is not enough to say that the man is mad,” said the late Francis Imbuga. These very words came to me as I read two responses this weekend to your simple tweet: “As a matter of freedom of conscience and thought, I can’t accept Uhuru Kenyatta as President of Kenya. I can’t and I won’t.” Let us consider them separately.
Mwenda Njoka’s unhelpful article titled, 'An open letter to my friend, the good old Prof Makau Mutua,' in the April 7 edition of the Standard on Sunday is not seemingly inspired by any malevolent hostility at your clear antipathy towards Uhuru Kenyatta.
Rather, it appears to be informed by a befuddled puzzlement that you seem not to have given Uhuru the benefit of the doubt; especially now that he is the fourth President of Kenya.
He acknowledges that “it is your right not [to] accept Uhuru[s] presidency…"and further concedes that “to accept or not to accept anything, including presidents, is one’s personal prerogative.”
But, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Mwenda immediately trips himself when he makes no attempt to understand the principles informing your position and begins by suggesting that your stance may be due to ignorance: I will let you in on some home truths about African politics that you, being so far away and for so long, may not understand or appreciate.
Africans tend to be a proud people who often want to hold their dignity and destiny in their own hands especially when threatened by foreign powers….This is what happened in the case of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.
Is it really truly the case that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto benefited from the threat of foreign powers to our common dignity and destiny and, due to this, ascended to Kenya’s presidency and deputy presidency respectively?
Or did the two unite following the clear, career-ending threat of their respective indictments at the International Criminal Court and cunningly spin this to create a new ethnic basis to politically profit from?
In short, is our common dignity or destiny actually threatened by the ICC or have the two cleverly and skilfully made it appear that there is an international agenda against them and hence, rallied a slight majority among us to circle the political wagons around them?
The duo’s spin-and-mix skills are clearly superior to any political DJ’s in this neck of the woods. The difference between a real threat and the threat that looks real (as a result of a carefully crafted, politically-created scarecrow) should not have so plainly escaped Mwenda. Clearly, for whatever reason, his analytical lenses fatally failed him.
So to hear Mwenda attempt to patronize you as being removed from reality while he has uncritically swallowed hook, line and sinker the sedulously-woven spin from Uhuruto must have painfully grated. Worse, to attempt to patently rob you of your individual intellect and independent scholarly judgement because “your good friend the Chief Justice and President of [the] Supreme Court Willy Mutunga was the one who gave Uhuru and Ruto’s election a clean bill of health…” is plainly jaundiced.
First, we are entitled to be critical – brutally so in fact - of even our best friends. Second, since we have not received the reasons behind the Supreme Court ruling, how would it be that we are being required to accept it? Since when did the unthinking group-think that characterises bleating sheep become acceptable to the academy?
Oh, and his last piece of advice that you should offer 'constructive criticism' begs the question: what is 'constructive criticism' and who decides if it is 'constructive' or 'destructive'?
Is your role to critique as you see things or to, in addition and prior to speaking out, visit by whatever means possible the mind of the person critiqued so that you can discern whether it is 'constructive' or 'destructive'?
Its inadequacies notwithstanding, Mwenda’s critique of you, methinks, is from a benign place. Not so Eric Ng’eno’s article titled, 'There’s a thin line between radicals and irritants' in the April 6 edition of the Saturday Nation. At the outset, let’s applaud Eric: his sarcasm has great potential. I’m afraid that’s where it all ends.
For the long and the short of it is that Eric’s is a shallow cheerleader’s polemic against someone he considers as openly hostile to the Jubilee Coalition Eric dismally fails to make any headway in the one area one would think he would have privileged in his critique of you: an analysis advancing the norms and practise of democracy. He is completely, utterly and absolutely lost here.
He has no grasp or imagination of how divergent or dissenting thought could function as the magnetic north pointing his analytical compass to lusher democratic pastures. This makes his piece critically anaemic, intellectually lethargic and analytically inept in advancing any shade of democracy.
By his account, the fact that through your plain, plaintive and plucky tweet you ventilate your clear disagreement with the “popular choices of Kenyans” is “insulting”, “impudent”, “reprehensible”, and suggests that “those who voted for Jubilee are somehow inferior, deficient or illegitimate”.
Suddenly, your tweet (by some spontaneous combustion of logic) is “suggesting that Kenyans require… [your] consent to make their choices”. Eric even multiplies your alleged sins so that one tweet now becomes “tendentious outpourings”.
Where does one begin? By educating Eric that we have the enshrined right to disagree with the majority? That by so doing this does not in any way act as a command to them but as a legitimate expression and beacon of divergence and intellectual diversity? That there are many times where majorities actually have made mistakes (was Adolf Hitler not a genuinely very popular choice in German elections?)?
Methinks, however, that it is not that Eric did not know all these. Rather, he is deliberately trying to make you a hate figure around whom to rally the Jubilee troops; clearly, he is trying to create a new template that outlaws any disagreement with the new leadership given that they now perceive that there are numbers on their side. Now, is this not the very definition of tyranny?
Mugambi Kiai is the Kenya Program Manager at the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa (OSIEA). The views expressed in this column are entirely his and not OSIEA’s.
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