Our politicians are an uncivilised lot — and not just the Opposition

Kenyans attending a rally at Uhuru Park in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• Clearly, the President knows that, at one level of thought, “primitive” is the antithesis of “civilised”.

By PHILIP OCHIENG
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As we know from all objective historians of humanity’s career, civilisation is a dangerously double-edged concept.

In proportion as a society develops in terms of knowledge and technique — we learn — in the same proportion does the same society degenerate in terms of econo-political justice and ideo-moral compunction.

How can the US — such brilliant sheen of human ability in scientific knowledge and technological skill — also continue to harbour such most primitive thought-habits as racial and religious bigotry?

Such a paradox was what once egged no less a Western intellect than Oscar Wilde to demand a thorough rewriting of Western history.

President Uhuru Kenyatta raised that very question this very week, when he called for a “civilised opposition” in Kenya’s politics. Which one of these two mutually contradictory edges of civilisation did our young leader have in mind? In an important way, Uhuru appears to acknowledge at least one thing about Kenya

If — as with my lexicographer Collins — you define “primitive” as “belonging to the earliest stage of development”, then you have described most accurately the collective mind of Kenya’s entire political class. You have asserted that a society can make its own history only through an increasingly knowledgeable and skilled leading class.

Clearly, the President knows that, at one level of thought, “primitive” is the antithesis of “civilised”. If so, then, all in all, Kenya’s political class is probably the world’s most uncivilised, most primitive. Or do you — dear reader — know any group of people worldwide more narrow-minded, more myopic, more uncouth, more ignorant of its own objective self-interests?

As individuals, religious sects, business conglomerations and political parties, Kenya’s ruling class is too preoccupied with the petty short-term needs of the existential moment of the individual and his or her ethnic affiliation to see its own objective collective long-term self-interests with any clarity or even at all.

But when a number of traditional ethnic communities have been forced into a common political house merely by a happenstance of history — like colonialism — and they have done exactly nothing to conflate their mental and manual resources, how can those discrete communities develop any genuine ethnically transcendental “middle class”?

How can they conflate their energies into a genuinely national force? How can Kenya even talk of a national ruling class when, politically, the leaders of those ethnic communities never think in terms of the future of that whole nation?

How can Kenya develop into a genuine modern nation when the personal, party and “national development” programmes of our leaders are always hinged upon individuals belonging to certain ethnic communities?

How can Kenya develop (both economically and into real nationhood) when tribe — not educational attainment, nor professional training, not job experience — is the only criterion that all of us seem to seriously demand from applicants whenever we are in hire-and-fire governmental, parastatal and private positions?

How can Kenyans rescue themselves from the HIV in-dwelling in our brains that inevitably predisposes the educated stratum in all sectors of life to making ethnicity the first consideration for appointment into all key positions in the civil bureaucracy, in the county, in the corporate company, even in what Mark Twain once dismissed as the “doxological industry” (namely, the Church)?

If enough members of Kenya’s leading classes had read the history of Western Europe, North America and Sino-Japan, they would by now have learned the crucial importance of collectively investing crucial resources in the whole national boat to ensure that it will remain permanently buoyant in all future circumstances.

The President may know that national development entails periodic stocktaking so as, among other things, to lighten the national boat by throwing out of it (as jetsam) as many liabilities as possible — including deadwood, tribal jingoes, long fingers and other elements that tend to permanently moor to the ground all the wheels of a nation’s potential mental and material cruising.

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