Prof Kibwana On Consitutution
After two decades of constitution-making and three successive constitutional drafts – Constitution of Kenya Review Commission (CKRC) Draft, Bomas Draft and Wako Draft – will the Experts’ Draft finally deliver the phalarope, Kenya’s new National Charter?Since the l980s and especially in the l990s, Kenyans in their corporate struggles have established that their country will henceforth be a land of freedom. No leader or group of political leaders can establish a dictatorship in Kenya.Although the written new constitution has so far not materialised we have however, put behind us personal rule authoritarianism. After 10 years of President Mwai Kibaki’s open society oriented leadership style – what some call ‘laid-back governance,’ no imperial leadership will be possible unless the leader(s) wish to foment civil strife. I believe in any space that is Kenya, Kenyans have appropriated their space.
The year 2010 is significant because this must be the year we legislate our new found freedom through a constitutional framework. We shall then have declared ourselves: Kenya, land of the free and opportunity.In my view, we must overcome the following obstacles, among others, to guarantee an enduring constitutional settlement. The political elite must desist from viewing the generation of a new constitution as a battleground for succession politics or the fulfillment of other partisan interests.The Committee of Experts (CoE) which is charged with the life-giving role of mid-wife for the new Peoples’ Charter must demonstrate it is only supportive of the National Interest and not the narrow interests of any sector.
We need a governance and citizenship framework that will secure Kenya’s nationhood, development, peace and stability. Therefore, if the 30 days’ public debate of the Experts’ Draft does not observe the give and take principle, then the constitution is likely to abort once again. If give and take is embraced in the final negotiations of a new constitution for Kenya, then the Referendum or vote for the new constitution will be an easy ride.
We must thus mobilise Kenya’s latent genius which always helps us to avoid national cataclysms at the last hour. We peacefully achieved regime change after Moi. We overcame full-fledged civil war in 2007/2008. We never went under after Kenyatta’s demise.A new constitutional order therefore must, through a national consensus, replace the independence constitution that during one-partyism was made a One-Party State Constitution through prolific amendments. To become a middle economy, Kenya needs a facilitative constitutional framework. Contentious issues must be negotiated, but ultimately the New Constitution is Non-negotiable.
Prof Kibwana
It Is Time For Unity
“Our people have been oppressed because we are never together,”
Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta
Kalenjin Leaders Must Do More
Where is the Kalenjin Council of Elders
Obama: Kenya Is Not Ghana….Britain’s Colonial Legacy Has Undermined Its Moral Authority
A success story undone by corruption
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Accompanying the fanfare of President Obama’s visit to Ghana in July was a chorus of well-founded praise for that country’s functioning democracy. The U.S. president pointed to his host country as a shining example, while warning other nations on the continent that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.” Political pundits and the media reinforced Obama’s message, holding up Ghana as Africa’s success story.
Not so long ago, Ghana shared the limelight with Kenya, the country of Obama’s paternal past. But the vote-tampering and widespread ethnic violence that marred the 2007 Kenyan elections left observers shaking their heads, wondering how the idyll of East Africa could have gone so wrong, so quickly. A well-functioning, multiparty government buoyed by an impressive 6 percent annual growth rate had made for a potent combination in the post-colonial dream world.
The blurring of fantasy and reality, however, was laid bare in the smoldering rubble of election violence that left some 1,500 Kenyans dead and at least 300,000 internally displaced. Journalist Michela Wrong provides a very important and illuminating account of Kenya’s present-day political and economic morass. On one level, “It’s Our Turn to Eat” reads like a John le Carré novel as it traces the cloak-and-dagger maneuverings of Kenya’s political bosses, and the heroic but futile attempts of John Githongo — the government’s internal, anti-corruption watchdog, and the protagonist of Wrong’s account — to stymie them.
On a deeper and much richer level, the book is an analysis of how and why Kenya descended into political violence more than a year and a half ago. For Wrong, the insidious bedfellows of corruption and tribalism inhabit nearly every sphere of Kenyan existence. At the upper echelons of government, members of parliament connived to defraud the country of some $750 million through the notorious Anglo-Leasing scheme; at the lower levels of society, the ordinary Kenyan doles out on average 16 bribes a month to government agents simply to get by.
These factors, as Wrong points out, have been present in Kenya since the inauguration of the country’s first independent government in 1963, despite the rather rosy and misplaced image that characterized the nation, at least in the Western media, for decades. First, under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu, Kenya’s ethnic majority, benefited disproportionately from the state’s spoils. Kenyatta surrounded himself with a coterie of loyal ethnic supporters who systematically excluded non-Kikuyu from participating in their quest for power and ill-gotten wealth.
Subsequently, when Daniel T. arap Moi took power in 1978, the new president continued with the tribally based corruption. Only this time, Moi, who came from the ethnic-minority Kalenjin of western Kenya, redirected the flow of wealth and power to his tribal base of supporters. For the Kalenjin and other closely related tribes, it was their turn to eat.
It was Githongo — a Western-educated, physically imposing and exceedingly shrewd man — who was to herald the literal and symbolic end to this vicious cycle of corruption and ethnic favoritism. When Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, took presidential power in 2002, he declared his election a mandate for reform and appointed the young Githongo, also a Kikuyu, to root out the old bogies that had undermined Kenya’s progress. It wasn’t long, though, before Githongo’s starry eyes cleared, only to find his revered mentor, Kibaki, knee-deep in the corruption game, with a supporting cast of legislators aiding and abetting theft from the state’s coffers.
With much drama, Githongo eventually fled Kenya, taking with him piles of documents and secretly taped conversations. He landed on the London doorstep of Wrong, an old acquaintance. Given this personal connection, Wrong is notably self-aware of her position as both author and partial subject of her own book. Indeed, her personal involvement scarcely compromises her excellent analysis of Kenya’s twin evils; rather, she deftly points to the fact that corruption and tribalism are not endemic just to Africa, but inhabit the contemporary, worldwide landscape, and that complicity reaches to all corners of the globe as well.
If the old-boy system is not an African artifact, and if undemocratic processes have no boundaries — many a Kenyan will snicker at the mention of a hanging chad — how then does Wrong make sense of the localized events in Kenya? By “probing the roots of a dysfunctional African nation” and its British colonial legacy, as well as Kenya’s more recent entanglements with the likes of the World Bank and Britain’s Department for International Development, Wrong takes a decidedly Paul Wolfowitz-like stand. That is, political systems are at the heart of the problem and must be reformed if there is any hope for the alleviation of poverty — and not just in Kenya.
It’s difficult to argue against Wrong on this point, though the roots and solutions to Kenya’s problems are far more embedded in the country’s past than she suggests. Colonial Kenya — with its white tribe of settlers and administrators, economic monopolies and perpetuation of African tribalism, and a governor who ruled with highly centralized powers and a posse of loyal underlings to support him — bears an uncanny resemblance to the country today. Moreover, while Wrong praises Britain’s former highest-ranking ambassador to Kenya, High Commissioner Edward Clay, and his anti-corruption stance, she fails to mention that, while Clay was making his strongest denunciations of corruption, the full impact of Britain’s colonial violence and coverups was finally being disclosed in Kenya.
Britain’s colonial legacy has undermined its moral authority and continues to influence processes in Kenya, no matter how complicit Africans have been in perpetuating corruption and tribalism. The historical phenomenon of colonialism and its long-term impact vary across the continent, making the trajectory of a former settler colony such as Kenya distinct from that of Ghana, and many other African nations, for that matter. If strongmen are to be eliminated and institutions reformed — as both Obama and Wrong urge — then the historical differences among various African countries, and the ways in which these differences inform and shape present-day governing structures and cultures, must be thoroughly understood.
Caroline Elkins is a professor of history at Harvard University and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.”
Susan Rice Over Her Head On Sudan. We Are Living In A World of Modern International Relations.
When will The United States Learn the World has changed.We Are Living In A World of Modern International Relations.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a “comprehensive” U.S. policy for resolving the conflicts in Sudan, focused on ending human rights abuses and genocide in the Darfur region, fully implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and ensuring Sudan does not become a haven for violent extremists.Speaking to reporters at the State Department October 19, Clinton said today’s Sudan, four years after the signing of the CPA, is “at a critical juncture, one that can lead to steady improvements in the lives of the Sudanese people or degenerate into more conflict and violence.”
The people of Darfur still live in “unconscionable and unacceptable conditions,” Clinton said. The U.S. focus, she said, is on “reversing the ongoing dire human consequences of genocide by addressing the daily suffering in the refugee camps, protecting civilians from continuing violence, helping displaced persons return to their homes, ensuring that the militias are disarmed and improving conditions on the ground.”
The situation in Sudan has emerged as one of the largest and most devastating humanitarian crises for the 21st century, the State Department said in an October 19 statement. More than 20 years of fighting between the government and the SPLM has killed more than 2 million people, and key portions of the 2005 CPA remain unfulfilled and will be a flashpoint for future armed conflict unless implemented, Clinton said.
In addition, Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party and government-supported militia launched a genocidal campaign in 2003 against ethnic groups affiliated with a potential rebellion, killing hundreds of thousands, displacing 2.7 million people and creating more than 250,000 refugees, according to the State Department statement. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in the Darfur genocide.
Instability in Sudan not only jeopardizes the future of the country’s 40 million inhabitants, but can also “be an incubator of violence … in an already volatile region,” Clinton said.
The fate of Sudan’s people is “profoundly important” to U.S. officials, from President Obama on down, Clinton said. The decision to pursue the two goals of improving human rights in Darfur and fully implementing the CPA “simultaneously and in tandem” reflects the Obama administration’s “seriousness, sense of urgency, and collective agreement about how best to address the complex challenges” to both, she said.
“We are realistic about the hurdles to progress,” but “the problems in Sudan cannot be ignored or willed away,” Clinton said, adding that although dialogue will continue with the parties in the conflict, “words alone are not enough” to end the conflict and humanitarian suffering, and the United States is prepared to take measures to encourage progress.
“Assessment of progress and decisions regarding incentives and disincentives will be based on verifiable changes in conditions on the ground. Backsliding by any party will be met with credible pressure in the form of disincentives leveraged by our government and our international partners,” Clinton said.
The secretary said the United States has “a menu of incentives and disincentives” that includes both political and economic measures, but added “we want to be somewhat careful in putting those out” when she was asked to specify potential actions.
In an October 19 statement on the comprehensive strategy, Obama warned that Sudan is “poised to fall further into chaos if swift action is not taken,” and the conscience of both the United States and the international community requires action “with a sense of urgency and purpose.”
The president said he plans to renew U.S. sanctions on the Sudanese government. “If the Government of Sudan acts to improve the situation on the ground and to advance peace, there will be incentives; if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community,” he said.
At the State Department, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said there will be “no rewards for the status quo, no incentives without concrete and tangible progress,” and “significant consequences for parties that backslide or simply stand still.”
To track progress on the ground, the United States has more sources of information than in the past, including the hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur (UNAMID), the 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the south, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. “We’re in contact with all the parties, and I’d have every confidence that our challenge will not be lack of information,” Rice said.
ELECTION, REFERENDUM SCHEDULE ADD TO URGENCY
Retired U.S. Air Force General Scott Gration, who is the Obama administration’s special envoy for Sudan, said there is a strong sense of urgency to improve the situation in the country because Sudan is scheduled to hold national elections in April 2010. And a referendum in southern Sudan on self-determination, which could lead to that region’s independence, is likely to be held before the end of 2011.
“Success requires frank dialogue with all parties in Sudan, with the regional states and international community. We all must work together to get tangible results on the ground, to achieve a lasting peace, a better life for future generations of Sudanese. And we must not stop until our task is complete,” Gration said.
According to the October 19 statement from the State Department, the Obama administration has learned “critical lessons” from previous U.S. efforts to resolve the conflicts in Sudan, including the need to engage both with allies and “with those with whom we disagree,” holding individuals responsible for genocide and humanitarian atrocities, and valuing Sudanese counterterrorism support, but not as “a bargaining chip to evade responsibilities in Darfur or in implementing the CPA.”
The October 19 statement said that rather than viewing process-related accomplishments such as the signing of a memorandum of understanding between two parties as a means of determining progress, U.S. officials instead will base their assessments on “verifiable changes in conditions on the ground.”
“Each quarter, the interagency at senior levels will assess a variety of indicators of progress or of deepening crisis, and that assessment will include calibrated steps to bolster support for positive change and to discourage backsliding. Progress toward achievement of the strategic objectives will trigger steps designed to strengthen the hands of those implementing the changes. Failure to improve conditions will trigger increased pressure on recalcitrant actors,” the statement said.
The statement also said the United States will be working with international partners to provide assistance for the April 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum with the goal of “a peaceful post-2011 Sudan or an orderly transition to two separate and viable states at peace with each other.”
Along with providing assistance for voter registration and education, balloting, election monitoring and other services, the Obama administration will encourage parties in the north and south to enact legal reforms conducive to a more credible electoral process, work for the “timely and transparent demarcation of the north-south border,” and support efforts to develop a post-2011 wealth-sharing agreement between the two
Sudan has so far held out against the United States and the West for almost 10 years.Why would they be interested In the United States’ new offer. So far ignoring what the west wants has worked out well for them. The North /South partition is a given reality with or without the United States. With the African Union and China on their side who needs engagement with the United States that is already hostile.Whats in it for Sudan in this new deal.The west is slowly becoming EVEN MORE irrelevant .
Post Election Nightmares
Those who committed heinous acts during last year’s post-election chaos are probably having endless nightmares.
Yesterday, a man stunned a court by demanding life imprisonment, claiming he torched houses when Kenya went to the brink of chaos.
The man, who has been charged with being drunk and disorderly, also claimed Mungiki gangs were after him because of his involvement.
Mr Clement Wafula claimed police had refused to lock him up even after presenting himself at two stations.
A packed court was thrown into confusion and disbelief as the man sought the heavy sentence despite undergoing two mental tests.
He appeared before Kapsabet Senior Resident Magistrate Gerald Mutiso for being drunk and disorderly last December 18.
Wafula shocked the court when he said he wanted to be charged with arson in Uasin Gishu District during post-election violence.
He claimed he presented himself to Eldoret Police Station, but was chased away. The same happened at Kapsabet Police Station, but he was later arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
No peace of mind
The former tout claimed he would be secure in police custody, having received threats for his role.
He said he had moved to Lodwar and Mt Elgon, but could not find safety and wanted to be jailed for life or at least 30 years to be safe from members of the outlawed sect.
He claimed some of his friends had allegedly died mysteriously for their heinous acts.
The claims prompted the mental assessment at Kapsabet District Hospital, and a second one at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Eldoret. A report released on January 21 found him fit to plead. Court orderlies said investigators have been dispatched to establish the man’s claims, but they have found no clues.
Yesterday, Mr Mutiso ordered the probation department to investigate the credibility of the accused’s utterances, his home and work place, and report to court on October 21
Luke 4:23-30
23Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’ “
24“I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27And there were many in Israel with leprosy[a] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
28All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff.30But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
Happy Rosh Hashana -Happy New Year
Rosh Hashanah is the start of the civil year in God’s calendar. It is the new year for people, animals, and legal contracts. Rosh Hashanah also commemorates the creation of man
Ndura Waruingi Interview With Jeff Koinange
Kisima
Response to Deceptive Moralist Defence By Kikuyus 4 Change of Kalenjin Community
Kikuyus for Change have just released a statement. They believe that ethnic stereotypes are harmful.
Having experienced the harm resulting from ethnic stereotypes, they’re, understandably, determined to speak out against misrepresentations of other communities as a whole. In their view, there has been serious misrepresentation of Kalenjin as a community — it’s unclear just what this amounts to, but it seems to be a variation on collective responsibility. If Kikuyus for Change are right, it is widely believed that Kalenjin are perpetrators of (significant portions) the PEV; that they are destroying the Mau; and that they are the source of discontent on coalition governance issues. Against this unfortunate state of affairs, Kikuyus for Change argue that Kalenjin are not as a community perpetrators of PEV; and that they are not as a community Mau forest occupiers. We are given exactly one reason for that: those actions – the PEV; the entrance, destruction of and refusal to leave the Mau – are not the responsibility of Kalenjin because they are the actions of individuals.
This is the sort of empty and deceptive moralism that gives advocacy organisations in Kenya a bad name.
First, though, a word about the argument. The structure should be familiar: members of a group have done some terrible things; the group is then accused of collective responsibility for those acts; it is argued, felt, or feared that the members of the accused group will be victims of bigotry. A defender of the group has three options: accept collective responsibility; deny collective responsibility; or deny that collective responsibility has anything to do with it. If he accepts collective responsibility, then the defender has to show that this group doesn’t bear collective responsibility for this act: maybe they didn’t do it, or they knew not what they did, or whatever. If he doesn’t accept collective responsibility, then it makes no odds what the group did: even if the group performed the act, it can’t be held responsible. Alternatively, the defender of the group could simply say that even if the group were collectively responsible, that wouldn’t justify bigotry against it, because ethnic bigotry is just wrong.
Kikuyus for Change supply a desperately inept version of the first, when they should have gone for the third; their moralism lies in telling untruths for (what they suppose to be) good ends. Remember that they said that the actions for which Kalenjin are held communally liable are the actions of individuals. It is clear, I think, that they aren’t denying collective responsibility; rather, their point is that even if there is collective responsibility, it doesn’t apply in this case: Kalenjin aren’t collectively responsible for, say, the PEV. The problem with that move is simple: that the actions were committed by individuals does nothing whatever to show that there’s no communal liability for them. That follows from a very simple fact: groups acts through individuals, so it is entirely possible for a communal act to be performed by an individual. Think about the President’s assent to a bill. It is an act performed by the individual who happens to hold the office at the time; it is also an act by which the state, and therefore the groups of people who constitute the state, promise to obey a certain rule. Think also about a murder, carried out by a group of three men, who jointly plan and bring it off. Roughly speaking, it’s enough, for there to be collective moral responsibility, for a group to deliberately perform an act. The group of murderers is constituted of individuals; it is their actions which constitute the planning and commission of the murder. What makes them jointly responsible is their joint deliberate participation in the joint enterprise. But that joint deliberate participation is composed of individual acts. So the fact that the actions were performed by individuals is entirely consistent with collective responsibility for them; merely noting that the actions in question are the actions of individuals is a hopeless defence to the charge of collective responsibility.
More to the point, it deliberately overlooks facts which are common knowlege. The PEV in the Rift Valley was carefully-planned, and there was wide communal involvement. (See, for example, the Human Rights Watch report). All sorts of independent evidence suggests that the violence had the consent of a significant proportion of Kalenjin; and the consent, planning and participation of those properly empowered to act in the name of the community (Ashforth, Lynch, Waki). There is pretty good evidence of wide, if not quite universal, Kalenjin approval of the consequences of the violence (Ashforth, Lynch). And, again, there have been well-reported efforts to institutionalise the consequences of the violence: segregated schools, for example. In the example I gave earlier, the consent and particpation of all the members of the group was taken to be sufficient for collective responsibility. So it might be argued that the lack of either rules out collective responsibility in this case. That’s too quick. Collective responsibility can accrue to a group for an action even when not all its members approve or participate. The clearest example is war. It’s often taken to be the case that a duly-elected head of a state or a nation has the power to commit the state or nation to a war, with the collective consequences that that brings. It’s also true that a President, say, need not be elected by the entire nation to gain that power — all that’s necessary is a majority of the vote. Donald Kipkorir’s devotion marks the extent to which the Kalenjin political class is the duly-empowered representative of the Kalenjin nation, It is tolerably clear that the Kalenjin political class arranged the relevant bits of the post-election violence, tolerably clear that they were acting in their capacity as leaders of the Kalenjin nation in doing so, and tolerably clear that there is near-unanimous Kalenjin support for the consequences (if not, perhaps, the means) of PEV. That is why it ought to be conceded that Kalenjin bear collective responsibility for it.
It’s essential at this point to distinguish kinds of collective responsibility. I have in mind the following distinction: there is a kind of collective responsibility in which each member of the community is liable (and may therefore be punished) for the actions of the entire group; and there’s the kind of collective responsibility which does not distribute in this way — where we should say that the community is responsible for the acts, but in which it doesn’t follow that each member of the community can therefore be punished for the communal act. The clearest example of the first is the first example above, the joint-murder case, in which all the deliberately participants agree to kill. The Kalenjin-communal case is of the latter kind, mostly, I think, because while there was a piece of deliberate group activity, it is also clear that this was not unanimous. To recognise collective Kalenjin responsibility is not to call for communal punishment of Kalenjin.
But suppose you don’t agree. You think that there’s no Kalenjin communal responsibility for the PEV. You should still think that the Kikuyus for Change argument is foolish. Think about like this: rape is bad, regardless of the identity of the intended victim. The prohibition against rape isn’t contingent on whether or not the intended victim is, say, a rapist: even rapists ought not to be raped. If you’re looking for reasons not to rape someone, and the best you can come up with is that they’re not a rapist, you need to buy a new moral compass.
The Kikuyus for Change argument against anti-Kalenjin bigotry is of exactly this type: instead of saying the simple and true thing — that ethnic bigotry is bad, independent of the identity of its victims — they say the complex and false thing — that anti-Kalenjin ethnic bigotry is bad because Kalenjin aren’t communally responsible for PEV. They seem unable to see the point that anti-Kalenjin bigotry is bad because it is wrong, not because Kalenjin are right.
By Daniel Weru In response to Kalenjin Bashing-This Emerging Trend Must Be Stopped
Book:The Challenge for Africa
In her new book, Wangari Maathai talks straight and says many things we’d love to say ourselves, but lack either the courage or the fluency to do so. The Nobel Peace laureate lacks neither, and the Challenge for Africa makes a stimulating and refreshing read.Too often, she says, Africa is still presented as a helpless victim of her own making; a land of unparalleled riches, startling beauty,….of strange and at times primitive tribal customs, civil disorder, armed militias; of child labour, child soldiers, mud huts, open sewers, and shanty-towns; of corruption, dictatorship and genocide. These and other perceptions have framed the world’s response to Africa.This has caused a dangerous psychological process that subtly convinces Africans they are unable to chart their own destiny. Whereas, in fact, tens of millions of African women and men go about their lives responsibly, work hard and educate their children, often without means. These are the real African heroes and the world should hear more about them.
Covering a variety of topics: aid and dependency; indebtedness and unfair trade; leadership; culture; the “micro-nations” (wrongly known as “tribes”); the crisis of national identity; land ownership; environment and the family, there is nothing the author doesn’t include.She relates the experience of her own community, the Kikuyu, particularly affected by the colonial experience, and how they have been severely challenged to raise subsequent generations of children, many of whom have drifted onto the streets or are members of the outlawed Mungiki sect. In Kikuyu tradition, the “ituika” (translated as the “severance”) ceremonies served as term limits, and guaranteed to future generations that their time to rule would come.
Each generation of leaders understood they were being closely watched by the next, to ensure that the resources – privately and communally held property and natural resources- were well managed, to hand over to the next generation. The last ituika was due between 1925 and 1928, but was banned by the colonial government, and still remains incomplete.Wangari Maathai’s experience as a university lecturer, politician, political and human rights activist and expert on the environment gives her words weight. Democracy, she writes, isn’t all about “one man, one vote”. It also means protecting minority rights, an independent judiciary, an informed and engaged citizenry, rights to assemble and worship, and freedom to express one’s views peacefully without fear of reprisal or arbitrary arrest.
A challenge for Africa, she concludes, is that the nuclear family is often dysfunctional because the man is so often separated from wife and children -a practice that began under colonial rule-, and so cannot provide emotional and physical security for them. One of the most devastating experiences for any African parent is to see street children or child soldiers, or youth addicted to drugs, engaged in prostitution, afflicted with HIV/AIDS; or young men and women languishing in a state of alienation and torpor. How can such unfortunates create a strong society? A book to make one think, and hope that a better future is possible.
Book: The Challenge for Africa
Author: Wangari Maathai
Publisher: Heinemann, 2009
Traditional Leadership and Institutions( South African Example)
Jewish Sisters Recall Kindness 1939
Survival was foremost in the minds of the Berg family when they arrived in the highlands of Kenya in 1939. They were among hundreds of Jewish families who fled the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, but just a small number of those arrived on the east coast of Africa. The land and culture were strange to the Bergs, but the kindness and help of the Kikuyu people helped them survive and thrive.
“I have a stronger bond with the Kikuyu people than with Germany, and our family lineage there dates back to the early 1700s,” says Jill Berg Paully. “I consider Kenya my homeland.”The story of Inge Berg Katzenstein, 74, and her younger sister Jill Berg Paully, 70, is unusual in the Jewish diaspora. They were small girls, 10 and 6, in 1939, when their family fled to the East African nation.
“Our story is about five families, which later grew to seven, who were able to escape the persecution and raise enough money to buy land in Kenya and survive,” Mrs. Paully says.She says her family’s trek began in 1933, the year she was born, six years before the Bergs fled. Adolf Hitler rose to power as Germany’s chancellor that year, and the situation for Jews became worse day by day from that time on.The Bergs, who were wealthy cattle dealers in Germany, began moving their money out of German banks to Holland (now the Netherlands) in 1935. That bit of ingenuity, fostered by their grandmother, eventually would enable them to secure safe passage to Africa.
Mrs. Katzenstein was supposed to start public school in their hometown of Lechenich, but six months after school began, Jews were barred from attending public schools. She was forced to attend a Jewish school several miles away in Cologne, where her grandmother lived.”I remember walking to the [public school] building, and the Gestapo were there with their German shepherds – I am still afraid of those dogs to this day – and told me I was no longer welcome at the school,” she says.”But it was Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) where our story really begins, as with most Jews of the Holocaust,” Mrs. Paully says.
On Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, hundreds of Jewish homes, synagogues and other properties were burned, shattered and destroyed. The term Crystal Night is a reference to all the broken glass from Jewish homes and stores that littered the streets.Members of the Nazi Party rallied Germans into a destructive frenzy after the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, the secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, by a 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan. He was seeking revenge for the expulsion of his parents from their Polish home to a wasteland between Poland and Austria.”It took our family seven months to find a place that would accept Jews. Many Jews during that time had been swindled into trips where they were turned away when they arrived,” Mrs. Paully says.
Along with their parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, the girls finally would arrive in the grassy highlands of Kenya in June 1939, without an understanding of Swahili or English, the only languages spoken there.Kenya was a colony of Great Britain until 1963, and although the level of persecution against Jews was far less there, “the British were also anti-Semitic and not fond of Jews ,” Mrs. Paully says.
“Anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe hundreds of years before Hitler, and the British were no exception,” she adds.The girls endured great hardships not only because of the language barrier, but also from British schoolchildren, who beat and ridiculed them with impunity.”We were compelled to play sports three days a week at school, and often I fought with the girls and they would beat me with their lacrosse sticks. Nothing was done,” Mrs. Paully says.Amazingly, Mrs. Paully says, she and her sister were speaking nearly fluent Swahili within three months and becoming proficient in English as well.
“Two Kikuyu boys taught us as they escorted us to and from school,” Mrs. Katzenstein says.The Kikuyu tribe of Kenya was the native population on the highland where the sisters lived for the next eight years. Mrs. Katzenstein says the Kikuyu were a strong, intelligent people and the only inhabitants of the highlands who treated the Berg family with kindness and respect.At the end of the first three months, though, World War II broke out, and all the Jewish men were taken into custody, considered enemy aliens by the British.
Although the men were returned to their homes soon afterward, it would be several years before most of the world would become aware of the Nazi death camps and the vehement anti-Semitic persecution that enthralled the German populace under Chancellor Hitler and the members of his National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”For the entire eight years we lived there, the British were unaware, or so they said, that the Jews were being persecuted,” Mrs. Paully says.
“Many of our family members, like most others, died, and even we were unaware of the totality of what happened until much later.”In 1947, when Inge was 18 and her sister 14, the family was prepared to move again, this time to America. Shortly after their arrival, they learned of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and were shocked. In preparation for efforts to gain freedom from British rule, members of the Kikuyu, Embu, Meru and Kamba tribes in Kenya took oaths of unity and secrecy to overthrow the colonial rulers, beginning the Mau Mau movement.
Although the British greatly inflated the atrocities committed against English settlers, the rebellion was bloody, and many Kenyans who refused to join were killed for fear they would sell out their brethren who were fighting for freedom.”We got along so well with them and they were so kind to us, we had no idea what their relationship was with the British until that happened,” Mrs. Paully says.The family’s journey to America was long and treacherous, Mrs. Katzenstein says.”It took us seven weeks to get there on a cargo boat, and it was so stormy that the boat was tipping at 421/2 degrees. At 45 degrees a boat capsizes,” Mrs. Katzenstein says.A trip that was supposed to port in New York wound up in Boston harbor. Inge was expected to work, but Jill was forced to adjust to a new school with a new culture.
“It was difficult for her to adjust,” Mrs. Katzenstein says.”Our experience in Kenya made us aggressive and tough, and that did not translate well at first,” Mrs. Paully says.The family eventually found its way to Vineland, N.J., “a stronger Orthodox Jewish community than what my father found in New York,” Mrs. Paully says.Mrs. Katzenstein met and married her husband, Werner, and they had three children – two sons and a daughter now living in Boston, Pittsburgh and Highland Park, N.J. Mrs. Paully met and married her husband, Kurt, and they had two children, a son and daughter now living in New York and Florida.
The compelling story of the Berg family and how they were able to barter their escape from Germany is only one story of Jews who fled to Kenya. A film on the subject, “Nowhere in Africa,” was released in 2001. The sisters were intrigued by the parallels the movie had to their lives in Kenya. The two retired real estate brokers who immigrated to Vineland, N.J. in 1947 with their mother and father now live in Silver Spring. Both volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mrs. Paully has volunteered at the museum for nearly a decade, and her sister since 1998, when she moved to the region.The siblings will be telling their family’s unique story at the Holocaust Museum downtown, across from the Washington Monument.
“What we want is for people to learn what it is like to live in countries that are not free and what it means to be discriminated against,” Mrs. Paully says. “We want them to understand what they have and what they need to do to preserve it.”"Children are not born knowing hate; it is taught. And born Americans must understand what it is they have overcome and know that it can be quickly taken away, especially in these times,” Mrs. Katzenstein says.Jill Berg Paully (left) and Inge Berg Katzenstein, who as children fled Nazi Germany with their family and found safety in Kenya, pose with the family’s Sefer Torah at Kemp Mill Synagogue in Silver Spring. The Torah was carried from Germany to Kenya and then America and has been donated to the Kemp Mill synagogue.
By: Brian DeBose
Nyakio- Beauty Entrepreneur
Beauty entrepreneur Nyakio Kamoche Grieco has been prepping for the skin-care biz since she was in grade school. “My mom would always make me put shea butter and grapeseed oil on my feet before bed,” she says. Fast forward nearly two decades, and the New York native of Kikuyu descent now heads the African-inspired Nyakio line of bath and body products.
Nyakio, 31, launched the downtown L.A.-based business in 2002 and uses recipes passed down by her mother and grandmother–the latter still living on the family’s coffee farm in Kenya. “I used to watch my mom grind coffee beans in the kitchen and combine them with extracts to use as a skin cream,” Grieco says. “And you should see my mom. She looks 25.”
Nyakio, who grew up in Oklahoma, where her father is a professor of African history at the University of Oklahoma, recently added a perfume oil blending coconut oil, sandalwood, jasmine and other elements. Other offerings include citrus moluccana body wash and a soon-to-launch grape eucalyptus scrub. Nyakio prefers indigenous African ingredients such as shea butter and sweet almond oil. “There’s beauty in simplicity, which is really what my line is about.”
Nyakio Products.
Apothia at Fred Segal,8118 Melrose Ave.,Los Angeles,(877) APOTHIA
Kalologie Skincare, 132 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 276-9670.
Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates
Kenya’s hiring of CLS & Associates, a top Washington public relations firm to improve the country’s image in the US is a positive pointer that the country’s leadership has realized the power of a good image. However, the deal that will reportedly cost the taxpayer a whooping $ 1.7 Million over the next two years begs disturbing questions: why do we have a bad image in the first place? What steps are we taking to correct the cause of the bad image?
Hiring an image firm to sanitize the country when the country can’t feed its people; has wanting governance; can’t protect its citizens against crime; can’t supply electricity; can’t supply water and is selling parcels of land to multinationals is like washing a cup on the outside but leaving its inside dirty. A western propaganda machine to sanitize the late Omar Bongo did not stop the suffering and poverty of black Gabonese villagers from their government and foreign merchants in the extractive industry.
Kenya ought to improve its PR by being accountable to the electorate; promoting tribal cohesion; instituting an efficient and credible judicial system; and creating an environment that will spur individual innovation and productivity.
We should shame Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates for accepting kenyan tax payers money when kenyans are starving.The Kenyan government may have no shame but CLS & Associates…………..???
Catalogues Of Failures
Najivunia Kuwa Mkenya Swahili for “I am proud to be a Kenyan” that is conspicuously printed on colourful hand bills circulated by the office of the Government Spokesman, Alfred Mutua. The Spokesman is always reluctant to elaborate to curious Kenyans on what to be proud about in the country whose Golden Jubilee is less than four years away. Like any other citizen, Dr Mutua is too familiar with the habitual chest thumping, self praise while the country mires in catalogues of failures that so far outweigh its successes. Our shortcomings and misplaced priorities are many and countless; but few examples illustrate the gravity of policy weaknesses and laxity in moving this country to another level.
The proud and enduring Kenyan sleeps on an empty stomach because the shameless political class have depleted the strategic grain reserves in a race to a millionaire status. Rains have failed, drought has set in, livestock are dying in numbers as famine looms large with 10 million people threatened with starvation Eighteen months ago even a fool knew there would be famine after post election violence uprooted farming families from crop fields in the bread basket Rift Valley region. No emergency measures were put in place to forestall the looming disaster by those who want Kenyans to believe that everything is okay in the country that often boasts success in the vicinity of imminent failure.
The income per capita of some of the Asian Tigers was lower or compared to Kenya at independence in 1963. Today, we are shameless beggars of famine relief from countries that were no better in economic terms. More than four decades later the country still imports sewing needles, razor blades and other cheap items from China amongst other Asian countries. Amongst third world countries, Kenya is a lucky one that should be the last to be lumped together with failures. It boasts infrastructure, industries and communications network unsurpassed by its contemporaries save for South Africa. Because of its strategic importance, the country hosts the headquarters of two UN specialised agencies whose expertise and resources are at the disposal of the country to push itself to role model level. There are no immediate tangible plans to do away with unplanned settlements in urban areas and in the cities that house the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (HABITAT) Ironically, the country is home to the biggest slum in Africa amongst others that mushroomed in the post-independent period.Another UN agency on environment, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is based here but the country is far off from being an environmental conservation model given the raging debate on water catchments destruction and careless waste disposal. Unfortunately, we have not reciprocated the honour to host these UN bodies.
It is worth noting that the leadership of this country once declared poverty, ignorance and disease as number one national enemies. Today, these enemies are not our best of friends but are incontestable bedfellows of some of who survive on less than a dollar a day and resident in the many unplanned urban settlements.Mr Government Spokesman, do the foregoing scenarios strike you as success stories to be proud of or should we be an object of self pity?. Time to conduct a postmortem on when the rain started beating us is now not tomorrow before reference is made on fifty years of lost and missed opportunities. Some of the countries with success records never chest-thump but do a lot of soul searching on how to put food on the table. It is not a distant dream here though. A constitution should be amended now to allow for a dual citizenship so that Kenyans in the Diaspora can participate in building this economy.
Those who suffer in silence are not amused at the Najivunia campaign posters but make a mockery of the phrase “Navumilia Kama Mkenya”.
By J .Kamotho
Jimmy Kibaki
………..” Simama Kenya “
Kenya: Deliver Justice for Victims of Post-Election Violence
(New York) – The Kenyan government has reneged on commitments to deliver justice for the victims of post-election violence, Human Rights Watch said today. On July 30, 2009, the cabinet announced that, contrary to previous agreements, it would not establish a special tribunal, but would rely instead on a “reformed” national judicial system to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators.An independent domestic court with international participation remains the best option to start establishing accountability and the government should immediately adopt legislation to establish the special tribunal, Human Rights Watch said.”Bringing justice to these victims is the most urgent test of the coalition government’s willingness to resolve Kenya’s crisis,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The cabinet just resoundingly failed that test.”
The July 30 announcement is a U-turn from the government’s previous position that the Kenya justice system is deeply flawed and that the regular courts were unlikely ever to bring senior politicians and government officials to face justice. The recommendation of the Waki Commission on Post-Election Violence, which the government accepted and promised to implement in December 2008, was to establish a special tribunal independent of the high court and with international participation to investigate and prosecute the suspects.
“The argument for a special tribunal has always been that the Kenyan judiciary lacks independence, and the necessary root-and-branch reforms of the entire justice system will take years,” Gagnon said. “The idea that the existing judicial system can deal with the senior politicians and government officials who allegedly incited and organized the killing is an insult to the memory of those who lost their lives.”
As recently as July 3, the Kenyan government agreed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor in The Hague that by the end of September it would set out clear benchmarks for a “special tribunal or other judicial mechanism adopted by the Kenyan Parliament.” The government had agreed that if there was no parliamentary agreement on such a mechanism, it would refer the case to The Hague.Parliament rejected the draft legislation establishing the special tribunal in February, and since then, there has been no parliamentary debate, let alone agreement on the issue of how to deal with the suspects.
Kofi Annan, the chair of the panel of eminent Africans who negotiated the National Accord that led to the coalition government, repeatedly extended the time for the Kenyan government to take action on a national solution. On July 9, Annan handed over the Waki Commission’s evidence and its sealed list of suspects to the ICC, a step the commission had recommended in the event that a special tribunal was not established.
“After months of delay, the cabinet has finally declared that it is unprepared to carry out the principal task for which the coalition government was formed: to end Kenya’s decades of impunity,” Gagnon said. “The only credible option for the government to gain public confidence is to establish the special tribunal immediately or to refer the cases to the ICC.”On July 27, foreign ministers of the European Union called on Kenya to establish the special tribunal, along with carrying out the broader reform agenda provided for in the National Accord.
“Reforms of the national judicial system are badly needed, but they alone will not bring to account perpetrators of the worst crimes committed during the post-election violence,” Gagnon said. “The US and Kenya’s other international partners should insist in no uncertain terms that, until an independent judicial mechanism is established in Kenya, there can be no ‘business as usual’.”Any judicial mechanism adopted by the Kenyan parliament should conform to the recommendations of the Waki Commission and international standards – principally, that it should be independent of the High Court and the attorney general, that constitutional immunity provisions should be waived, and that suspects charged before it should resign their posts pending prosecution.
The cabinet also announced planned changes to the Truth, Reconciliation and Justice Commission (TRJC) although it did not provide specific details. Human Rights Watch said that changes that strengthen the commission are welcome, but could not be a substitute for credible prosecutions consistent with international fair trial standards.
Commentry by Human Rights Watch
Martha Karua On Mungiki
NSIS.Admits Mungiki Has Infiltrated Government
Mungiki gang members have established themselves in every sector of the Kenyan government, according to the National Security Intelligence Service.
The spy agency made the disclosure while responding to questions from the Parliamentary committee on National Security and Administration.The committee, which sought to establish the number of people killed by organised criminal gangs in Nyeri East and Kirinyaga West districts between April and May, tabled a report of its findings in Parliament on Thursday.
The NSIS told the team that media coverage and propaganda were partly to blame for challenges the government faced in its war against the group and other criminal gangs.
Martha Karua On Mungiki
Harvesting And Destroying Our Crops
Charles was one of the main suppliers of arrows and machetes in the violence that rocked Kenya’s Rift Valley last year. Eighteen months later, he and his Kalenjin tribe have not buried the hatchet.Some of the worst violence that followed the disputed December 27 polls was carried out by the Kalenjin tribe against the country’s dominant Kikuyu tribe and little in the way of reconciliation has taken place since.”We are ready to fight any time the alarm is raised, we have the weapons and we know how to use them,” said Charles, 35, who asked for his real name not to be revealed.A small lamp sheds a feeble light on his emaciated and determined face, as he gazes towards the Kerio valley, a remote part of western Kenya where few roads, no mobile telephone network and few police patrol can reach.
“For the Kalenjins, land is inheritance and you can’t share it with a foreigner,” he said, referring to the Kikuyu tribe of President Mwai Kibaki, who was maintained in his job by an internationally-backed power-sharing agreement despite widespread accusations that he rigged the results.During the post-election chaos, at least 1,500 people were killed nationwide, and the Kalenjins attacked Kikuyus whom they consider to have settled their ancestral lands.”We have decided to give peace a chance, but if the Kikuyus cannot honour their agreement, then we will go another way and anything can happen,” warned Peter Kipkurui, a tribal elder and farmer.
“The Kikuyus came to settle here, they should respect our community.”The deal brokered by former UN chief Kofi Annan last year brought an end to the fighting but its implementation has stalled on several key issues.Many Kalenjins feel they got the rough end of the stick and explain they will only accept the Kikuyus’ continued presence in their heartland under certain conditions.”If the Kikuyus try to vote like the local community wherever they are, it will be better and people here won’t have any more bad feelings towards them,” said Francis Samoei, a 48-year-old local farmer.Francis and many of his local tribesmen flatly deny any responsibility for and sometimes the very existence of what happened in early 2008. “It’s not people from this place who perpetrated that, they came from far,” he said.In a nearby camp for displaced Kikuyus, local leader Peter Maina worries that his community continues to be demonised, and says there are insufficient guarantees for them to go home.
“These Kalenjins don’t consider us their equals anymore. They just want us to leave so that they can remain alone, that’s why they keep on harvesting and destroying our crops,” he said.”They told us that we need to forget about what happened, that it was Satan who did all that chaos.”
In Gitwe, a small village near the city of Eldoret, the segregation has been institutionalised, down to the school system.Anthony Mwangi has never seen his former Kalenjin classmates since the violence. They now go to a “Kalenjin only” school on a nearby hill. His school, which was partially destroyed, is now a school for Kikuyu pupils like himself.
“The Kalenjin are afraid and guilty of what they did during the violence,” said Anthony, a well-built 17-year-old in a beige uniform.Gitwe school’s head teacher, Peter Ashimosi, says the psychological impact of the violence is still felt by the children and warns that the lack of interaction between the communities risks engendering more problems.”Before the violence, the school was a mixture of ethnic groups. The children were mixing freely, there were no tensions at all,” he said.
“It’s believed that the one’s who burned the schools are from houses down the valley (Kalenjin), so the Kalenjin parents feared retaliation and pulled out their children,” he explained.Across the ridge from Gitwe, is Lomok school having only Kalenjin pupils and teachers. Ann, a teacher, lamented that the “segregation will affect overall peace.”"The pupils will just learn that it is wrong to live with other communities,” she added.Veronica Wanjiru, 16, expresses the distrust that continues to take root in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
“They didn’t come back because they knew what they did: they burned houses, our school, they killed people,” said the young Kikuyu girl, who still lives in a camp with her grandmother.
“I had two good friends that I miss. But even if they come back, I won’t be so close to them because I can’t trust them any more.”
Ruben Kebatta explains that he will not let his 14-year-old twins interact with Kalenjins anymore: “We are still very bitter; we lost a lot of property and lives,” he said.”May we dwell in unity, peace and liberty.” The words of the national anthem the Gitwe schoolchildren sing under the Kenyan flag every morning have a hollow ring, with no reconciliation in sight.Charles doesn’t begin to make any apology for the 2008 violence and his complaint that his tribe is systematically discriminated against seems to carry the promise of more unrest.
“If the people didn’t fight last year, we would not have a power-sharing government, we would not have justice, just a stolen victory… I think it was necessary for the people to fight.”
The Trail of the Serpent
Eastern Province
IDPs hounded out of resettlement Land in Ukambani “Mungiki wa rudi kwao” was the chant by one of the women .
Rift Valley Province
Kamwaura, Kenya – “They’ve pulled up my crops again,” said Jane Wangui, a Kikuyu who still lives in a camp for fear of returning to the farm near ethnic Kalenjin she fled last year. “I can no longer trust them.”Her feet blackened by the soil, Jane, 60, rests after a morning on her “shamba” (farm), a 90-minute walk from the “transit” camp at Kamwaura in the fertile Molo region. Here 65 people sleep in tents and work their land during the day.A year-and-a-half after post-election violence brought bloodshed to Kenya, during which members of the Kalenjin ethnic group attacked the Kikuyu tribe of President Mwai Kibaki, several thousand displaced people have still not returned home.
“I just came back from my farm. Today, I found that they have again uprooted my potatoes,” she said. “Since February, I’ve been going to my farm on a daily basis. We can’t stock any harvest, it’s been stolen.”I’m very careful not to stay too late in my shamba. I don’t know what can happen when it’s dark.”
“I can’t trust these people (Kalenjin) any more. They told us they had no problem with us, and a few months later they were killing us.
“Life is miserable here. Before I had wealth accumulated and today I have nothing to eat,” said Jane, who survives on one meal a day.Spurred by economic reasons and encouraged by the government, a number of Kikuyu families began migrating in the 1960s from their traditional central provinces to the Rift Valley, the “ancestral home” of the Kalenjin.Land here is an explosive issue due to unbalanced distribution and population pressures in a poor, mainly agricultural country.Lucy Muthoni, 48, says she doesn’t understand why her neighbours continue to rip up her plants.
“They even told me there was no point in planting maize, since I might no longer have access to my land at harvest time,” she said.”Personally, I don’t think we can ever heal the rift between us and the Kalenjin. They betrayed us.”Like other displaced people who believe the government has not tightened security enough, Lucy does not want to claim compensation and buy a plot of land at Kamwaura. She wants to continue to run her farm.
At Rai farm, in the Eldoret region, one of the worst hit by the violence in the Rift Valley, huge areas of agricultural land have been turned to dust by a long-running drought.Njunguna Gachui has built a flimsy house with bits of wood for windows and a plastic tarpaulin for a roof.”I had 60 sheep, some cows. At the age of 70 I have to begin a new life,” he said. “My children’s future has been destroyed because I lost my property.” His daughter, Catherine Njoki, said the government had offered little in the way of assistance.”They promised they would build a house for us but they never delivered on their promises.”It will be very hard to reconcile fully with the neighbours. It will take a long time for the trust to come back. Everyday you can see what has been destroyed.”
Relations are strained with one neighbour in particular, a former Kenyan athlete whom, they allege, gave petrol to youths to burn down their house so he could get their land. Benjamin Ngaruiya, one of the displaced people at Rai farm, said the 10 000 shillings (about R1 000) he received is not enough to build a decent home and buy fertiliser to begin farming again.Only his father and mother have been resettled in a simple house on their plot of land that was devastated during the violence.
The government likes to point out that all the big camps created at the time of the violence have now been closed.One local official even told the AFP the displaced people were trying to benefit by holding out for better land.
Ngaruiya denied the claim. “These officials from the government are only touring towns,” he said. “They never come inside the rural zones. They ignore us.”His father Michael Nyanga Njeru recalls the days when there were four homes on his property. All have been reduced to rubble. Still he remains defiant.”I’m not going to leave this land, because it’s my property. We bought it legally. I’m not going anywhere else. I will be buried here.”
Truth Commission Politics
Sensing that there could be no political will to deal decisively with suspected perpetrators of the post-election violence, Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister Mutula Kilonzo now says that influential Party of National Unity (PNU) bigwigs are misleading President Mwai Kibaki on the issue of a local tribunal in a bid to scuttle any efforts to deal with the problem domestically.The individuals, he said, have misled the President over a wide range of issues particularly that which deals with presidential immunity from any form of prosecution while in office.Mutula attributed the stalemate in Cabinet on the establishment of a local special tribunal to deal with crimes committed during post-poll chaos to powerbrokers within PNU who are advancing their vested interests in the pretext of protecting the integrity of the office of the President.According to the minister, President Kibaki fully backs the move to strip him of the privilege of immunity from prosecution incase he is implicated in the post-election violence that resulted to the killing of at least 1, 300 people, displacement of 350, 000 others and wanton destruction of property.He avers that Kibaki is aware that the International Crime Act which domesticated the Rome Statue that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no room for presidential immunity.
The Cabinet has been deadlocked on whether or not the President Kibaki should retain the privilege of immunity from any civil or criminal litigation with regard to crimes committed during the poll-election violence most of which touch on gross violation of human rights.A group of ministers allied to PNU have vehemently opposed the proposal on grounds that the country could easily degenerate into anarchy should the president be exposed to criminal or civil litigation.The Ministers who include Kiraitu Murungi (Energy), John Michuki (Environment), Moses Wetangula (Foreign Affairs) and Chirau Mwakwere (Transport) argue that stripping the president of the constitutional powers will be tantamount to a breach of country’s sovereignty.But yesterday, Mutula lashed out at the Ministers for misleading the President due to political, tribal and sectarian interests even when the law is very clear on the issue.“Kibaki is very understanding but he is being misled by PNU operatives. It is the PNU coalition where I am the Secretary General which is objecting to stripping Kibaki of presidential immunity from prosecution,” said Mutula while addressing a Media Owners Association (MOA) luncheon at a Nairobi hotel yesterday.
He said the Rome Statue, which Kenya is party to, does not grant any person immunity from prosecution irrespective of his or position.“Kibaki signed the International Crime Bill into law in January this year which domesticated the Rome Statute without issues of sovereignty coming up. This means the President allowed himself to be subjected to prosecution both locally and internationally if implicated in the atrocities during the electoral mayhem hence the issue of presidential immunity should not arise,” said Mutula.Mutula who chairs a ministerial sub-committee mandated to review the bill on the establishment of the local tribunal to try the suspected perpetrators of the post-election violence maintained that his team will not relent in the quest to ensure that the President is stripped of the constitutional privilege of immunity against prosecution incase he is linked to the crimes committed during the post-election violence or held responsible under the principle of command responsibility.This position is also shared by Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) in its push for a fair and credible judicial process.
Other members of the committee include Ministers James Orengo (Lands) Moses Wetangula (Foreign Affairs) and Attorney General Amos Wako.Yesterday, Mutula said the committee has resolved to adopt the proposals in the current form and even explore further ways of cushioning the tribunal from political manipulation in order to meet international standards.The Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill and Independent Special Tribunal Bill has clauses that strip Attorney General of his powers to terminate prosecution through nolle prosequi and bars the Chief Justice from transferring judges unilaterally.The team has come up with a raft of options among them Kenya contemplating to withdraw from the Rome Statute and repeal the International Crime Act.Despite still opposition from some ministers and MPs, the team says a local special tribunal which meets international standards was the best option to deal with crimes committed during the post-election violence.It recommends an upper tier tribunal to handle international crimes such as crimes against humanity and a lower one for crimes punishable under the Kenya Penal code such as rape and murderIn the event that Kenya decides to withdraw from the Rome Statute, it will join the league of failed states which have failed to prosecute crimes.However, the minister warned even if Kenya withdraws from the Rome Statute, the masterminds of the mayhem can still be arrested and prosecuted by any country under the international customary law.The committee also recommends the High Court or a Special Division of High Court to handle the crimes committed during the post-election violence.With Kenyans’ confidence in the country’s criminal justice system waning significantly, this route may not guarantee justice to the victims of the chaos.If all these fail, the Kenyan case will be taken over by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Netherlands for investigation and subsequent prosecution.The committee will table the proposals in the Cabinet on Monday next week for discussion.
However, Mutula expressed optimism that the government will establish a special local tribunal to handle the crimes committed during the post-poll chaos in order to end impunity which continue to haunt the country.“Kenya’s hope lies in establishing a local special tribunal. Kenyans must push leaders to take this difficult decision.A country where impunity thrives is not good for anyone including those practicing it. Let the masters of impunity not hide in government, churches, region or tribal cocoons,” charged Mutula.The minister used the opportunity to condemn MPs for shooting down a bill seeking the establishment for a local tribunal to try the architects of the post-poll chaos saying it was a demonstration of impunity at its best.“The rejection of the bill even by ministers who were part of the Cabinet that approved it shocked the nation. But the greatest shocker was Parliament which had in the previous year approved the National Accord and adopted the report of the Waki Commission which formed the basis of the special tribunal.For Parliament to turn around and go against the spirit of its earlier decision and worst still go against the will of the people is itself impunity of the most unholy kind,” noted the minister.Most MPs have vowed to oppose any attempt to set up a local tribunal or special court to deal with the crimes on grounds they will be prone to manipulation from the political class.He also criticized those vouching for the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission to handle the crimes committed during the violence saying it is not recognized by the Rome Statute.
“Rome Statute and International Criminal Act do not consider punishing international crimes through reconciliation or prayer. International crimes are punished such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide are punished through a judicial process such as a special tribunal or ICC,” added Mutula.
By KT
“When all goes well and I feel strong, Oh, help me, Lord, to see That I must place my confidence In You and not in me”. —Anon.
MV-Fina
BY David Axe
The ceremony last Feb. 12 at the commercial seaport in Mombasa, Kenya, was a surprising one. When the Ukrainian-owned merchant ship Faina sailed into port, five months after its capture by Somali pirates and a week after its release, the Kenyan government rolled out the red carpet. Civilian officials and military officers lined the pier, and armed guards patrolled, as Faina’s weary seafarers debarked. There were speeches and reluctant testimonies by Faina’s senior crew before the strange gathering came to a halting end. Hundreds of vessels had been seized by Somali pirates over the previous decade, and their releases had rarely prompted an official celebration such as this.
The ceremony might have been inspired by the intensive media coverage that had surrounded the Faina’s capture and the subsequent stand-off, pitting U.S. Navy warships against the merchant ship’s ragtag captors. Faina’s captain died of natural causes in the early days of the crisis. Ultimately, the vessel’s owners paid a $3.2 million ransom, which itself is not unusual. Faina had stood out, among captured vessels, owing to her cargo: 33 Soviet-designed T-72 main battle tanks, plus other arms and ammunition — all of murky provenance and ownership. To cynical observers, the June ceremony was seen as an opportunity for Nairobi to voice its official position regarding the weapons’ origins and destination.
Nairobi waged a clumsy campaign to first cover up, then deny, its alleged South Sudan connection. In October, Kenyan authorities briefly arrested Andrew Mwangura, a prominent Mombasa seafarers’ advocate who had corroborated the U.S. Navy’s claim regarding the weapons’ destination. Faina’s welcoming party was the capstone event in this apparent disinformation strategy.
“We are very happy that our military equipment, purchased by the government from the Ukrainian government, has arrived safely — and we cannot wait to take possession,” spokesman Alfred Mutua said. In the following days, the tanks rolled from Faina’s holds and apparently headed to Kahawa Barracks, outside Nairobi. Commercial satellite imagery confirmed the presence of 33 tanks at Kahawa in March, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly, a British trade publication.
But subsequent investigation by Jane’s appeared to show the tanks migrating elsewhere. The magazine’s probe, combining satellite imagery with other photographic evidence and eyewitness reports, showed “a pattern of tanks making their way north” to neighboring South Sudan. The semi-autonomous, predominantly Christian region has in the past waged a bloody separatist campaign against Khartoum and the North’s majority Muslim population.
The Faina shipment apparently represented the third and final installment of a large batch of heavy weaponry for South Sudan, sourced from Ukraine and brokered by Nairobi. In November, the German magazine Der Spiegel claimed it had records proving an earlier shipment of 42 tanks that had largely escaped international scrutiny. Khartoum has more than equaled South Sudan’s apparent arms program, with large-scale purchases of fighter jets, helicopters and other weapons, sourced mostly from Russia and China.
The mutual re-armament, in violation of a U.N. arms embargo, bodes poorly for reconciliation efforts aimed at forestalling a continuation of the 20-year, North-South civil war. The fighting ended in 2005, and in 2007 former Kenyan President Daniel Moi traveled to Sudan to smooth out the implementation of a formal peace deal. According to the so-called “Comprehensive Peace Agreement,” in 2011, South Sudan will vote whether to remain a part of Sudan, or formally secede.
But “the implementation of the CPA has been hampered by the lack of good faith and the absence of political will,” according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. Ongoing tension might tilt the referendum toward sovereignty, resulting in a fresh round of fighting — a contingency both the North and South seem to be preparing for, and one to which Kenya seems resigned. Since the CPA’s implementation, Kenya has aligned itself closely with South Sudan. Kenya gets discounts on South Sudanese oil. In return, Kenyan banks have financed massive construction projects in South Sudan. Nairobi’s apparent military assistance to South Sudan underscores Kenya’s investment in the region’s eventual, full independence.
The U.S. military’s “outing” of the Kenya-South Sudan relationship reflects Washington’s delicate stance on regional security. Washington works closely with the Kenyan government to prevent pirate attacks and prosecute captured pirates. But the U.S. seems willing to somewhat jeopardize that relationship in order to prevent arms flowing to South Sudan.
Still, the U.S. State Department is arguably South Sudan’s second-most-important supporter. Last year, the State Department awarded a contract to Virginia-based consultancy USIS, to help train up the South Sudanese army — a deal that does not include arms transfers. The goal, an unnamed State Department source told Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog , is to take the South’s army “out of the bush, basically, within the construct of the CPA — as a force that can come together in a unity government. Or if in 2011, the South secedes, that force could become the element of a South Sudan that’s sovereign.”
Despite the clear risk of massive bloodshed, sovereignty for South Sudan is a prospect both Kenya and the U.S. seem to be preparing for. The difference is in the tactics used. Washington’s support for South Sudan is subtle and non-material. Nairobi’s alleged support, by contrast, is the stuff of pirate tales and techno-thrillers — and apparently too obvious to escape major scrutiny
David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of “War Bots.” He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.
Gwikinyira:Bill Gates & Njoroge
Bill Gates organized an enormous session to recruit a new Chairman for Microsoft Europe. 5000 candidates assembled in a large room. One candidate was Njoroge a Kenyan living in USA . Bill Gates thanked all the candidates for coming and asking those who do not know JAVA programming to leave, 2000 people left. Njoroge said to himself, “I do not know JAVA, but I have nothing to lose if I stay. I’ll give it a try’”.
Bill Gates asked the candidates who never had experience of managing more than 100 people to leave, 2000 people left and Njoroge said to himself “I never managed anybody by myself, but I have nothing to lose if I stay. What can happen to me?” So he stayed behind again.
·Then Bill Gates asked candidates who didn’t have a minimum of a Diploma in Business Management to leave. 500 people left the room. Njoroge said to himself, “I left school at 15, grade 7, but what have I got to lose?” So, he stayed in the room. Lastly, Bill Gates asked the candidates who do not speak Serb-Croat to leave. 498 people left the room. Njoroge says to himself, “I do not speak one word of Serb-Croat but what do I have to lose?” So he stayed and finds himself with one other candidate. · EVERYONE ELSE HAS GONE.
Bill Gates joined them and said, “Apparently you are the only two candidates who have all the required qualifications & experience I am looking for and speak Serb-Croat, so I’d now like to hear you have a conversation together in that language. And……..” · Calmly, Njoroge turned to the other candidate and in a horse voice said “Wi mwega mundu wa nyumba?” The other candidate answered softly but clearly saying “Gutiri na uuru, no gwethera ciana mutu. . . !!”
Regional Governments & Self Rule
Central Regions
Rarely has a topic turned out to be so emotive, divisive and controversial like the majimbo debate.A debate that should otherwise be very intellectually stimulating has been reduced to a weapon for political one-upmanship and for settling ethnic scores.Far too many people feel that majimbo is a red-herring for ethnic dichotomisation. Their fears are greatly justified by the ethnic pogroms that have always, unfailingly, followed calls for majimboism.This ugly history notwithstanding, the real majimbo should stand up. Maybe all of us, pro-majimboists, and anti-majimboists need to pause for a moment.Let me confess here. I have been a rabid majimbo-phobic. Today, I am a real convertee to the gospel of majimboism. It is much easier to work on the real fears of the phobics, as well on the mischievous designs of the centrics, than to throw away the baby with bath water.
For beneath the acrimony, majimbo is good for us, a ‘‘nice-to-have’’ and not a ‘‘must-have’’ for the sake of our country.I have many reasons for my stand, but two will suffice. Take the case of our government structures at the grassroots. It is simply a tower of Babel.You have a district agricultural officer who reports to Kilimo House, trying to work through a district commissioner who reports to Harambee House. If they are to have a project that requires irrigation, the water officer has to seek the authority-to-incur-expenditure (AIE) from Maji House
I haven’t even talked about the Public Works, Environment and Youth officers involved – just in case the project has a Kazi-Kwa-Vijana component.The local MP has no inkling about the civil servants who serve in his constituency, let alone being responsible for their performance. In case of new districts, all these departments have to build their offices independently.So pathetic and scattered are the offices that in some districts, they are referred to as the “government slums”. I look forward to the day the jimbo governor moves in to restore order.
I look forward also to see the demystification of Nairobi. In South Africa, Parliament sits in Cape Town, the Executive in Pretoria, the Judiciary in Bloemfontein while the main business address is Johannesburg.By the same measure, I look forward to having tea at Parliament Buildings in Eldoret, and go for a case mention in the Judiciary headquarters in Kisumu. I can only imagine the glee with which sukuma wiki vendors will welcome the announcement that the office of the Prime Minister has been moved to Thika.
The second reason is sad, unfortunately. All over the country, illegal gangs are coming up by the day. They may be different in terms of modus operandi or region. However, a striking similarity among them is the way they rush in to duplicate (or is it substitute?) functions that are the preserve of the central government.From illegal taxes to providing ‘‘security’’, these gangs point out to the need for us to re-examine the centralised system of governance.The distance between the central government and the people has grown to the maximum limit. When Jomo Kenyatta became President, Kenya’s population was 9 million. Today we are 36 million, yet the same miserable central government structures still prevail. They are writhing in pain, over-burdened by this insurmountable yoke of responsibility.We have the option of continuing to hide our heads in the sand like the ostrich or to move with the times.
by Moses Kuria ( secretary-general, Centre for Strategic and International Studies)
Karanja From Daily Kos Takes on The Iranian Election
Karanja’s Dairy(daily Kos) -I am a fire breathing liberal, and a huge Obama supporter, for which reason, I liked the idea of an Ahmadinejad loss in the recent Iranian elections, particularly given that the storyline that was developing was that his loss would be translated as a win for Obama’s softly softly approach toward Iran and as an endorsement by the Iranian people (whom conservatives like to proclaim they have no quarrel with – even as they support sanctions that would weaken the Iranian economy wreaking havoc to those very Iranian people’s lives) of his extension of an open hand of friendship and open dialogue. Alas, the election did not go as I had hoped, against the slim odds that Mir-Hossein Mousavi might have toppled Ahmadinejad. Slim odds, in my opinion, because as all news media admitted in the lead up to the election, the close polls that were coming out of Iran were questionable, at best, and even if they had been accurate, the best case scenario would have suggested that the election would turn on turnout, and would have gone to whomever would succeed in getting out their supporters. I would argue that in fact it is quite likely that the polls would have unduly skewed toward the opposition, given that the opposition’s support was centered in the urban areas, and among the young and educated elites within the country, who would have access to telephones and other telecommunications technology and hence may very well have been over-polled.
This would suggest to me that in fact the polls showing Mousavi running almost even with Ahmadinejad could not be relied on as an indication of national sentiment right across Iran. Ahmadinejad according to all media reports enjoyed greater support from the majority of the rural population, who have benefitted hugely from his policies. Those people live outside Tehran, do not Tweet, and possibly have little reason to take to the streets, particularly given that their man got back in office. Whatever you think of Iran, and its system of government, Ahmadinejad was elected democratically four years ago, and has ruled in accordance with a relatively free, fair and democratic Iranian system, which contrary to popular belief is actually one where dissent takes place in relative openness and without crackdowns as most would prefer to believe. That the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is an unelected official and the true Iranian Head of State is certainly a situation that is suspect in mine, as well as in the eyes of many, but then again, I can’t believe the United Kingdom, the other country whose nationality I hold, has a Monarch as the official Head of Sate.
Furthermore, the Supreme Leader was installed as a result of the Theocracy that followed the Iranian Revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran, who btw, had been installed by the United States interfering with and ousting the democratically elected Iranian government of the time in 1953. With regard to the British Monarchy, I am personally super offended that my taxes go to support a whole family and their cousins and aunts and uncles, who also happen to be the world’s wealthiest welfare dependents, but that’s just me. So, with that out of the way, the idea that this election was not free and fair is not a foregone conclusion. The fact that the demonstrators are fighting a dictator is not necessarily one that is borne out by all the facts. That they are demonstrating against a leader they did not vote for and whom they do not like is certainly clear. That the elections were rigged is certainly not clear either. Therefore, to continue to encourage the Iranian people to demonstrate against the election is not necessarily responsible. Senator Saxby Chambliss of GA, went on Chris Mathews declaring that the election was stolen and calling on President Obama to call it as such. This is hugely irresponsible, and is not backed by any facts whatsoever. President Obama, as usual is ahead of most everyone else, and has struck exactly the right tone on the question of the Iranian elections. As he pointed out, not only is there no guarantee that Mousavi would be dramatically different, but there really is nothing to suggest that Mousavi won, other than that his supporters are certainly very passionate, and clearly do not accept that Ahmadinejad won. Surely if Ahmadinejad was the tyrannical dictator that it has been suggested he was, I can’t imagine that we would have seen the relative calm surrounding the demonstrations that we have seen, notwithstanding the eight deaths that were reportedly caused by Ahmadinejad’s supporters, and not by official government personnel.
Many news reports have admitted that it is not clear that Mousavi won, and in fact, the only extent to which many have gone was to argue that Ahmadinejad could not have won by the margins that it is claimed he won. I argue that in fact it is highly credible that he did win by larger than expected margins, given the heavy skew in favor of the opposition, that I believe the polls would have had, and given a possible higher turnout among the rural vote that supports Ahmadinejad than the urban (more visible, more tweetable) vote. We in the west had absolutely no opportunity whatsoever to gage the rural support for Ahmadinejad, and furthermore, given that they may not have even viewed President Obama’s extension of friendship, may not have necessarily cared for greater engagement with the west, and hence may well not have cared for a change of government. I come from Kenya, and during the recent turmoil that followed the disputed elections of December 2007, I saw similar kneejerk reactions in the west in support of the opposition, calling for President Kibaki who had won in a closely contested election, to back down and or negotiate to end the impasse.
What most in the west were not privy to, was that the opposition were in fact a murderous bunch of thugs who killed over a thousand government supporters and tried to ethnically cleanse the government supporting members of the Kikuyu tribe from opposition strongholds, leading to hundreds of thousands displaced form their homes and ending up as internally displaced people, who to this day remain displaced, over two years later! It was not convenient to report this particularly given that the opposition was seen as more pro-western, which in fact they were. It is not that the Kenyan government is anti-western, but in fact the reality is that the opposition was far more malleable towards western manipulation, with the opposition leader, Raila Odinga having close ties to the MI6, and having enjoyed the support of British business backers, who stood to gain from greater exploitation of Kenya in a Raila administration. In that election, just like in the Iranian, there was no clear evidence that the incumbent had not indeed won, but furthermore, there was evidence that the opposition had been less than honest and transparent in their strongholds, having started their murderous rampage on the eve of the election, killing security personnel who had been sent to man polling stations within the strongholds of the opposition in Western and Nyanza provinces.
The US and Britain were impatient with President Kibaki, I believe who had refused all western aid, having succeeded in turning Kenya into a self dependent economy that was growing at a 7% rate annually and running purely on tax revenues. One example of his refusal to play ball was when he refused George Bush’s “so called” aid for HIV AIDS programs, which came with the strings attached of having to spend the money on US patented drugs, which cost so much more than generics that Kenya could have obtained from India and Brazil. It is therefore with such examples that I tread the free Iran bandwagon with great care, knowing that I do not understand enough about internal Iranian politics to jump to the conclusion that a) Iran is not Democratic and that b) that Mousavi won the last election. As far as I can see, there are demonstrations against an election result that a good number of Iranians, quite possibly almost half of the population disagree with. Can you even begin to imagine if the nearly half of the American electorate that voted for Senator McCain had refused to accept the election results last year, and decided to take to the streets? That would be seriously huge numbers and would certainly produce the same results as what we are seeing in Iran.
Granted that is a distant possibility, but take for example, Gore vs. Bush in 2000. That election was even closer, and was disputed and remains disputed to this day. That is one situation where demonstrations could have taken place, and indeed did take place. But can you imagine what it would have looked like if masses of Democrats had felt strongly enough to come out for big demonstrations. I certainly think that people actually did feel strongly enough and would have come out en masse if Gore had encouraged it. He did not. Moussavi has been encouraging the demonstrations, and so has the western media in their one sided coverage. I am just not convinced that the western view will be borne out by the facts on this occasion. I support the right of the Iranian people to demonstrate in peace, without the fear of violence or retribution, but this seems to be the case right now. I support the right of the Iranian people to demand exactly what sort of government they want to see, and indeed to question their election results if they do not feel that they were fair and transparent enough. I will however, not jump on the bandwagon of jumping to the conclusion that this half, if that, of the Iranian population is the only true point of view. I also wholeheartedly agree with President Obama’s decision to sit this one out, and I believe that time will prove him right to have done so very soon, and I sincerely hope that he does not cave to the right’s demands to throw himself any further into the melee.
By Karanja- A liberal American Blogger on Daily Kos
Now On Twitter
Now on On Twitter
Ungumania Kenya(Corruption)
Alston’s Report: Bigoted Wild Allegations
It is inconceivable that anyone would have investigated the activities of Mungiki and Sabaot Land Defence Force in a mere ten days. This is hardly enough time to investigate chicken theft.On his visit, Alston spent one hour with the Police, despite having been granted total access. It was apparent he did so merely to fulfil a mandatory requirement, rather than establish the truth. In fact, during the two 30-minute sessions at Police Headquarters, he complained he would be late for other appointments and had to leave. He did not try to visit any police stations and cannot now complain he was not assisted.
Alston provides little beyond wild allegations. It seems he was handed a written document by local activists to adopt as his own work. In his hurry to use plagiarised material, he failed to interrogate why civil society organisations used unqualified persons to conduct post mortem examinations in Mt Elgon.In his overzealousness to condemn those he was instructed to, he has published inexcusable falsehoods. His assertion there was no need to assemble evidence to apportion blame is an astonishing disregard for due process. According to him, the fact that any unproved allegation had been made is sufficient reason to condemn the Government without the need for further proof!
There is no precedent for such absurd reasoning. All reports by rapporteurs are made on the basis of information sufficient to require further investigation, not to sustain a conviction.
The report comes as ‘civil society’ organisations with links to Mungiki try to elicit public sympathy against efforts to restore law and order. Their diversionary tactic is to distract attention from the more than 5,000 Mungiki prosecuted, including the leader Maina Njenga, and the many defectors executed by this gang.Little or no effort was made to investigate each allegation or to obtain credible evidence. Given the resources available to organisations that have made these allegations, it is telling that none has sought to “bring the killers to book” by setting in motion any proceedings or, at the very least, lodging formal complaints.In summary, Alston suggests that he had three objectives: (a) to ascertain the types of unlawful killings; (b) to investigate whether those responsible are held to account; and (c) to propose measures to reduce incidence of killings and “impunity”.It is sad to note that:He chose to concentrate exclusively on accusations against the police. He did not find it necessary to ask about the systematic murder of citizens by Mungiki. Maybe he thought it was not important. He, however, appeals to the criminals to stop killing!b) Alston did not identify even one person responsible for specific killings sufficiently enough to sustain any prosecution;c) The ‘recommendations’ he makes were handed to him by activists keen to attract donor funding and, therefore, neither interested in truth nor accuracy.
There are a number of factors that militate against any attempt to take the report seriously. First, the sweeping findings and generalisations by the rapporteur are astonishing. Obsession with the police is evident in the three areas that he elected to study.
Alston provides not an iota of evidence on alleged killings by police. All he has are wild allegations by civil society groups. Torture allegations against police or military personnel are based on similar information. These, however, are outside Alston’s mandate and fall within the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Torture, an established office in the same UN office. He also concentrates on post-election violence, which was not a case of extra-judicial killings. Police action in reaction to widespread politically-instigated violence was, arguably, also outside his mandate.
The report is a cheap anti-police statement that strains to ensure the result is skewed. Alston claims he interviewed many Government officials, but he falsified the list of people he met and his visits were brief and hurried. His report is fabricated and postulated entirely on the allegations of phantom witnesses supplemented by bias and prejudice.
In current investigations, it is clear that Mungiki hace changed tack and infiltrated the public opinion machinery. The activities of the group have escalated following the report’s release.While cases of human rights abuse cannot and will not be tolerated, it is essential that there be credibility in independent investigations. This report, sadly, does not have such credibility. It would have been useful to have a truly independent report with plausible evidence of wrongdoing. But our security shall not be battered by populist compilations with no investigative merit.
By Eric Kiraithe
Humility
God hates seven things. Tellingly, the first is pride. When someone overvalues himself by undervaluing others, he inevitably reveals it with his proud look. Puffed up in self-conceit, he may also devise evil and sow discord. No wonder God hates proud looks. Proud and powerful people may think they can disregard others’ displeasure, but they cannot disregard God’s opposition.
Peter reminds us not to trust in ourselves but in the One who will exalt us “in due time” (1 Peter 5:6). As we submit to Him, we avoid the risk that pride brings to our character and we become thankful, humble servants of God.
We should never look down on others ! devise evil and sow discord with the aim of building ourselves.We can grow and build without undervaluing others.Because we seek a better future for ourselves We should also seek a better future for others even though seperate from ourselves
Acceptance of killing of Innocent Kikuyus
With the pervasive demonisation of the Mungiki militia group providing an effective cover for the killing of members of the Kikuyu community – Mungiki and non-Mungiki alike – ordinary citizens are reluctant to speak out, both for fear of being accused of supporting the sect and of the reactions of Mungiki militia to criticism. Calling on the political and religious leadership of the Kikuyu community to face up to the challenge in its midst, Maathai urges the country to heal the growing rift between the community and other Kenyans.
Mungiki
In the course of history everywhere in the world, it is the leadership of the day that guides its people towards peace or war, poverty or wealth, development or collapse, slavery or freedom. And so it is with Kenya’s current leadership, a leadership which is failing to see the signs of anger and frustration of those they govern even though the writing is on the wall. Since the rupture over the infamous Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in 2003, the referendum on the constitution, the general elections and the subsequent fallout from them, Kenya has continued to slide dangerously backwards.
In 2008, thanks to a quick response from the African Union and the international community, Kenya was saved from the brink and a National Accord was arrived at to allow the Party of National Unity (PNU) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) to declare a ceasefire, share power and work towards national cohesion and reconciliation. Kenya was given a new lease of life but since then the leadership has wasted away that second chance as it continues to compete and play politics with only 2012 in mind. In the past, the failure to recognise danger signs were the reason why some people expressed shock and dismay that deadly post-election violence could happen in Kenya in 2007-08. Such people had believed that Kenya was a peaceful country. Unfortunately, that perception was because people ignored the danger signs and lived a lie. To such people the tribal clashes of 1991, 1992 and 1997 were quickly forgotten. Yet during those earlier clashes, as in 2007-08, distress calls to the police for help were ignored. Many people died, and more were maimed, raped and displaced, while much property was destroyed. Again, once politicians shared power and privileges, nobody was held responsible for those crimes. Everything was swept under the carpet and was quickly forgotten. As it turned out, the clashes of the 1990s proved to be rehearsals for the post-election violence of 2007-08 and in all cases the violence was largely directed at the Kikuyu community.
Currently, the danger signs are palpable. Instances of citizens being murdered in cold blood in cases where no robbery is involved, or citizens shouting down leaders at public rallies – such as happened during Jamhuri Day (12 December 2008) and Labour Day (1 May 2009) – or youth uprooting the railway, engaging police in gun battles in rural towns, or engaging in killing orgies of defenceless villagers, are all signs of a society that is falling apart and losing respect for the rule of law. The government knows that the violence and killings are largely perpetrated by members of militia groups, which are created and funded by politicians. Different communities have their militia, which bear different names. The government knows these militia groups and knows that politicians use them to punish and defeat their opponents, especially during elections. If they win elections, the same politicians end up in government and become part of the leadership.
Mungiki, which is currently making headlines, is the militia group from the Kikuyu community. Information about the group is kept secret, but unconfirmed reports indicate that this militia is split into several groups. The original Mungiki members were only interested in pursuing the Kikuyu form of worship, which prays facing Mt. Kenya. This group does not believe in Christianity and calls for the traditional Kikuyu way of life, including practicing female circumcision. Owing largely to its stand on those two issues, the strongly christianised Kikuyu community has been unsympathetic towards this group and has largely demonised the sect. The banning of the sect by the government has criminalised it, and therefore the community and Kenyans in general have tolerated the extrajudicial killing of its members.The police have taken advantage of this demonisation and criminalisation to kill Mungiki indiscriminately, because they know that they will not be called to account. Why the members of the sect are denied freedom of worship, in a country where everybody else can worship as they please, is not clear. Indeed it is only among the Kikuyu community that worshiping in a traditional way is demonised, criminalised and the killing of followers is tolerated.
The second group camouflages itself as Mungiki but is said to be comprised of militiamen being recruited from thousands of unemployed youth. With the failure of the cash crop economy, impoverishment and the introduction of drugs and illicit alcoholic drinks in the Central region, it has been easy to recruit youth and men into militia groups. Criminality gradually infiltrated some of these militia groups, especially as they sought ways to sustain themselves beyond the handouts from their sponsors. Therefore, they become available to politicians and others for hire. They are the type we encounter protecting grabbed public lands or properties built on stolen land. Sometimes they may receive police protection, an indication of their political patronage.
The third group is claimed to be closely connected to the law enforcement arm of the government and is used to collect information, intimidate and instil fear in citizens, terrorise matatus and silence elements like dissidents, activists and competing elements. It may also provide ‘protection’ or other services for a fee. These are the ones people accuse of hiring police guns to commit crimes.
In some cases the militiamen and the law enforcement arm of the government form a symbiotic relationship, which sometimes goes sour with either of them getting killed. When militiamen are killed they are labelled thieves and members of the Mungiki sect. That is usually an indication that the matter get closed and no further action is expected. Because of the internalised disdain of the Mungiki sect, especially in the Kikuyu community, the expected outcry against their killings has been absent and nobody in the community wants to be seen supporting Mungiki. At the same time Mungiki has instilled so much fear in the community that nobody is willing to speak about them or their actions for fear of immediate elimination.Therefore, when innocent persons are killed and are labelled Mungiki, death is stoically accepted as the will of God and the community internalises the pain. Killing members of Mungiki, irrespective of their innocence, has became so acceptable that all that police have to claim to literally get away with any murder is to say that the victim was a member of Mungiki. Unfortunately, that has degenerated into acceptance of killing of innocent Kikuyus. Currently this is further degenerating into members of Mungiki turning on the community itself in a cycle of vengeance and tit-for-tat.
The recent murder of the son of the former member of parliament for Gatundu North, Hon. Kariuki Muiruri, painfully exemplifies the tragedy and the dilemma that the Kikuyu community faces. The son was shot dead by a plainclothes policeman, who subsequently walked into a police station and wrote in the Occurrence Book (OB) that he had killed a thief who was also a member of the Mungiki sect! Yet the son was on holiday and the two met casually at a social place. Whatever the circumstances that led to the shooting of the son, this was a case of an innocent young man killed by a policeman who knew that nothing would happen to him if he were to record that the man was a member of the Mungiki sect. But for the fact that the victim was the son of a former member of parliament and a former assistant minister, Muiruri’s son would have joined the list of thousands of Kikuyu youth who have been killed under similar circumstances and labelled thieves and members of the Mungiki sect.
The Mungiki phenomenon, almost like the Mau Mau experience five decades ago, is providing cover for extrajudicial killings, intimidation, harassment, criminalisation and the bashing of the Kikuyu community under the pretence that police are protecting citizens from Mungiki. Sometimes police are fully aware of the activities carried out by this group. The killings in Mathira and Kirinyaga, for example, are said to have been committed with full knowledge of the law enforcement arm of the government. Indeed, citizens claim that distress calls to the police for help were never responded to until the killings had been completed. The extrajudicial killings of innocent Kenyans have been attracting international attention. This is because not only is the state perceived to be failing in protecting its citizens, but the police are being blamed for some of the deaths. Promises to carry out a thorough investigation come to nothing, and nobody has been held to account. After all, the police cannot be expected to investigate and incriminate themselves.
Perhaps militia groups like Mungiki have gotten out of hand. But is the right response to militia groups a license to kill them indiscriminately? We are not in a state of war, and nobody should be killed without following the due process of the law of the land, police excuses for self-defence notwithstanding. Police Commissioner Hussein Ali will find it hard to explain how in his era Kenya has experienced a level of carnage at the hands of the police greater than at any other time, even when compared with the colonial era. When the government sends the message that the Mungiki group should be crushed, it is an endorsement for extrajudicial killings. For their part, the militiamen will subsequently go on a killing spree to avenge members killed. This cycle of death has become a common feature, has instilled fear and has given rise to frustration in the people of Central Kenya.
The way I see it, the political and religious leadership of the Kikuyu community should rise to the challenge facing the entire community. This is a community that suffers from accumulated trauma and frustration extending back to the beginning of the colonial era. From the latest attack during the post-election violence, the community has yet to bury their dead, settle the internally displaced persons (IDPs) and send their children back to school. A culture of Kikuyu bashing, criminalisation and isolation is being perpetrated and is quickly entrenching itself, creating a deep rift between the community and other Kenyans. The fact that this is happening when the national leadership in State House is from the community is doubly tragic. How can they be so bashed, so criminalised, killed, displaced and humiliated when their beloved son is in State House? Will he wait until he or members of his family are touched by the tragedy afflicting the community? If they are now encouraged to turn on each other, there will be no shortage of helping hands, including being given guns to kill their own children! For a country awash with militia groups, these are dangerous signs not only for the Kikuyu community, but for Kenya as a whole. The question I would ask Prime Minister Raila Odinga is, have you not heard the cries or seen the tears of these Kenyans in your capacity as the coordinator of government business? Have you not seen the mourning mothers?
* Wangari Maathai .Nobel Peace Prize winner
Victims of British Brutality:”baboons”, “barbarians” and “terrorists”.
In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with pliers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as “baboons”, “barbarians” and “terrorists”.They will come bearing the story of how Britain invaded a country, stole its land, and imprisoned an entire civilian population in detention camps – and they ask only for justice, after all this time.
As a small symbol of how we as a country have not come to terms with our history, compare the bemused reaction to the arrival of these Kenyan survivors of Britain’s gulags to the recent campaign supporting the Gurkhas. We have all waxed lyrical over the Nepalese soldiers who were, for two centuries, hired by the British Empire to fight its battles. Sometimes they were used in great causes, like the defeat of Nazism. Sometimes they were used to crush democratic movements in India or Malaya or Pakistan. But they did the bidding of the Empire – so they are that rare bunch of foreigners whom the right will welcome. I too strongly supported their rights to reside in Britain, out of simple humanity – if they’re good enough to die for us, they’re good enough to live with us. But isn’t it revealing that even in 2009, we can cheer the servants of Empire but blank the people mutilated and murdered by it?
The British arrived in Kenya in the 1880s, at a time when our economic dominance was waning and new colonies were needed. The Colonial Office sent in waves of white settlers to seize the land from the local “apes” and mark it with the Union Jack. Francis Hall was the officer of the East India Company tasked with mounting armed raids against the Kikuyu – the most populous local tribe – to break their resistance. He said: “There is only one way of improving the [Kikuyu] and that is to wipe them out; I would only be too delighted to do so but we have to depend on them for food supplies.”
The British troops stole more than 360,000 acres from the Kikuyu, and renamed the area “the White Highlands.” But the white settlers were aristocratic dilettantes with little experience of farming, and they were soon outraged to discover that the “primitives” were growing food far more efficiently on the reserves into which they had been driven. So they forced the local black population to work “their” land, and passed a law banning local Africans from inde-pendently growing the most profitable cash crops – tea, coffee, and sisal.
The people of Kenya objected, and tried to repel the invaders. They called for ithaka na wiyathi – land and freedom. After peaceful protests were met with violence, they formed a group, dubbed the Mau Mau, to stop the suppression any way they could. They started killing the leaders appointed by the British, and some of the settlers too. As a result, the London press described them as “evil savages” and “terrorists” who were motivated by hatred of Christianity and civilisation. They had been “brainwashed” by “Mau Mau cult leaders”, the reports shrieked. The 1.5 million Kikuya overwhelmingly supported the Mau Mau and independence – so the British declared war on them all. A state of emergency was announced, and it began with forced removals of all Kikuyu. Anybody living outside the reserves – in any of the cities, for example – was rounded up at gunpoint, packed into lorries, and sent to “transit camps”. There, they were “screened” to see if they were Mau Mau supporters. One of the people locked up this way for months was Barack Obama’s grandfather.
Professor Caroline Elkins, who studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted by the British to snuffle out Mau Mau. “Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire,” she writes. “Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. “The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.”
The people judged to be guilty of Mau Mau sympathies were transferred to torture camps. There, each detainee was given a number which they had to wear on a band on their wrist. They were then stripped naked and sent through a cattle dip, before the torture would begin again. “Detainees were frog-marched around the compound and beaten until blood ran from their ears,” Elkins writes.
The Kikuyu survivor Pascasio Macharia describes some of the tortures he witnessed: “The askaris [guards] brought in fire buckets full of water, and the detainees were called one by one, [my friend] Peterson first. The askaris then put his head in the bucket of water and lifted his legs high in the air so he was upside down. That’s when [one of the camp commandants] started cramming sand in Peterson’s anus and stuffed it in with a stick. The other askari would put water in, and then more sand. They kept doing this back and forth … Eventually they finished with Peterson and carried him off, only to start on the next detainee in the compound.”
British Crimes against Kikuyus
When I reported from Kenya earlier this year, I met elderly people who still shake with fear as they talk about the gulags. William Baldwin, a British member of the Kenya Police Reserve, wrote a memoir in which he cheerfully admits to murdering Kikuya “baboons” in cold blood. He bragged about how he gutted them with knives while other suspects watched. Another British officer, Tony Cross, proudly called their tactics “Gestapo stuff”. For the civilians outside, life was only slightly better. Women and children were trapped in 800 “sealed villages” throughout the countryside. They were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, and forced at gunpoint to dig trenches that sealed them off from the world.
There was always another, honourable Britain that fought against these crimes. The Labour left – especially Barbara Castle and Nye Bevan – fought for the camps to be exposed and shut. They didn’t succeed until the British imperialists were finally forced to scuttle away from the country entirely. We will never know how many people they murdered, because the colonial administration built a bonfire of all the paperwork on their way out the door. Elkins calculates it is far more than the 11,000 claimed by the British Government, and could be as many as 300,000.
Yet in Britain today, there is a blood-encrusted blank spot about Empire. On the reality show The Apprentice, the contestants recently had to pick a name for their team, and they said they wanted “something that represented the best of British” – so they settled on “Empire”. Nobody objected. Imagine young Germans blithely naming a team “Reich”: it’s unthinkable, because they have had to study what their fathers and grandfathers did, and expunge these barbarous instincts from their national DNA.
This failure to absorb the lessons of Empire is not only unjust to the victims; it leads us to repeat horrifying mistakes. Today, we are – with the Americans – using unmanned drones to bomb the Pakistan-Afghan borderland, as we did a few years ago in Iraq. Nobody here seems to remember that the British invented aerial counter-insurgency in this very spot – with disastrous consequences.
In 1924, Arthur “Bomber” Harris bragged that all rebellion could be stopped with this tactic. We have shown them, “what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: they know that within 45 minutes, a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed,” he said. Yet instead of “pacifying” them, it radically alienated the population and lead to an uprising. If we knew our history, we would not be running the same script and expecting a different ending.
Gordon Brown said last year (in India, of all places) that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over”. The survivors of England’s blanked-out torture camps are entitled to ask: when did they ever apologise?
Madaraka Day Special
My Enunciation
I like many of you, appreciate the comforts and security of the familiar,I enjoy the tranquility of repetition. But in the spirit of truth , I thought I should pen some facts many will sadly not accept. I consider myself Kikuyu first and Kenyan Second.There are of course those who would not want me to say so. Their replies may express shock and disbelief at what I have to say. But we must ask them why?
Because ideas will always retain their power and words offer the means to meaning I feel I have to express why I dont grieve our national spirit being in a coma. For those who will listen to my enunciation of truth.The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with Kenya and that is why I am Kikuyu first .The truth is hard to accept because most people are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats(politicians,the constitution,our tribes) are the psychological cataracts that blind us all.But the day has passed for my superficial patriotism.
He who lives in a lie , lives in spiritual slavery.But freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth.”Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” .And the truth of my enunciation is setting me free.The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which it calls is a difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, we do not easily assume the task of opposing unjust systems , especially in country like ours. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom.
When the issues at hand seem as perplexing as the Kiambaa church aquittal , as they often are in the case of Kenya, we’re always mesmerized by indifference and collective denial.Where we once had the freedom to think and challenge we now have coercing to conformity and solicited submission for the sake of false peace. How did this happen? Who’s to blame for this false hopes?(maybe its Eric Wainaina’s song Kenya only) Well certainly there are those more responsible than others for the breakdown in my patriotism to Kenya(The Church Burners, Justice David Maraga,Raila Odinga,Mwai Kibaki),but again truth be told, if I was looking for the guilty, I need only ask you to look into a mirror.
After reading that a judge had set free the church burners and jackson Kibor,I waited to hear from you but all I heard was the echo of your silence. Then I sought to end my own silence and remind you what it is our ‘Nation’ has forgotten. More than forty six years ago great citizens wishing to embed our independence forever in our collective psyche, shed their blood for fairness, justice, and freedom (Not for a flag, a country name or even eight provinces)
So I write to you on this issue, because we(those who are now Kikuyu first) are determined to be taken seriously. We feel the day has come the ‘true patriots’ (Generation Kenya ,Revisioning Kenya & Kenya first gang) to explain to the growning many like me how the whole road to happiness can be granted in Kenya today ,So that men,women and children are not beaten and killed in churches.I look uneasily on the glaring contrast of visions and political direction and ask can I be loyal to this Kenya ? Show me how I can be Kenyan first and Kikuyu second when I see the injustice of Kiambaa and all the recent talk that accompanied the burial.
Joe Ndungu
‘V’ version
Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC)
While Kenyans praise the setting up of a body by Parliament to investigate historical injustices with a view to reconciling communities torn apart by ethnic hatred and inequalities, doubts surround the success of such an initiative.Negotiators named by post-war leaders to the international mediation group were of the view that signing of the National Accord without putting in place mechanisms to heal the war wounds would be an exercise in futility.A raft of proposals towards possible reconciliation and peaceful co-existence were made, one being the setting up of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) to investigate historical injustices, including the eruption of post-election violence.Nobody in Kenya can claim the cloak of a saint before the TJRC.
In adult life, everybody in this country is an accomplice in meting out injustices. Since violence or political assassinations always have leaders’ blessings, how will this commission summon such personalities without provoking ethnic animosity?
Only the privileged class can get away with injustices as was evidenced by the 2007 general elections. Kenyans who bear the scars of senseless protests against bungled election results were not the contestants for the top seats.The big question is, what constitutes injustices in the eyes of the commission and the public? Caution, patience and sobriety should be the guides if the country is to forestall a recurrence of violence.Some of the heart-rending testimonies by victims and the stone faces of the perpetrators could be stressful. The commission could be presiding over the disintegration of the nation or perform a miracle to restore the short-lived unity at independence.
The latter is unlikely where negative ethnicity has deepened in all sectors including the Legislature.The leaders across the divide should convene a national healing conference as part of the preparation of the perpetrators and victims to look at the commission, not as a witch-hunter or a trial court, but as a peace-broker.
Going by recent inflammatory statements by leaders after the burial of Kiambaa church fire victims and the conspicuous absence of some coalition leaders, it is safe to conclude that we have forgotten that the country was engulfed in one of the worst violence in living memory.It is thus upon the two principals to rise to the occasion and save the coalition and the country from disintegration.Given the sensitivity of the terms of reference of the commission, the coalition government should move with speed to reinforce the confidence of Kenyans in the healing process.The unease in the coalition government that was crafted out of the ashes of a bloody war should not be a hindrance to the smooth functions of the commission. The TJRC process should not be turned into another public relations exercise to hoodwink the international community, which insisted on reconciliation rather than confrontation.An appearance by leaders across the divide would encourage the perpetrators and victims to fearlessly testify at the commission that seeks to reconcile communities and individuals who regard their neighbours as arch-enemies.
By Joseph Kamotho. EGH.
Mugumo
We must prune the old and unproductive branches but the tree should not be uprooted.
In the fiery dawn of time, when the earth trembled in the throes of creation, a dense cloud of mist stood over the land as Ngai (GOD), the divider of the Universe, descended to earth, to his seat of mystery.There upon the dazzling snow capped peaks of the black crystal mountain called Kirinyaga, he made a dwelling place. From that day the mountain became his symbolic abode and was revered as sacred ground.
One day, Ngai led Gikuyu, father of the Gikuyu nation, to the misty peaks of the sacred mountain. Pointing out the beauty of the land lying below he said:”You shall carve your inheritance from this land, it shall belong to you and your children’s children to be passed from generation to generation until the twilight of existence.”And so it became. The Agikuyu were given the land of rivers and ravines, of hills and valleys, of forests with all the creatures therein, and all the gifts of nature that Mugai, divider of the Universe had bestowed on his people.
As the morning sun broke through the misty skies, Gikuyu did as his creator had commanded. He descended to Mukurwe wa Gathanga where a grove of sacred fig trees grew in rich red earth.Resting in the shade of the sacred grove, he found the most beautiful of women. Taking her to be his wife, he named her Mumbi, the creator or moulder of the tribe.From the sacred Mukuyu grove, Gikuyu took his name. Together, Gikuyu and Mumbi built a home and gave birth to nine daughters.
Away from Myth
The (Mugumo/Mukuyu) fig tree is one of the more frequently mentioned trees in the Scriptures. It was from its leaves that Adam and Eve made their first covering (Gen. 3:7). The fig tree was valued first of all for its delicious, sweet fruit (Judges 9:11). It was also a symbol of prosperity and security: “and Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree” (1 Kings 4:25). It was an enjoyable thing to rest, meditate on God’s word, and pray in the shade of the fig tree. (John 1:48)
Figs are considered characteristic fruit for the land of Palestine. The best loved and most nutritious were the spring fruits, which ripened in May and referred to as figs in the fig tree of the first time (Hosea 9:10). The main harvesting of figs occurred in the later months of the summer and in the fall. Those figs were called late figs. They were inferior in their quality. The poorest ones were even fed to cattle.
The Fig Tree as a Symbol
Some places in the Bible indicate that the fig tree also has a symbolic meaning. One of the Lord’s miracles is most intriguing when his curse of the fig tree caused it to wither. This seems to have been the only miracle in which Jesus used his power to destroy, to annihilate something. It also is the only miracle which was of no benefit to anyone. All others were done for men. The Lord multiplied bread, healed diseases, raised the dead. This miracle was as if in conflict with our Master’s disposition, who to the suggestion of destroying the wicked, answered back to his disciples: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of”. (Luke 9:55). All these facts imply an exceptional character of that miracle and its symbolic meaning. But to understand this symbolism, the miracle must be considered in the light of our Lord’s parable of the barren fig tree.
“A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering said unto him: let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it and dung it. And if it shall bear fruit, well and if not then after that thou shalt cut it down.” (Luke 13:6-9)
The parable was preceded by his words: “Except ye repent ye shall likewise perish”. The explanation of this parable was obvious to the listeners. The owner of the vineyard is the God of Israel (Isa 5:7). The dresser is the Messiah, who, three years into his mission, would, through his digging and fertilizing, make the nation bring fruit unto God. At the time of the utterance of this parable, the fate of this nation was still not decided. Our Lord still had half a year of his dressing work before him. It seems that the cursing of the fig tree is as if it is the finishing of the unfinished parable.
After his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the end of our Lord’s mission was fast approaching. Returning from Bethany, the Master approached the fig tree and looked for fruit in it. Having found none, he passed this sentence on the tree: “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforth for ever” (Matt. 21:19). Some interpret this event literally, as a curse on a tree which had no fruit. But such an interpretation is in conflict with a note made by the author of the Gospel of Mark, who emphasizes that “the time for figs was not yet” (Mark 11:13). Both our Lord and his disciples realized that in that season, in the early spring, no figs could ever be found on a fig tree. The lesson was manifest: his seeking the fruit had a symbolic meaning, it was a living parable, so often used by the prophets. Jesus wanted to finish the story of the barren fig tree which he had told earlier. After three and a half years of the dressing work was complete, he wanted to show that the antitypical fig tree brought no fruit. The fate of the tree was decided. On the next day it withered.
The fig tree was used as a picture of Israel not without a cause. As early as in the Old Testament, figs were identified with the nation of Israel by the prophets. Hosea wrote: ‘I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, I saw your fathers as the first ripe in the fig tree in her first time” (Hosea 9:10). Jeremiah received the vision of two baskets of figs, which represented Israel: “Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah” (Jer. 24:5).
How soon was Christ’s prophecy fulfilled about the withering of the symbolic fig tree to be fulfilled?. In the year 70 A.D. the temple was destroyed. No longer was there a place to offer sacrifices, the opportunity to serve the Lord according to the precepts of the Law thus ended. Jerusalem fell into ruin, and the whole nation was expelled from their own land and dispersed throughout the world. Speaking about the time of his Kingdom approaching, Christ again turns his disciples’ attention to the fig tree. “Now learn a parable of the fig tree: When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth his leaves, ye know that summer is nigh. So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the door”. (Matt. 24:32, 33)
It should be observed that this parable was uttered on the same day when the barren fig tree was cursed. Therefore it would be difficult to assume that when Christ told them to watch for signs taking place on that very kind of a tree, it was merely accidental. These two events constitute one whole. As a result of the rejection of the Messiah on the part of the Jews, during his first advent, God’s favor was turned away from them, as shown in the withered tree. Whereas, the softening of the branches and the bringing forth of leaves represents the return of favor to this nation during the time of the establishment of the Kingdom in Christ’s second advent. Let us, then, carefully observe this symbolic fig tree.
Wahu Mathenge:An African Queen
Wahu Mathenge (Rosemary Wahu Kagwi )
- Wahu Mathenge. Best female artist MTV Africa Music Awards.
While she was a student at Precious Blood Secondary School, in Riruta, she wrote her first song called ‘Showers of Blessings’ (with a friend) as a tribute to God for the national academic success that the school enjoyed. The song is still part of the schools hymnal collection.She worked in the entertainment industry and used the money to pursue her university education at the University of Nairobi, studying for a Bachelors degree in Mathematics.Her first song ‘Niangalie’ drew the attention of renowned CBN presenter Victor Oladokhun, who aired it on his ‘Turning Point’ program. Her second song ‘Esha’ was a fusion of English Swahili and Kikuyu based on a traditional Kikuyu folk song, and inspired by the late Brenda Fassie. She also came out with ‘Liar’, ‘Kibowow’ and ‘Sitishiki’. She launched an album, Liar, in 2004.In 2004, she married longtime boyfriend David Mathenge (popularly known as Nameless) who was also on the Ogopa DJ’s label. They have one child, a daughter who was born in 2006. Wahu also acted in a leading role in the popular television show, Tazama on KTN.
In 2007 She released some singles including Mambo bado, Running low, The little things you do, and Sweet love.
*Sweet Love has been Wahu’s biggest song. It has received two nominations — the British Music of Black Origin Awards and Kora Awards.
Wahu , African & Kikuyu Queen
Provocateur Exposed:2007 Kenyan Election
When Paul Collier, professor of economics at Oxford, publishes something, it invariably contains some very important ideas. I realised this when I first encountered his paper about civil war and insurgency, “Greed and Grievance”. Collier co-wrote it when head of research at the World Bank, where he developed a rare ability to merge his deep understanding of economics with sober analyses of a rapidly changing political landscape. Put simply, in “Greed and Grievance” he argued that armed rebellion had more to do with access to financial resources than with any deep commitment to ideology.
mong political scientists that particular paper was greeted by murmurs of approval and harrumphing in equal measure. Here was an economist treading on the keenly defended turf of political wonks, and many took umbrage. A few wonks, however, recognised the valuable contribution Collier’s research had to make to the struggle against poverty and political violence.I think some of the harrumphing that followed the publication of that paper might also be ascribed to Collier’s liberal use of baffling mathematical formulae to prove his point. I confess I had to skip a raft of calculus in his earlier work. But I am pleased to report that since he started writing bestselling books, he has dumped the equations in favour of clear prose.
This strategy paid real dividends just under two years ago when he published The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About It, a fresh and inventive look at chronic underdevelopment, its victims and its winners (the latter being few in number but abnormally powerful). The book was showered with praise as it offered many cogent explanations for the persistence of grinding poverty in a world which was until last September indecently rich. Wars, Guns & Votes carries on from where The Bottom Billion left off.
Apart from the fact that its author is not American, Collier’s work is distinguished from the books of Tom Friedman, Bob Kagan, Fareed Zakaria and several other gurus of globalisation in that it is based on extremely thorough empirical research. This puts him in the same camp as real heavyweights such as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. When Collier asserts that the bottom billion are much more prone to insurgency and civil war than the rest of the world, you can be confident this is not observational anecdote. The chances are that he and his indefatigable team of student minions will have exhaustively examined the data from every civil war since the dawn of time to back his thesis.
This aspect of Collier’s books is powerful, making it hard to refute many of his conclusions, some of which are disturbing, iconoclastic or both. He is destined to upset a lot of people when he asserts at the outset that democracy is bad news for the countries of the bottom billion – it usually ends in tears, not to mention grand larceny, murder and even genocide. On closer examination, he argues that elections alone do not amount to a strong democracy. Without institutions that promote accountability, they are too easily exploited by cynical, greedy elites.
Unfortunately, the “kumbaya” politics of the 1990s held that voting was an end in itself. Western institutions became involved in an electoral circus which often absorbed huge sums. Self-selecting election “monitors” from America and Europe would travel to Armenia one week and the Ivory Coast the next to pass judgment on the validity of the process. By contrast, there was little or no investment in dealing with the consequences of the elections or building the institutions essential to ensuring that the resulting government did not abuse its power. In the former Yugoslavia, unscrupulous populists exploited the plebiscitary democracy in 1990 and 1991 to rip the place apart. And Collier saw this repeated in many countries in Africa, the continent where the great majority of the bottom billion states are found.
It is a brave scholar who asserts that democracy equals bloodshed, but Collier is not afraid of going against the grain. He gives very short shrift to the fashionable cause of self-determination or special status for minorities espoused by the Kosovo Albanians, the Luo in Kenya or the rebels in Darfur. He casts Raila Odinga, the Kenyan prime minister, and not President Kibaki as the provocateur in the country’s last elections (in contrast to most foreign media covering the story).But he mounts a very heartening defence of peace-keeping operations which, using hard facts, he is able to prove unambiguously are extremely good value for money. He then comes close to creating what on the surface looks like a surefire formula for stabilising the countries of the bottom billion, enabling them to begin economic development in earnest.
And this is where the problems arise with his thesis. He proposes a reduction of sales in weapons to governments and rebels in these areas – so far so good, although he skips over the issue of how to police such a regime a little too lightly. It is in his central assertion, however – that fragile democracies in Africa must be allowed to flower under the military guarantee of the United States, France and Britain – that the optimism of his economic modelling clouds the reality of global geopolitics. The “command centre” that the Americans are trying to establish in West Africa is motivated by a need to secure oil supplies, not by an altruistic project to nurture democracy. And his faith in the military strategies of the French in West Africa overlooks much of Paris’s cynical manoeuvring in the region (including the promotion of arms sales and mineral exploitation).
One might argue that British, French and American motives may change; however, after Iraq, Rwanda and Afghanistan (to name but three), the political and moral space for intervention is extremely limited. But it is to Collier’s great credit that he has really opened up a debate that we need to conduct with some urgency. Even as we dither about military strategies and aid for West Africa, for example, the entire region is being captured by Colombian and Venezuelan cartels who are turning Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia and even Senegal and Ghana into the new Mexico. In economic terms, even after the crash, the world still has more than enough money to raise the bottom billion out of the swamp they are forced to inhabit. As in so many challenges we face, it is political vision and political will that is lacking.
By Misha Glenny
Appeasement Of Anti-Kikuyus Will Never Work
“You may gain temporary appeasement by a policy of concession to violence,but you do not gain lasting peace that way”.Anthony Eden
DN .The entire top ODM leadership on Thursday skipped the burial of victims of the arson attack on a church in the Rift Valley district of Eldoret during the post-election violence which had been billed as a reconciliation gesture between different communitiesPrime Minister Raila Odinga, deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi, Agriculture minister William Ruto, ODM national chairman Henry Kosgey and local MP Peris Simam, all failed to show up at the ceremony presided over by President Kibaki. The arson of the Eldoret church was one of the most brutal attacks of the post-election violence which followed the declaration of the 2007 presidential election.
Standard -Burned Kenya Assembly of God Church burials the Orange Democratic Movement boycotted on Thursday, have scoured old wounds in the Grand Coalition.The internment boycotted by Kalenjin leaders has renewed the cat and mouse games between President Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement. The groundswell stands out in the Rift Valley – ODM’s stronghold and the hotspot of post-election chaos – where local MPs stayed out of the State burial organised for 36 victims of the bloodletting.Fourteen of those buried in the church compound died in the fire that destroyed the shrine. The other 22 bodies were collected around the area and were not identified or claimed.President Kibaki’s presence at the Kiambaa burial, the first for victims of post-election violence, PNU’s proposal to split Rift Valley Province, plans for a monument at the church, which Kalenjin leaders insist was not destroyed by their youth, and the decision to bring in bodies collected elsewhere, triggered the ODM boycott.Those who did not attend, leaving the burial to members of one community, Government officials and PNU leaders, say they did not want to be accused of displaying double-standards because they were not at the burial of the party youths killed in the violence that was at its worst in January and February, last year.
Others claimed there was favouritism for a section of the Internally Displaced Persons and by attending the burial it would seem they would be endorsing this, courting a political backlash among their communities.At least one MP, speaking in confidence because of the sensitivity of the matter, claimed they would not be part of Kiambaa burials because of the feeling it was hyped to cast their party as the aggressor and PNU the victim.”Why did they bury them in the church? We have public cemeteries. Why bring in bodies that had nothing to do with the church fire? Why build a monument if we are pursuing healing? Should we also erect monuments everywhere our children were killed as a perpetual reminder of what happened?” asked an ODM MP.
*Eldoret Church Suspects Set Free
kiambaa- RIP
Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light.
Devolution
As Kenyans continue to debate the 4th item of the national peacemaking agenda – how to resolve historical injustices of the past – we continue to ponder if the devolution of political and economic power to the lowest administrative levels could offer a lasting solution to the exclusion of marginalised communities. The national peacemaking agenda was drawn up to prevent the recurrence of the post-electoral violence that rocked Kenya earlier this year. In countries where there is constant contestation for state power between the government and the people, genuine devolution of power has in many instances provided a panacea for resolving the conflict. In addition, devolution, as a foundation of good governance has become a reality of global norms and practices.
In any part of the world where democratisation is not in tandem with devolved governance, democracy can only be synonymous with legitimising the elites’ accession to power.Many examples can be cited where perfect harmony between democratisation and devolution has been registered. In the United States, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland among others, devolution has been the driving force of social harmony and an engine for development. In Africa, despite the numerous ethnic communities with competing political and economic interests, South Africa, Rwanda and Uganda, among others, have appreciably implemented modern devolved systems of governance with ease. In all of these instances, positive aspects of ethnicity and pragmatic approaches to decentralisation have been recognised to contribute to stability and enhance human development.
In Kenya, the fundamental flaws in the devolution debate from those opposing devolved government is essentially two-fold: firstly, anti-devolution groups have deliberately concentrated on the labels of majimbo (Swahili for federalism) rather than the content, because of too much focus on the narrow ethnic interests rather than the interests of the broad masses of Kenyan society. Secondly, the anti-devolution crusaders have not taken cognisance of the fact that the current system of provincial administration was not subjected to the popular mandate but rather, was imposed on Kenyans undemocratically. By maintaining the adopted current centralised form of governance, the people of Kenya abdicated important responsibility to the government. The consequence was a glaring gap in governance, whose remedial measure is long overdue. When the current system of provincial administration was crafted, the overriding interests were those of the ruling elites, with the interests of the people sacrificed in lieu of elites’ control of state power through a tightly controlled administrative structure.
Pragmatic criteria of socio-economic development and vulnerability of the poor and marginalised were never issues for consideration. For instance, it defies logic when one looks at the rationale used to create the Eastern province which stretches all the way from Ethiopia to near the Tanzanian border with its provincial headquarters in Embu, far off from other key areas such as Dasnatch and El Molo -about 800 km away. Likewise the Rift Valley province was made to stretch all the way from Sudan to the Tanzanian border, with the headquarters in Nakuru, about 1000 km away from Toposa and Dongiro in Elemi Triangle. Poor road infrastructure makes it impossible to connect the public in these vast areas.
The fallacy of the current system of provincial administration is that the administrative officials lack even the basic knowledge of the communities they purport to serve. An example from the pastoral and arid areas of Kenya gives a clear example of why this current system bears high risks to human security. First, most of the administrators are transferred to this harsh environment for disciplinary reasons. This is aggravated further by the standing order and code of ethics of the provincial administration, which bars the local community from participating in the institution charged with local security such as the District Security Committee (DSC) and the Provincial Security Committee (PSC). The locals are prevented from participating in the security meetings ostensibly as a measure to protect the ‘government’s secret’. Further, given the lack of accountability and transparency, these local administrators have often been accused of bias, and at best, incompetence in appreciating local conditions.
Mt Kenya region
The very nature and structure of governance through the provincial administration is a semblance of colonial institutions. In a number of cases, local elders have drawn parallels between the districts and provincial administrators and the British colonial administrators. It is therefore very clear that the entire governance system in Kenya as currently constituted, has limited the opportunities and impacted on lives, livelihood and human security of the people. In these arid and peripheral zones, devolved governance is inter-alia anticipated to offer a final solution to the myriad of problems that have witnessed intractable conflicts and perennial instability and displacement. And as such, the call for the devolution of power creates hope and aspiration for the disenfranchised groups, which will eventually redress the neglect and unlock human potential.
Kenya missed an important juncture to mitigate the shortcoming in governance during the advent of the multi-party political system. Both the proponent of political reforms and the regime did not embrace democracy comprehensively, thereby equating electioneering to democracy. Far away from Nairobi, many communities in Kenya often equate the period of general election as the ‘season of democracy’. This is because democracy in this part of the world is equated to a single event in five years whose principles and practice ends with the general election. And what is more disturbing is the perception about the provincial administration as an institution of government that implements democracy through tight administrative controls.
Kenyans have shown great enthusiasm towards greater participation in the government as reflected by the great debate at the Bomas. The spirit at the Bomas clearly indicated that the people of Kenya can articulate their problems and offer practical solutions. What crystallised out of the constitutional review process was the need to design a system that allows for a fine balance of ‘self rule’ at local level as well as ‘shared rule’ at national level. Through this approach, government powers are not only shared horizontally between executive, legislative, and judiciary; but also vertically between various levels of government. This will ultimately guide the spirit of Kenya as a common homeland, and attain the objective of combining unity and diversity.
In this age of globalisation, therefore, where states have been busy pursuing international and regional interests, proactive decentralisation is actively becoming a norm. The move towards devolved governance is another juncture in Kenya’s political development whose sober approach will contribute to the great historical success. Whereas four decades of unresponsive governance is a lost opportunity in terms of development, the time is ripe for Kenyans to grapple with the unfinished business of allowing the people to choose a popular mode of governance regardless of the label.
* by Mohamed A Guyo, ISS Research Associate and Dr Annie Barbara Chikwanha, AHSI, ISS Nairobi
Eldoret church massacre suspects freed
Kenya’s high court on Thursday threw out the case against four men over tribal violence in which at least 33 people were burnt alive in a church during last year’s post-election chaos.The ruling brought to a close the only case in which citizens have been charged with murder in connection with the violence that left around 1,500 people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.At least 33 civilians, including women and children, died when marauding militias set fire to the Kenya Assemblies of God church in the northern city of Eldoret, where they were sheltering from the clashes.The deaths took place on 1 January, 2008, and four suspects were charged two months later but Justice David Maraga said he had to drop the case, citing lack of evidence and shoddy police investigations.
“I find that the prosecution (has) failed to prove the burden of the case against the accused persons and thereby acquit them of all the charges and order that they be set free,” he said.”This was obviously a well planned and orchestrated attack and as such I was amazed to find no whiff of common intention on the part of the accused or the planning that went into the attack,” he said.”The events preceding the commission of this offence cannot have eluded the police as clouds for the gathering storm were there for all to see,” he said, reading a 45-page ruling.”I am not a politician but I am only a judge and a Kenyan who is just as outraged at the casual manner in which we are handling serious issues like insecurity in this country and by the attitude of our police force in the face of serious crime,” Maraga added.
Eldoret is in the Rift Valley of Kenya, which saw the worst tribal violence following the dispute that erupted when irregularities in the December 2007 presidential poll prompted accusations that then opposition leader Raila Odinga was robbed of victory by incumbent President Mwai Kibaki.Three days after the election, on December 30, hundreds of civilians were driven from their homes by militias, according to evidence presented in court.Some who had found refuge in the church were attacked by more than 1,000 men, who had painted their faces with chalk and were armed with bows and arrows, machetes, clubs and other weapons.The mob lit up mattresses inside the church and then blocked the door to prevent the displaced from escaping the fire. The State dropped incitement charges against Kibor
‘Save Darfur’ Movement:The pornography of western racism & deceit
The international community is presently engaged in a high-stakes game of poker with the government of Sudan. At stake is the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, the permanent sitting tribunal whose purpose is to punish those that commit the worst crimes against humanity. Also hanging in the balance are the lives of 2.5 million Darfurian refugees who have been driven from their homes by a scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign launched by the Sudanese government in response to rebel attacks in the region in 2003.Both sides in this international stand-off have already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice those lives for the sake of the principles they support. The Sudanese government has thrown out 13 international aid groups who provide the food and medicine necessary to sustain those refugees, under the pretext that they gathered evidence for the ICC against Sudan’s president, Omar al Bashir. The ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo went ahead with the indictment in full knowledge that this was the likely consequence. He claims to be acting in the interest of justice alone, without reference to the political or humanitarian situation – and no one disputes that by arming and abetting mounted Arab proxies (later dubbed “devils on horseback” in the press) to put down a rebellion with indiscriminate violence against civilians, al Bashir violated the spirit and letter of international law (as have many rulers before him). We have a struggle for primacy between the two principles – national sovereignty and international law – that seems likely to define global politics for the rest of this century.
Providing an accurate account of these principles, and the intricate politics in which they are embedded, involves wading through self-serving and overwrought claims from both sides while weighing two genuine and incommensurable claims to legitimacy. In his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, the distinguished Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani does his readers the considerable service of laying waste to many of the dangerous and self-serving illusions of one side of this argument. But he erects a mirror edifice of illusions in its place; getting the story straight requires disentangling the true from the misleading in Mamdani’s account.On one side, there are the claims of universal justice that the ICC purports to represent. The ICC is the institutional face of a growing movement seeking to make real the promise of “Never Again” inscribed into the Convention on Genocide of 1948. The ICC indictment of al Bashir was the first against a sitting head of state, and it was hailed in editorial pages across America as a great progressive advance for global justice. Even those who worried about the consequences of the indictment still placed hope in its deterrent value. The goal was to worry the minds of subsequent heads of state tempted to use mass rape and murder as a counter-insurgency tactic.
Taken on its own terms, in narrow isolation, this is a worthy and unassailable mission. But nothing exists in narrow isolation, least of all moral purity and universal justice. Such claims exist in a real world of actual politics amid complicated histories, which many Darfur activists have made it their business to elide – portraying the conflict in Darfur as what Mamdani dubs “a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart”.On the other side are the rights of sovereign governments to govern themselves without outside interference, which the Sudanese government and the Arab nations that have rallied to its side purport to defend. Sovereignty has been, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the currency of the international system, and, as Mamdani reminds us, a privilege hard-won by postcolonial states only recently.
In the wake of the American misadventure in Iraq, the weird confluence of moralistic rhetoric and bellicose policy that characterised Bush’s foreign policy, the complicity of so many ostensibly liberal hawks caught up in the Iraq War fervour, and a history of one-sided enforcement of humanitarian rules, it should surprise no one that the leaders and intellectuals of formerly colonised states are wary of the claims to universal justice emanating from what Mamdani dubs the “new humanitarian order”. At this week’s Arab Summit in Doha, Arab leaders, many of them signatories to the ICC, (which the United States has refused to sign) lined up in unanimous support of al Bashir.
The human rights lobby views this emphasis on sovereignty as the first and last resort of butchers who employ anti-colonialist rhetoric to defend their crimes. Weary of the grubby compromises of diplomats and corporations willing to do business with tyrants and criminals, one faction of the human rights community calls for armed western intervention to defend helpless victims of state violence everywhere. The Save Darfur movement, an aggressive and media-savvy coalition “whose scale recalls the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and 1970s”, rose up with the intention to turn Darfur into a test case for western action to halt what it called a genocide in progress.
Mamdani devotes the first section of his book to assailing the credibility of Save Darfur. He accuses them of inflating the scale of the killing, obfuscating the reality of a “civil war” and “cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency” that it called genocide, bombarding viewers and readers with “a pornography of violence” that removed the conflict from its political context, sustaining an impression of ongoing genocide long after the claim was plausible, portraying the conflict in racialised terms as a genocide conducted by Arabs against Africans and ceaselessly advocating for hard-line policies more likely to harm than to the help the victims they intended to save. On each of these counts, Mamdani assembles a more or less devastating case. Save Darfur publicised a figure for the number of deaths – 400,000 – that was twice as high as reliable estimates (Mamdani cites a study commissioned by the US Government Accountablity Office to this effect) and escalated its rhetoric at precisely the moment – January 2005 – when the scale of killing fell dramatically. Save Darfur have continued to clamour for aggressive action despite a humanitarian crisis that was largely stabilised due to the cooperation of the Sudanese government with aid agencies that had reduced the mortality rate to between 100 and 200 month in Darfur – “below emergency levels”, according to World Health Organisation.
Most important for Mamdani’s purpose, though, is the Save Darfur Coalition’s emphasis on the race of the perpetrators and victims: “The central claim is that perpetrators and victims in Darfur belong to two different racial groups, Arab and African and that the Arab perpetrator is evil.” Mamdani is not content to say, as he does, that Save Darfur are committed to policies that will do harm. He intends to demonstrate that they are part of a more insidious agenda written into the War on Terror. To strip Darfur of its politics serves a political project of its own, and Mamdani makes it his mission to reveal its workings – what he sees as the foundation of a post-Cold War order in which American clients and proxies act with impunity while rogue states are subject to violent discipline at the hands of the international community, with America at its head. It is a politics notable for denying that it is a politics at all and, as Mamdani narrates it, one that portends a bleak future for the inhabitants of the developing world.
In the long historical section that makes up the centre of the book, Mamdani traces the centuries-long intermingling of Arab and African identities in Darfur, and their reciprocal permeability. He also shows how these identities were politicised under the “indirect” rule practised by British colonial administrators that pursued a policy of “re-tribalisation” of the various groups that shared Darfur by assigning homelands to certain groups and denying them to others.
This backdrop allows Mamdani, in his third and final section, to return to the question with which the book opens. Since Americans are inclined to regard Africa, to the extent that they regard it at all, as a site of “meaningless anarchy – in which men, sometimes women, and increasingly, children, fight without aim or memory,” why has there been “a global publicity boom around the carnage in Darfur”?
The worst conflict since the Second World War, with a death toll of 3.9 million between 1998 and 2004, raged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the figure of “excess deaths” caused by the Iraq war likely outstrip the same numbers in Darfur. Yet only Darfur, a conflict in a remote and impoverished region without oil or other significant exportable resources has generated a lavishly funded advocacy organisation. For Mamdani, the answer is embedded in the definition of genocide itself. “Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different ‘on grounds of race, ethnicity, or religion’ is that violence termed genocide,” Mamdani observes:
“Given that colonialism shaped the very nature of modern ‘indirect rule’ and administrative power along ‘tribal’ (or ethnic) lines it is not surprising that both the exercise of power and responses to it tend to take ‘tribal’ forms in these newly independent states. From this point of view, there is little to distinguish mass violence unleashed against civilians in Congo, Northern Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and so on. Which one is named ‘genocide’ and which one is not? Most important, who decides?”
The new humanitarian order is, as Mamdani describes it, “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East,” in which subjects exchange their political rights as citizens of sovereign states for the “human” rights possessed by “wards in an open-ended international rescue operation” in a humanitarian “system of trusteeship” administered by an international community that lacks either accountability or responsibility. The world he describes he looks a lot like the world as the Palestinians under the jurisdiction of UNRWA see it, and the vision Mamdani projects of an Africa delivered piecemeal to the good intentions of the international community is a stark one.
A problem with this claim, however, is that the record of American policy in Sudan challenges it. Indeed, proponents of humanitarian intervention in Darfur make a diametrically opposite charge against the American government – that it has subordinated its interest in the cause of human rights to its desire to maintain relations with Sudanese intelligence to aid the War on Terror. Mamdani’s argument also passes over the American response to Sudan’s much longer, more brutal and more complex civil war, a two-decade conflict pitting Christians and animists from the south of the country against the Arab Islamist cabal to the north that controlled the state and the military.It was here that al Bashir pioneered the technique of using proxy war conducted by mounted Arab warriors. And it was this conflict that first aroused activist concern among the evangelical Christian movement at the base of George W Bush’s electoral coalition.
Islamists in Sudan were waging a brutal war against the Christian coreligionists of the single most belligerent electoral constituency in American politics. If the goal of American policy was, as Mamdani alleges, to “slice Africa by demonising one group of Africans, African Arabs”, then surely the Sudanese Civil War was the perfect opportunity to carry out this agenda. But the Bush administration instead expended considerable diplomatic resources cajoling the North and the South to make peace in a negotiated settlement that Mamdani himself acknowledges as Bush’s only foreign policy accomplishment.While there were plenty of hardline advocates for the fantasy of regime change in Sudan, the United States remained effectively committed to the stability of the Bashir regime, as the only guarantor of the peace deal it had signed, through the end of the Bush Administration.And so, when Mamdani describes the “the responsibility to protect” as “a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonise Africa”, he is mistaking the fantasies of American activists for the policies of their government. He is also asserting the existence of a hidden nefarious agenda where none exists, and providing a false clarity that is the merely the obverse of the good-and-evil dichotomy of the War on Terror and the humanitarian order that he assails.
This overreaching damages the credibility of Mamdani’s powerful and incisive criticism of the international justice movement. So much of what Mamdani argues is true, and so much of it cuts against the grain of the usual coverage of Darfur in ways that are essential for the broader public to understand. And neither he, nor the rest of us, can afford to squander the opportunity to set the record straight
Maina Kiai,Muite autophobia Xtreme
* A response to Maina Kiai and Paul Muite Opinion – “Ethnic ‘entitlement’ does not bode well for Kenya and its communities ” Published by the Daily Nation
Maina Kiai A Hater
Did you ever notice that there are no Kalenjin going around the world saying, or writing about, how awful Kalenjins have been? Given that the Kalenjin have unleashed three tribal wars and perfected patented industrialized genocide against the Kikuyu, why has there been no Kalenjin Maina Kiai ?Are there any Luos writing books about the absence of Luo soul-searching or expressions of sorrow over their torture and murder of Kikuyus in Kibera ? Has anyone ever encountered any Luo or Kalenjin remorse ?The answer, of course, is no. In fact, among all the world’s peoples, only Kikuyus produce individuals who have greater sympathy for those who hate their people than for those who love it. Some in this small urban kikuyu community loathe everything Kikuyu (they love their own agenda and their own vision of what Kenya could be over their own people ) and have contempt for the average Kikuyu. That is why most of them have such admiration for William Ruto and ODM
There are no comparable self-haters in any other country, This newly minted young Kikuyu Intellectuals (sic) are often the leaders in anti-Kikuyu kamukunji(s) ,demonstrations and movements. The Kiai’s and Binyavanga’s devote much of their lives to trying to harm our community and expressing deep hatred of Gikuyu traditions.This self-loathing on their part is all the more remarkable when you consider that those who support and fund them strongly affirm their own cultural and ethnic identities. For example, while Kiai and Muite ceaselessly attack their own community ,ODM ceaselessly defends its own communities even in the face of serious catastrophic environmental negligence as shown by the issue of the Mau.
How, then, to explain this anomaly of new Kikuyu self-loathing? I offer one explanation.Many of the haters are political rejects,political wanna be’s driven by anger and selfish ambition .Anger that is similar to adolescent anger at a parent who claims very high ideals and turns out to be slightly flawed. Many of the haters are angry at Kikuyu’s for being ‘imperfect’ in accepting their values (ODM Values)and therefore disappointing them.There may be other explanations. But what is certain is that Kikuyu self-hatred is a unique phenomena that plays a particularly destructive role as designed by those who fund it .It gives fodder to those who are for the destruction of our community.What better way to promote anti Kikuyu propaganda than to have one of them spew it in the guise of speaking the truth .
Yes, we may agree with parts of your opinion that the older generation of Kikuyu leadership has failed.Failed to deal with poverty that is destroying us.Even worse is that they failed to protect the defenseless in the Rift Valley and in IDP camps , but the solution Mr Kiai is not to side with those our leaders have failed to protect us from by promoting their propaganda and agenda.
We can move on as younger Kikuyus without having to bow down to these forces or their stale ideas.
Joe Ndungu
Mungiki marked for death
Gitau Njuguna, Paul Muite
At least 24 people have been stoned or hacked to death in central Kenya during overnight fighting between vigilante groups and an outlawed criminal sect.The clashes in Karatina began when the vigilante groups armed with machetes, axes and clubs set upon members of the feared Mungiki gang, which extorts money from homeowners, taxi operators and businesspeople in many Kenyan towns. Gang members later regrouped and fought back but most of the dead were alleged Mungiki members.
“So far, investigators have confirmed that 24 people have been killed and three people have been injured,” police said.Thirty-seven people were arrestesd during the violence, which follows more than a week of vigilante action in the area, about 100 miles north of the capital, Nairobi. More than a dozen Mungiki members were reported to have been lynched by the public before last night’s fighting.The clashes are indicative of a growing sense of lawlessness in Kenya, with police seemingly unable to protect the public and deal effectively with criminal threats.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword”
Henry Muoria-Self & Community.(1914-1997)
Henry Muoria (1914-1997).
Muoria was an active journalist, a friend and press secretary of Kenya’s future president Jomo Kenyatta and, from 1945 to 1952, the editor of a nationalist newspaper Mumenyereri, written in Gikuyu, one of Kenya’s major languages. In October 1952, when the British declared the Emergency in Kenya in order to quell the Mau Mau rebellion, Muoria was visiting London. He stayed there for the rest of his life, but continued pursuing his writing career. He finished more than ten full-length autobiographical, philosophical and political manuscripts, but not one was published. East African Educational Publishers in Nairobi brought out his I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury in 1994. This book and his unpublished autobiography from 1982, The British and My Kikuyu Tribe, are used in discussing Muoria’s debt to his ethnic community, the Gikuyu, his successful attempts to contribute to the creation of a nationalist public sphere in colonial Kenya, and his authorship in exile. The declaration of the Emergency put a stop to Muoria’s hopes for the recognition of his work, based as it was on a desired continuum between self, community and nation.
For several years during Britain’s late colonialism, from 1946 onwards, administrators in Kenya were in a panic over how to control the African press of the colony. African and Asian businessmen, politicians, editors and journalists had managed to create a public realm in which members of the various colonised communities debated pressing problems of everyday life, as well as the larger political questions of colonialism, racism, self-determination and independence. Colonial information officers asked advice from their colleagues in other British territories in East and West Africa on what measures might be taken to regulate and suppress the local press, and urged on the Colonial Office in London the need for sharper instruments than those already available. Samples of ‘near-seditious’ newspaper pieces, translated into English from the various Kenyan languages, were sent to London. 
This activity was an acceleration of ongoing endeavours within Kenya. The non-European press had been under surveillance for as long as it had existed. Officials had kept a worried eye on Muigwithania, the organ of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) from its inception in 1926. It was edited for a period by Kenya’s future president, Jomo Kenyatta. In a letter, the Governor, Sir Edward Grigg, warned the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London that the political tone of the newspaper gave grounds for worry. In particular laments over the injustices the Kenyan people had suffered under colonialism, couched in Old Testament idiom, might have serious consequences: “There is a danger that this emotional and semi-religious propaganda may spread very rapidly among excitable and ignorant natives, and it is clearly desirable that means should be devised to protect the natives themselves … from such an insidious menace” (Grigg 1926).
The authorities closed down Muigwithania in 1940, along with the KCA. Four years later the self-taught journalist and intellectual Henry Muoria launched its successor, Mumenyereri (The Guardian). He addressed it to the same community that had constituted Muigwithania’s readership–a community that was being created by access to reading matter in their own language, among other influences (Lonsdale 1996). The first issue of the paper was in Gikuyu and English, but those following were restricted to Gikuyu in order to use all the available space for the enlightenment of the Gikuyu community who did not have a great deal of writing available in their own language (Muoria 1982:17).
Henry Muoria was born in 1914 in Kiambu in Kenya’s Central Province (Berman & Lonsdale 1992:414-416, Pugliese 2003, Frederiksen 2006). His parents were land-owning peasants and did not know how to read and write. The young Henry managed to get himself into an infant and primary school run by the Church Mission Society. His formal schooling lasted for seven years altogether. He taught himself enough English to be able to enter the Railway Training School of East African Railways, and became employed as a railway guard and later an assistant stationmaster. As a trainee he experienced the discrimination and brakes put on the development of business and enterprise for the African population that was characteristic of the policies of the colonial regime. Being African, he was paid less than his European and Asian colleagues both as a trainee and later as an employee. This experience contributed to his disgust with colonialism and racism and prompted him to join the existing African political organisations. As a young man he was a member of Kikuyu Central Association–an oppositional nationalist organisation based on the community that was most affected by British colonialism, the Gikuyu. The organisation was banned in 1940.
In his life and works Henry Muoria brought together many worlds–sometimes in ways that were paradoxical. He was born into a Kikuyu traditionalist family and made use of Christianity. He grew up in the countryside, but chose the city as his place of work. He invested in both urban and rural property and cultivated a large plot of land in his home area with the assistance of his wives. He was a wealthy man who came to know poverty in London. He loved his country, detested racism and was cosmopolitan in his outlook and knowledge of the world but was sometimes accused of being a Gikuyu chauvinist. He fought for independence, but independence did not need him after it had been consolidated.
The declaration of the Emergency in 1952 by the British constituted the caesura in Muoria’s personal life and in the social and political fortunes of Gikuyus and Africans in Kenya. The event disrupted the continuity between self, community and nation that Muoria devoted his working life to uphold. After October 1952, the colonial government sought to isolate the Gikuyu from the rest of African nationalist opposition by undermining the credibility of their leaders and spokesmen, and cancelling their access to public debate. Large numbers found themselves in protected villages and detention camps. All his life Muoria fought for a democratic space to be kept open to all communities in Kenya. He insisted by his example that Africans in Kenya should be partners in debate on self-determination and the end of colonialism. For a while he was successful.
In exile he kept writing. When he tried to keep up his claim and his efforts to educate a new public by the combined moves of turning inwards and documenting his own life, and turning outwards and documenting the shifting political debates and events in Kenya, he was not heard. He had great hopes following the publication in 1994 of his autobiography and a selection of his political essays from the 1940s and 1950s in I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury. The volume attracted some attention in Kenya where Muoria was by now recognised as an important figure in the nation’s history, but little internationally. His writings deserve to be better known.
by Bodil Folke Frederiksen published in Current Wrting, October 2006, Vol. 18 no 2.
Happy Easter
Video-British War Crimes Against The Kikuyu.-Transitional Justice
Dealing with widespread colonial human rights violations raises large practical difficulties. A country’s political balance may be delicate, and governments may be unwilling to pursue wide-ranging initiatives-or may be unable to do so without putting its own stability at risk.The many problems that flow from past abuses are often too complex to be solved by any one action. Judicial measures, including trials, are unlikely to suffice: If there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of victims and perpetrators, how can they all be dealt with fairly through the courts-especially in cases where those courts are weak ,corrupt and controlled by former colonial masters ?Even if courts were adequate to the task of prosecuting everyone who might deserve it, in order to reconstruct a damaged social fabric, other initiatives would be required.After two decades of practice, experience suggests that to be effective transitional justice should include several measures that complement one another. For no single measure is as effective on its own as when combined with the others
Martha Karua Resigns.
MORE ON MARTHA KARUA
Stella Mwangi & Lauryn Hill:
Born in September 1986, Stella Mwangi aka STL realized her potential in music at the age of Six. Her interest in music resulted from racial discrimination she was subjected to following her family’s move from Kenya to Norway in 1991. Music made her feel good about herself and at the age of eight she could relate to Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, NWA and Salt & Pepper . In 1998, she worked with an African Youth group known as “The Rise” where they produced an album called “Maroon” which was released in Norway 2002 and had among its tracks the single ‘All about the Benjamin’. See details on www.theriseproject.com In 2005 STL and “The Rise” performed for Nelson Mandela while he was in Norway for an AIDS eradication campaign.
Since 2002, STL has been working with two production team; Rumblin Music and JayArr Music. Her Break into the African Hip Hop scene came in 2005 when she worked with a Senegalese Hip Hop group called Wagable in their Debut album, Senegal, produced by Rumblin Music. She was featured in two of their songs ‘Babylon’ and ‘Do it’ which topped the charts in Senegal and Gambia for several weeks. The album scooped the Best album of the year in Senegal for 2005. In Kenya STL has worked with top Hip Hop artists such as Mishelle, Abbas Kubaff ,Kantai and reggae artist Ousman. In 2006 she got five nominations in the Chaguo La teeniz Awards in Kenya. Then she had been in the Kenyan music scene for only three months. Though she did not win, it propelled her to win in the KISIMA Awards three months later for the Best new and Promising artist.
In December 2006, STL had a performance with MTV Alert in Nairobi, Kenya. She has curtain raised for International artists like Angelique Kidjo, Common, Talib Kweli, Slick Rick, Dead Prez and Public Enemy during their shows in Norway. Her songs, “Crazy”, “Feeling Love” and “Swing”, which she featured on produced by JayArr, was picked by the Position Music and Choice Tracks (based in L.A) as a soundtrack for the films Save the last dance 2, American pie 5, Redline and the series; CSI (New York) , LasVegas, Ghost whisperer and Army Wives. The summer of 2007, STL has had shows on festivals in Norway while working on her Debut album and is now out with the single ‘Take it back’ and it’s music video in Norway and in east Africa. STL is a hard working artist and is determined in realizing her dream as an international Hip Hop Artist.
Her debut album called ‘The Dreamer’ was released in 2008.
Read more on her website .http://www.stellamwangi.com/
Machetes, then Machineguns
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The recent shooting of two prominent Kenyan human-rights campaigners in broad daylight in Nairobi, the country’s capital, has darkened the national mood just when Kenya’s fragile coalition government is showing signs of stress and the global recession is beginning to batter the economy anew. The campaigners, Kamau King’ara and Paul Oulo, had been investigating death squads widely thought to be linked to senior politicians, so it was immediately assumed that the pair had been silenced by orders from on high.
Mr King’ara had said that at least 1,700 young Kenyans had been shot or tortured to death by death squads during President Mwai Kibaki’s first term in office between 2002 and 2007, while another 6,500-plus had disappeared, probably also at the hands of government goons. His was not an isolated allegation. Last month Philip Alston, a UN investigator, published a report documenting around 500 death-squad executions in the months leading up to the election of December 2007, whose disputed results led to 1,500 or so deaths and the displacement of at least 300,000 Kenyans in the subsequent violence. Mr Alston, an Australian, called for the chief of police, Hussein Ali, and the attorney-general, Amos Wako, to resign. They show no sign of doing so.Hours before the two campaigners were killed, the government’s spokesman accused Mr King’ara of raising funds for the feared Mungiki, a gang of thugs (mainly Kikuyus, members of Kenya’s largest and richest ethnic group) who have terrorised people in the area around Nairobi for several years. Human-rights groups say this is nonsense, and Mr Alston has called for an independent investigation into the killings. Raila Odinga, prime minister in Kenya’s increasingly shaky coalition government, said America’s FBI should be called in, a suggestion perhaps designed to embarrass security ministers in Mr Kibaki’s part of the coalition.
Speculation as to the killers’ motives abounds. Some suggest that policemen suspected of setting up and running the death squads were furious that they were being investigated, especially since the politicians who are presumed to have given the go-ahead have got off scot-free. A death-squad member had already been hunted down and killed after blowing the whistle. A local investigative journalist was beheaded, possibly by the police.Apologists for Kenya’s Criminal Investigation Department and other units say the police have been performing a patriotic duty. Most of the murdered men whose cases were documented by Mr Alston were suspected of having sworn an oath of allegiance to the Mungiki, who attract their young adherents with a blend of Kikuyu revivalism, nostalgia for anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels, Jamaican and American street culture, and community action. Some say the death squads were told to wipe out a generation of Mungiki leaders to ensure that poor young Kikuyus stay loyal to Mr Kibaki, who heads the old Kikuyu establishment. The police also wanted to curb the Mungiki’s crimes, particularly their habit of extorting money from bus drivers and passengers. Mr Alston’s findings have been well received by the Mungiki, who have since held marches in Nairobi and smaller Kikuyu-populated towns.
If they mutate from being tribal chauvinists into class warriors, the Mungiki may start to menace the old guard. The rising cost of food, soaring unemployment and the grimness of life in the huge slums abutting central Nairobi may open up space for a potent new movement that could cut across ethnic lines. “A thousand death squads won’t deal with all these angry young men,” says a local observer.In any event, the grand coalition government put together less than a year ago after the disputed elections may be buckling under the weight of its own inadequacy. Corruption and mismanagement are still rife. The government has created an “eat-and-let-eat” dispensation, with officials from both ends of the coalition pilfering the country’s resources. Even if it were being well governed, Kenya would have to sprint just to stand still, since the population is continuing to balloon; from less than 8m at independence in 1963, it now exceeds 37m. The infrastructure continues to fall to bits, health care and education are patchy. Land reform, a topic that stirs angry feelings, particularly between competing ethnic groups, has still not been addressed.
Some 4m Kenyans now rely on food aid. The number in absolute poverty is up. So is unemployment. The Kenyan shilling is overpriced and set to be sharply devalued. The government cannot meet its budget targets. Banks and mobile-phone firms enjoyed big profits in 2008 but manufacturing and tourism will dive as the global recession bites. Kenya’s exports of cut flowers, coffee, tea and fruit may shrink.If the economy were less grim, the shenanigans of the country’s politicians might be amusing. Instead, they are making Kenyans feel bitter. Mr Odinga’s Orange movement has threatened to leave the coalition; its leaders say it is stuck in a “marriage without conjugal rights”. Then off you go, say the allies of President Kibaki, whose Party of National Unity has the choicest ministries. Far from giving a lead when he recently held a rare press conference, Mr Kibaki merely took the opportunity to declare that he was no polygamist.
Messrs Odinga and Kibaki have both broken promises to deliver politicians and businessmen who stirred up violence after the elections of 2007 for trial in Kenya or the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Several detailed reports have named a slew of senior figures on both sides of the political divide. A growing fear is that the next crisis may see an escalation from machetes to machineguns. It is by no means certain that Kenya’s fragile political peace can last until the next general and presidential elections, due in 2012.
Self-Determination-A Peace and Human Rights Issue
Kikuyu self determination
The appeal of the principle of self-determination is simple, for it is surely better that nations(ethnic nations) should determine their own destinies than that someone else should do it for them. The concept of self-determination appears to express the idea of democracy, according to which the people are presumed to be best qualified to govern themselves. International law also appears to recognize the right to national self-determination unreservedly. The common Article 1 of the covenants on civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights proclaims that all peoples have the right to self-determination.
The appeal of self-determination is, however, not restricted to democrats and has deeper roots in human nature. All human beings live in groups, and all persistent groups share a common culture. Commitment to a common culture entails an inclination to resist the imposition of alien cultures, although groups respond in various ways to contact with and subjection to other cultures: collaboration, assimilation and resistance are options commonly available. Nevertheless, the desire for cultural autonomy is one of the oldest forms of political motivation known to history, and the right to national self-determination is the principal modern form of its recognition.The global political order is, however, primarily an association of states. International law seeks to regulate the relations among states by recognizing their equal sovereignty. The principal value of this order is peace. The United Nations Organization is concerned primarily with the stability of the existing states system. However, because it was established in response to the imperialistic aggression and atrocities of fascism, it included the protection of human rights and national self-determination among its aims. There are, however, both theoretical and practical tensions between the values of peace, human rights and self-determination.
The concept of human rights accords fundamental value to individual selfdetermination. This value rests on the belief that individuals cannot live in safety and dignity if their lives are controlled by others. They should, therefore, be guaranteed a set of rights that protect their freedom to choose their way of life and their capacity to live it. Such rights, according to the human-rights doctrine, are best protected by governments that are accountable to their people and subject to the rule of law. The idea of human rights, therefore, appears to entail the endorsement of democratic political institutions. However, the logic of human rights and the logic of democracy are different. The concept of human rights is designed to protect certain fundamental interests of individuals against the actions of governments. The concept of democracy legitimates a particular form of governmental power. Democratic government does not necessarily respect human rights. Where democratic government is informed by strong nationalist sentiments, it is more likely to violate the human rights both of its own dissident citizens and of foreigners.
If democratic governments do not necessarily respect human rights, governments motivated primarily by nationalist sentiments are not necessarily democratic and do not necessarily respect human rights. The particularities of the history of the U.S. are such that national self-determination, democracy and individual rights seem to be mutually supportive and even mutually necessary principles. This was the background to President Wilson’s famous proclamation of the principle of national self-determination as the basis of the new world order after the First World War. It is now common for historians to criticize Wilson for ignoring the complex mixture of nations in Europe and consequently proposing a principle that was both impracticable and a recipe for subversion and violent conflict. The principle was not in fact implemented and was abused by the Nazis as an excuse for German expansionism.Although fascism discredited nationalism among Western liberal intellectuals, the anti-fascist political leaders perceived fascism to have constituted a massive violation of both individual human rights and of the rights of nations to self-determination. The U.N. Charter, therefore, included both the traditional principle of international law that states were the primary agents of international politics and the principle that world peace must be based on the self-determination of nations. The chief defect in the U.N. was that several of its leading states were imperialist powers. The global struggle against colonialism gave new meaning to and strengthened the right to national self-determination.
The postcolonial world order, however, also contained a serious flaw. This was the doctrine of uti possidetis juris, which stated that the territorial boundaries of postcolonial states should be the same as those of the colonial territories that they replaced. The rationale of this doctrine was that it would minimize territorial disputes among the postcolonial states and thereby maximize the prospects for peace among them. The state elites of post-colonial, “underdeveloped” countries became strongly attached to the doctrine because it appeared to underpin the stability they believed to be necessary for their projects of development. If postcolonial societies were not yet in reality nations, nation building needs to became part of the project of development.
Frontline- Kenya
Frontline -Kenya
Kenya’s abrupt descent into mayhem after President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election tarnished one of Africa’s most promising economies and badly damaged its tourism industry. And a year on since the UN brokered peace agreements were signed it seems apparent to all that Kenya’s underlying issues are still unresolved. There is continuing ethnic unrest and tens of thousands of displaced persons still living in camps. So have the peace agreements achieved anything or have the country’s wounds simply been papered over? And with a series of corruption scandals over the last few months and the economy in a downward spiral, what does the future hold for this country once renowned for its stable economy and democracy?
Michela Wrong is author of It’s our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower – which tells the story of her Kenyan friend John Githongo – Kenya’s anti-corruption tsar. Michela is also a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. She is also the author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz and I Didnt Do It for You – both based on her experiences in Africa.
Professor John Lonsdale is emeritus professor of modern African history and fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. Among his books are (as co-author) Unhappy Valley: conflict in Kenya and Africa (James Currey, 1992) and (as co-editor) of Mau Mau and Nationhood (James Currey, 2003); he is also the author of seventy articles or book chapters on Kenyan and African history
Joseph Warungu is editor of the BBC’s two flagship daily news and current affairs radio programmes for Africa as well as a quarterly magazine, Focus on Africa.
Martin Kimani is a writer, newspaper columnist and security consultant.
Lindsey Hilsum is International Editor for C4 news
Ruth Wamuyu- Murui Mbara
Mugikuyu
I came into the world a Mũgĩkũyũ, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Mũgĩkũyũ,I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Mũgĩkũyũ.I don’t want to turn my back on a great and noble heritage.God created Kikuyus ,The British made Kenyans .I will die, what God created me a Mũgĩkũyũ
White Man’s Rule in Kenya
William Ruto a”disgrace”to ODM & Kenya
William Ruto -Maize
Agriculture Minister William Ruto came face to face with the magnitude of the maize scandal that threatens to blow away his political dreams when his ODM colleagues told him to carry his own cross. The Eldoret North MP got a rude shock on Monday night after ODM Cabinet Members unanimously gave the Prime Minister Raila Odinga the go-ahead to recommend his sacking if he refuses to resign.
Attempts by the Minister to defend himself during a meeting convened at the Prime Minister’s Treasury office by producing documents to show that a host of Members of Parliament and senior government officials made requests for allocation of maize to the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB), were dismissed by his colleagues.And last evening, Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Martha Karua piled more pressure on the Minister calling him a baggage. she dismissed Ruto’s claims on Monday morning that she was fighting him to scuttle the minister’s 2012 presidential ambitions. Ruto had claimed in a radio interview that Karua had invited him to a friend’s house in Nairobi where she sought his support for 2012 presidential contest.Karua noted that at no time had she discussed any partnership regarding the 2012 general election with Ruto, adding that she did not wish to be allied to a person “associated with graft and violence”.
“If I was to choose (a partner), I wouldn’t choose that person (Ruto),” said Karua adding that the minister should answer questions concerning the escalation of prices of maize flour despite Government subsidy.She added, “I don’t wish to carry such baggage now or in the future.”At the Treasury meeting, Lands Minister James Orengo and Finance Assistant Minister Oburu Odinga are reported to have repudiated the documents, adding a new twist of uncertainty that has widened the victims of the infamous maize scandal.The two are said to have insisted that public officers who wrote the letters are guilty of criminal offence under the Economic Crimes Act and Public Officer Ethics Act, which both outlaw the use of public office for personal gain.
Orengo is reported to have maintained that all the individuals mentioned by Ruto contravened both the Public Officer Ethics Act and the Economic Crimes Act and action should be taken against them.The meeting of ODM ministers and assistant ministers concluded that the party must not condone corruption by any member, reiterating the party’s ‘No Corruption’ slogan at the December 2007 elections.At least three Cabinet Ministers and an assistant minister speaking on condition of anonymity revealed that Ruto was put to his defence by colleagues as Raila, who chaired the session, watched.
A confident looking Ruto had arrived at the Treasury meeting in the company of Raila, after arriving in the same chopper from the mass burial of the Molo fire tragedy in Nakuru, which the PM had to leave midstream for a donor consultative meeting in Nairobi. At the KICC, Raila kept donors waiting for half an hour as he held a consultative meeting with Ruto. Their entry into the hall together, evidently for the cameras, did not reveal the intense negotiations the two leaders had since mid morning.
Raila Odinga
At the ODM Cabinet meeting, the anti-Ruto chorus that gathered steam over the weekend reached a crescendo as the minister’s colleagues spoke of “disgrace” and “bad image” to his face. But this was after Ruto was given the chance to state his case, which he did by producing the documents that implicates a number of senior government officials.
Among the vocal ODM ministers at the meeting are reported to have included Orengo, William Ntimama, Oburu and Najib Balala.And in her scathing attacks on Ruto yesterday, Karua insisted that the Agriculture minister should step aside to pave way for investigations as has become tradition. She said that since the designation of the coalition Government, the standards on the subject of governance and integrity had been lowered.
Ruto is reported to have said that Karua and the ilk were keen on ensuring that they scuttle his possible candidature for the 2012 presidential race as well as ensuring he did not hold any public office.The minister is further reported to have said that Karua should answer questions on last year’s bungled general election since the then Electoral Commission of Kenya was within her domain. But Karua noted that ECK is independent and could not take any instructions from the Justice ministry. She said the role of her office only touched on formulation and ensuring policy was adhered to.
Speaking at her offices last evening, the Justice minister further called for a thorough probe on the maize scam saying the Government should consider enlisting the services of private investigators. She said if investigators do well, the real face of the maize scam will come to light. She further expressed concern that if not handled well, the same problem will be replicated in fertilizers which will be subsidised by the Government
Ethnic Federalism
Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in “ethnic federalism” has been largely ignored.
After the end of the cold war era one of the greatest challenge to world security and order emanate from multi-ethnic states. The problem of multiethnicity is not confined to the so called third world states in Africa. Some western democratic states who has been known for their long-term stability are seen to be precarious lately due to problems of multi-ethnicity.Quite a Varity of solutions have been forwarded by scholars as part of the search for solutions to this problem. The suggestions range from strong unitary dictatorial regime-as a means to suppress emerging ethnic nationalisms to ethnic based federalism-as a means of accommodating ethnic interests.
Ethiopian Regions
Federalism which may be identified as territorial based or ethnic based has come to be seen as the best alternative to promote the management of conflict prone multi-ethnic societies. Even those who extend sharp criticisms against this form of government admit that federalism, when properly implemented, has more often than not proved to offer tools for the better governess of supra-national institutions and has facilitated effective decision making in complex systems and promoted democracy.
In principle, relating federalism to multi-ethnicity and evaluating its success as a balance between unity and diversity involves a number of factors. In particular, how the boundaries of member states are drawn up and how powers are distributed horizontally as well as vertically. Moreover, the institutional set up should be examined if it represents a structure of diversity or at least minority accommodation providing institutional and political power
which democratically command loyalty to the common state.How far federalism, in particular ethnic federalism practically solves problem of multi-ethnicity is yet to be seen. However, daring decision has already been made in 1995 in Ethiopia adopting this approach as a solution to the longstanding ethnic problems of the country. Albeit with difficulty, the choice was made, and ethnicity was favored as the underling factor in the process of state formation.
The new model of government ,nevertheless, appeared to be peculiar from the outset not only because it follows an ethno-linguistic line for state formation but also in a sense that it allows the right to self-determination including secession. The inclusion of particularly the latter has made the
Ethiopian model of federalism prone to critiques.The success of the Ethiopian model of federalism in light of the inherent problems it poses along with some of the existing opportunities. Particular emphasis was given to power sharing arrangement-with a view to see how wholehearted is the federal arrangement, inclusion of secession clause-how far is it a threat to unity of the country, and uniform human rights implementation-how far will it serve as a binding force of the federation.
Ethnic Recognition
A close examination of the power sharing arrangement and the explicit recognition of the right to self determination including secession to nations,nationalities and peoples depicts that there is an apparent paradox in the federal arrangement. On the one hand, the nations, nationalities and peoples have been granted the right to exit from the federation with out any conditions albeit for procedural red tape. This gives the impression that the constituent unites are more independent compared to other federal arrangements. On the other hand, the powers of member states are relatively meager and regional government remain dependent on the federal level to be able to carry out their duties. As expressed by the the Constitution proposes few self determination remedies, since nothing is specified as lying in the gaps between secession. While the trend in multi-ethnic federations is to extend secession remedies through various areas of self-government, the Ethiopian federation has chosen quite the opposite: asserting the most extreme right to secession it failed to grant to the member states as the same time the power given to member states in the administration of daily affairs are quite scanty.
As federal theories underline that the functioning of federal system is not to be measured by only looking at the theoretical justifications or constitutional frame work attempt was made in this study to examine the de facto federal system of Ethiopia from socio-economic point of view revealing the asymmetric nature of the federal structure.
As argued by scientist in a study of Ethiopian federalism it can be concluded that the major problems that make the federalism falter are half-hearted decentralization, deficient democracy, and insufficient protection extended to human rights. Accontrario reading of her conclusions would point to important solutions to the predicaments of the Ethiopian federalism, namely wholehearted federalism, a more vibrant democracy, and sufficient protectionof human rights values.
Federalism has already been institutionalized and member states of the federation are exercising some degree of political and cultural autonomy.Nonetheless, financial dependency of the member states on the centralgovernment, among other things limits the scope of the federal decentralization. Democracy, as expressed through the principle of popular sovereignty, is not far out of reach legally, nonetheless, lack of strong alternative parties due to many reasons, lack of civil societies and civic culture, undue interference in the independence of the judiciary, and other reasons could not help democracy be utilized concretely. Human rights arewell articulated in the federal as well as state constitutions to the extent of becoming an overriding principle. The absence of strong law enforcement agencies and lack of political will, however, could not enable intensive utilization of the principle. The pathetic situation of all legal institutions in the states and the no less pathetic situation of the Federal Courts and Federal prisons, coupled with the inoperation of the institution of the Ombudsman and of the Human Rights Commission so far, could be invoked as reasons.
Apart from the above, one might suggest the following as solutions to problems of multi-ethnic Ethiopia.
1. Exploit the structures inherent in federalism. This can be done by instituting true bi-cameralism through making the upper house a legislative upper house with a veto power over legislations this canhappen only if its composition is restructured, either through equal representation of each state as it is the case in mature democracies or through equal numerical representation of each people group as it is intended to be done (on the face of it in Ethiopia). A clearer separation of power must complement this bicameralism. Relegation of the task of constitutional interpretation to the courts or special constitutional court might also be considered.
2. Intensify the task of Federal Government to build a country of united destiny.The House Of Federation is entrusted with this duty. The federal intervention of the sake of maintain a uniform human rights standards while at the same time empowering state governments to take self-administration seriously( thereby molding the process of developing peculiar area of concern vis-à-vis human rights is immediately important.
3. Intensification of democracy requires the increase in civil societies substantive pluralism of parties and a secure legal ground protection freedom of association. Furthermore, it is imperative that parties be organized in a manner that can access cross-ethnic constituencies.
4. Concerned legislative and law enforcement agencies should try to strike a balance between the uniform implementation of human rights standards and religious and customary laws of the different ethnic groups borrowing interdisciplinary approach, brining to the ground the debates on universality of human rights norms and multi-culturalism; and with due consideration of the overriding nature of human rights norms in the constitutional framework.It is noticeable from the forgoing that readymade solutions are hard to come by.
On the other hand some of the criticisms advanced by commentators on the Ethiopian model appear to be excessive as they stem from what seems exaggerated expectation from the process. Knowing the situation the country has underwent for 17 years, knowing the change undertaken with a totally new institutional set up, new political personnel etc. it will be utopian-lookingoptimism to expect bloom and blossom out of the new model of federalism. One should also note that federalism is hardly a perfect institution. As any imperfect institution, it evolves, and dealing with the problems that unfold is worth the experiment as the solutions given promote the politics of love, tolerance and association than hatred, intolerance and dissociation
*Read more on Ethiopian Ethnic Federalism Here
-Ethnic Federalism: The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective (Eastern African Studies)
-Abate Nikodimos Alemayehu Ethnic Federalism in Ethiopia
William Ruto: Kibaki & Raila Do Your Job!!!
The Kenya we want : A Kenya where the President and Prime Minister do their jobs…………
Agriculture minister William Ruto has said he will not resign over the Kenya maize scandal!……He does not see anything wrong with a firm he partly owns selling two million gunny bags to the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB).Or with his personal assistant writing notes to NCPB bosses on the Agriculture minister’s letterheads, directing them to allocate maize to certain individuals.Or with a large-scale farmer, who has refused to sell maize to NCPB until the Government offers Sh2,500 a bag (not including the Sh100-a-bag rebate for transport costs), getting a larger allocation of maize from the strategic reserves than half of 23 firms Ruto lists as “major millers”.And this at a subsidised price at a time severe shortages of maize available to millers led to the price of a 2kg packet of flour almost doubling to Sh120.
None of the acts was in contravention of the law, he argues. But in all three instances, NCPB was influenced by the minister’s office into making decisions that were not prudent or ethical and, arguably, legal. As examples of abuse of office, these offences are more grieveous than the halftruths that spurred us to demand Amos Kimunya’s resignation as Minister for Finance pending investigation into the secretive sale of the Grand Regency Hotel.
On the question of NCPB buying gunny bags from the African Merchant Assurance Company, a firm the minister is widely known to have an interest in, one asks: Was the contract won in an open tender conducted as stipulated in the Public Procurement and Disposals Act? And even if it were, wouldn’t NCPB managers’ knowledge of Ruto’s significant interest in Amaco (as opposed to, say, his minor interests in Safaricom) be reason for a conflict?
Cereal board sacking that never was
William Ruto
Confusion reigns at the National Cereals and Produce Board a week after Agriculture minister William Ruto announced the sacking of senior officers early last week. Questions are now being asked on who the Agriculture minister sacked. He, however, retained the board’s MD Prof Gideon Misoi.
The minister early last week announced changes at the board sending five out of six directors, and 14 out of 17 top managers on compulsory leave.Despite Mr Ruto saying this was a move meant to contain rampant corruption in the grain sector and pave the way for free importation of maize, it has been established that the officers are still in office raising questions on the minister’s directive. He added that the positions of the sacked officers would be advertised.
Mr Ruto told Parliament on Wednesday that he was working on a restructuring programme after advise from a consultancy firm. He said the measures were a product of an audit carried out since October last year whose report he received last month. “We got the report from Deloitte and Touche and this formed the basis of the sackings,” he said in Parliament.Also neither the names nor working stations of those who were sacked were given by the minister; further complicating the matter on whether there were sackings at all as officials at the ministry of Agriculture said they did not have any information on who was sacked.
Mr President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga will you take responsibility for corruption in Government?It is unfortunate leaders are always passing the buck and are not bold enough to give us the Kenya we want.
William Ruto needs to be shown the door.
Maize flour price to double as government abandons rebate
February 5, 2009: A price surge was on Wednesday looming in the maize flour market after the government withdrew the Sh200 rebate it was offering millers for every bag of maize.The subsidy had been aimed at making the staple more affordable to the majority of Kenyans who had in November complained that prices had risen beyond their means.Millers on Wednesday said they had been informed at a meeting with Agriculture minister William Ruto of the decision to withdraw the rebate, leaving the pricing to market forces.No reasons were given for the sudden withdrawal although the government was understood to have been unable to shoulder the financial burden.The announcement was immediately followed by a warning from millers that the price of the staple could rise beyond the Sh120 per two kilogramme bag that prevailed before the subsidy was announced. Although the government has waived duty on the grain, it is unlikely to stop an upward revision in prices in the face of a shortage.
On Wednesday, however, the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) denied that it had stopped supplies to millers at subsidised price.“We are still giving millers maize at Sh1, 750. The SGR board of trustees have allocated the maize and NCPB awaits to collects and the miller shave not collected the maize.” A spot-check in some outlets on Wednesday revealed that key brands were missing from the shelves and prices of those available had increased.“To alleviate the current supply situation, we need subsidies to allow maize imports to reach the millers at Sh1, 750 and keep consumer prices low,” said Ms Paloma Fernandes, the chief executive of the Cereals Millers Association.Until last week, the ex-factory price of maize flour was Sh65 per two kilogramme. They now range between Sh90 and Sh95, up from Sh72 per two kilogramme packet. The millers were by then getting maize at Sh1, 750 for processing the subsidised flour and at Sh1, 950 for commercial supplies. This had led to a confusing two-tier pricing structure with the subsidised selling at Sh130 per five kilogramme bag and the normal flour at Sh72 per two kilogramme bag.
Davos: Why Is Africa Talking Democracy and Not Economy
The World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of government and corporate leaders in the Alpine ski resort in Davos, Switzerland, runs through to Sunday, Feb. 1 2009.World leaders look for hope amid the gloom of an economic slowdown as they turn their attention to a long-stalled global trade deal, increasingly seen as a necessary bulwark against the rising threat of protectionism. Every year (Africans) travel to Davos to talk democracy !!!! Do Africans eat and live on democracy?
The Arab world and most of Asia is at Davos talking economy.They are not democratic!! So why is it that we Africans are always talking democracy at Davos. Africans dont need democracy we need free and fair trade. Our leaders are just stupid they keep falling for this democracy talk(its just another road block to keep us from free trade)
I would rather live like an Arab with no democracy and food on my table than as an African with democracy and no food on the table .
Wake up Africa.What we need is free and fair trade not aid or democracy.
IDPs
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless it means we side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life.
We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ”Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.
Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself.
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