Security in numbers: Why we no longer debate but attack and shout

Suspended Judiciary Chief Registrar Gladys Boss Shollei (Right) when she appeared before Parliamentary Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs at the parliaments buildings on August 21, 2013 on investigations into the decision to send her on forced leave. PHOTO|BILLY MUTAI  

In Summary

• There is nothing remotely close to Transition in Africa today. So how did we stop talking to each other and took to talking at each other?
• In Kenya, anti-Kanu politics took sanctuary in Central, Western, and Nyanza. Now when you organise among “your people”, you appeal to their fears and hearts, not their hopes and heads. It is passion and insecurities that keep ethnic or religious groups united, not cold logical ideas.
• When Ms Shollei did her rebuttal press conference, though as registrar you would think it was a dry professional job, she too showed up with over half a dozen of her supporters to state her case.

WHAT OTHERS SAY with Charles Onyango-Obbo

By Charles Onyango-Obbo
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There is an animal called civil political and public policy debate. If you don’t know it, you are forgiven; it died long ago in Kenya, and almost everywhere else you look in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, name it.

For example the current arguments for and against a referendum in Kenya mostly sound like battle cries. The controversial suspension of Gladys Shollei as Chief Registrar has turned into something akin to a gladiatorial pit from ancient Rome.

Question is why do we shout, threaten, vilify and demonise instead of calmly debate public issues?

Let us go back some years back. There was a wonderful journal of ideas called Transition, published in the Uganda capital Kampala. Every major debate in East Africa then ended up in Transition, where the intellectual minds of the region tussled without hurling insults or stones.

Here is what a Wikipedia entry on Transition has to say:

“In 1961, at the age of twenty-two, Rajat Neogy founded Transition magazine: An International Review in Kampala, Uganda. Transition was designed to be the literary organ of East African writers and intellectuals. Transition quickly became Africa’s leading intellectual magazine, publishing such diverse figures as Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer (Nobel laureate), Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and Americans James Baldwin and Paul Theroux.

“In 1968, the Ugandan government jailed Neogy for sedition; the magazine had criticised President Milton Obote’s proposed constitutional reforms. After Neogy’s release, Transition was revived in Ghana in 1971. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka took over as editor in 1973. During Soyinka’s tenure, Transition became still more contentious: the cover of one issue spotted a cartoon image of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin with Karasi! (“Finish Him!”) written across his face. Transition continued to make a name — as well as enemies — for itself until folding in 1976 for financial reasons.

“Henry Louis Gates, Jr, a student of Soyinka…and a frequent contributor to the Ghanaian Transition, brought the magazine back to life in 1991. Now based at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Transition (today) bills itself as “an anchor of deep reflection on black life and a map charting new routes through the globalized world.”

So, politics killed Transition and, like a lot of good things Africa has lost to west, now it is an American institute.

There is nothing remotely close to Transition in Africa today. So how did we stop talking to each other and took to talking at each other?

I think the slow death of civil debate in Africa started in the 1970s in the era of one-party dictatorships and military tyrannies. It became too risky for individuals to take on regimes or to champion good causes, so they found safety in numbers.

Thus they organised in civil society groups where it was much more difficult to target them individually. Secondly, because freedom of assembly and political association was banned, they could only organise in cultural groups and in safe districts or regions, which were usually their home areas. This meant they often organised around their tribes, which would protect them.

In Kenya, anti-Kanu politics took sanctuary in Central, Western, and Nyanza. Now when you organise among “your people”, you appeal to their fears and hearts, not their hopes and heads. It is passion and insecurities that keep ethnic or religious groups united, not cold logical ideas.

We have transported this same herd mentality and passion-driven approach to political debate and contests over public policy.

Chief Registrar Shollei’s case demonstrates this well. When the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) appeared to announce her suspension from office and investigations into her conduct, they showed up as a gaggle of mostly grim-faced men in dark suits to announce their decision.

When Ms Shollei did her rebuttal press conference, though as registrar you would think it was a dry professional job, she too showed up with over half a dozen of her supporters to state her case.

We see the same thing in the USA, another country where civil debate has been replaced by the worst form of bigoted narrow-mindedness and name-calling.

It seems either risky, or you make yourself too vulnerable, to wade into any public contestation as an individual. You need to have a group, or even a mob, behind you. However, you can only debate intelligently as an individual. A mob mostly bays or heckles.