Being a farming nation, Kenyans should appreciate better than
other countries the saying that you can harvest only what you sowed.
That
was why the newspaper reports that a public outcry had greeted the
latest musical chairs by State House were so astonishing.
What rubric of the Constitution had the President flouted in his drastic personnel reshuffle the other day?
I
ask because, after it, what persistently hit my eardrums was the charge
that the new beneficiaries were aging members of certain tribes.
Whenever the twin problem of tribes and age-groups is raised, it puts me in a dilemma.
Ideally, I dislike and have always strongly condemned negative tribalism, racism, sectarianism and sexism.
But,
in practice, I have never been absolutely sure that it is absolutely
evil to discriminate in certain terms, including age-groups.
There
are occasions when, both objectively and subjectively, tribalism,
racism, sectarianism and “genderism” are evils — objectively because
these practices deny some of the most capable individuals — our Albert
Einsteins and Mohandas Gandhis — the chance to contribute their
knowledge and skills to a society which desperately needs such
possessions.
And subjectively, because — in the
universal comity of sentient beings — any bigoted thought and practice
can serve only to remove us, both as individuals and as groups, from
that nature-given pool of gregariousness which is what makes manifest
our humanity and raises mankind above all other species on earth.
But you wouldn’t know it by looking casually at the earth’s political and economic landscape.
With
the inward binoculars of crude race-based corporate greed, the Western
liberal intelligentsia has long ago declared that all of the earth’s
hideous nation-based econo-intellectual and politico-military Everests
and Rift Valleys constitute “the best of all possible worlds”.
Human
upbringing is like that. Arrogant thoughtlessness has been
characteristic of all hegemonic classes, genders, nations, races,
religions and tribes throughout post-gentile mankind’s history.
Blinded
against all the objective forces of history, the privileged nation or
race of the moment may name itself “God’s chosen people”.
TRAGIC EXPERIENCE
From “the chosen people’s” own Bible, we know, too, that pride of that kind almost always leads to tragedy.
Khazari
Jewry’s own tragic experience in the hands of Euro-Teutonic bigotry is
fresh in our minds. Historian Edward Gibbon testifies that Rome
collapsed as a logical consequence of its own “immoderate greatness”.
More
recently, Britain took a perpendicular downfall in economic, military
and moral terms right after — at the end of the 19th century — the
British intelligentsia had bragged immoderately that the sun would never
set on “Rule Britannia”. Examples of such specific conceit abound
throughout the extraordinarily short history of our species.
The
question is: Why is such a brainy animal so short-sighted that it
cannot see the dangers that it brings upon itself by pitting individual,
racial, ethnic and religious groups against one another?
No
other species is known for our readiness to fight such costly and
catastrophic intra-specific wars for needs which the species can satisfy
much more readily, much more thriftily, through specific co-operation.
Why
does Kenya’s ruling class allow great intellectual talents and
expensively produced skills to languish on the peripheries of
decision-making and implementation? Why do we condemn such talents to
complete waste just because they do not belong to “our tribe”? How will
Kenya grow under the guidance of such narrowness of the mind?
Which
brings us back to the question we began with. Isn’t it high time
Parliament devised a water-tight legal instrument by which to ensure
that all brains and all skills from all ethnic and racial communities
and both genders are channelled fully into the most appropriate hubs of
policy-making and policy-implementation?
But one thing
is self-evident. We can inject into the body politic that fillip for
which Kenya’s economy is gasping, and make a rapid take-off, only when
we stop sacrificing knowledge and skill on the altar of tribe.
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