What Does Being A Kenyan Mean?
Monday, May 13, 2013 -BY NGUNJIRI WAMBUGU
After
my column last week, I am happy to note that a national conversation
has started about Cord’s performance in the last general election.
Professor Larry Gumbe, Raila Odinga’s chief agent wrote an interesting
piece on why Cord did not win the last elections. Sarah Elderkin then
went into the details of how Cord won.
The Sunday Standard then picked up the issue and Kenyans are learning why the country's most popular politician did not make it to State House.
This is not and should not be about belittling the Raila's campaign or his candidacy. It is regrettable that some interpret this as a way to belittle the efforts and commitment of the millions of people who supported Raila.
It should be about those of us who had the privilege of leading the Cord campaigns not burying our heads in the sand by refusing to accept responsibility for the loss in this last election.
Shifting the blame to the IEBC, the Judiciary or state functionaries can never explain how an incumbent and popular Prime Minister, and an incumbent Vice President with decades of public service, lost the presidency to a team who had been forced to step aside from their Cabinet offices because of indictments for crimes against humanity.
This is why the mantra that ‘we won the election and the vote was stolen’ now being bandied around by some of us, starting from the former chairman of the 2013 Raila Odinga campaign team, must be viewed as a threat to Cord’s capacity to prepare for 2017. A lot of mistakes made in 2007 were repeated in 2013 because of a similar narrative that ensured no audit was ever done on the mistakes ODM made.
To re-introduce the same narrative, however comforting it might be, is to once again refuse to accept that mistakes were made in 2013, which means there is no need to audit Cord’s performance. If this happens then the definition of insanity will apply – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
But as the Cord debates goes on, let us also look at the lessons from the March 4 elections for the wider Kenyan community.
Since the 2007-08 post-election violence, Kenya has undergone huge democracy, governance and institutional reforms. We now have a new constitution; our public institutions are gradually becoming more transparent and accountable; and five years after we literally hacked each other to death because we could not agree on who won the last presidential election, we were able to go peacefully through a political transition, despite disputes on presidential results.
But to consolidate the progress we have made, we must accept that in this last general election, Kenyans were even more tribal than in 2007. We must also accept that tribalism interfered with how we chose our leaders. Finally, we must develop a plan on how to ensure that this does not happen again in the next election.
A place to start would be to figure out how to affect the over 65 per cent of Kenya’s population that is below 35 years in age. This generation is the result of a non-ethnic based mode of education; operate in a non-tribal commercial and professional service industry; and their access to public services is not dictated by tribal affiliations.
This election showed they are happy to dabble in tribal politics; but this attraction is cosmetic at best. So how do we leverage this population and change our political conversations from tribe to policy by the next elections?
A group of young leaders drawn from the main political formations in the last elections have decided to join hands around an initiative called "Project Kenyan" and seek answers to the questions above. The group has also reached out to its peers from the academia, business and religious communities as well as civil society.
They start from interrogating why Kenyans do not seem to have a clear and/or common definition of what it means to be Kenyan. They then intend to understand, develop and brand a common simple definition; one that is acceptable and usable from one end of Kenya to the other, to explain the phrase "I am a Kenyan". They believe that such a definition would introduce an identity that can competitively challenge the tribal badges we so proudly display these days.
My work will be to share the experiences of these young leaders in their various activities, conversations and events as they venture into uncharted territory and try to develop a roadmap for how our younger generation of Kenyans can change our political discourse by changing the identity platform from which they engage.
At the very least, it will be exciting.
You can join this conversation through writing to info@change-associates.org
The Sunday Standard then picked up the issue and Kenyans are learning why the country's most popular politician did not make it to State House.
This is not and should not be about belittling the Raila's campaign or his candidacy. It is regrettable that some interpret this as a way to belittle the efforts and commitment of the millions of people who supported Raila.
It should be about those of us who had the privilege of leading the Cord campaigns not burying our heads in the sand by refusing to accept responsibility for the loss in this last election.
Shifting the blame to the IEBC, the Judiciary or state functionaries can never explain how an incumbent and popular Prime Minister, and an incumbent Vice President with decades of public service, lost the presidency to a team who had been forced to step aside from their Cabinet offices because of indictments for crimes against humanity.
This is why the mantra that ‘we won the election and the vote was stolen’ now being bandied around by some of us, starting from the former chairman of the 2013 Raila Odinga campaign team, must be viewed as a threat to Cord’s capacity to prepare for 2017. A lot of mistakes made in 2007 were repeated in 2013 because of a similar narrative that ensured no audit was ever done on the mistakes ODM made.
To re-introduce the same narrative, however comforting it might be, is to once again refuse to accept that mistakes were made in 2013, which means there is no need to audit Cord’s performance. If this happens then the definition of insanity will apply – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
But as the Cord debates goes on, let us also look at the lessons from the March 4 elections for the wider Kenyan community.
Since the 2007-08 post-election violence, Kenya has undergone huge democracy, governance and institutional reforms. We now have a new constitution; our public institutions are gradually becoming more transparent and accountable; and five years after we literally hacked each other to death because we could not agree on who won the last presidential election, we were able to go peacefully through a political transition, despite disputes on presidential results.
But to consolidate the progress we have made, we must accept that in this last general election, Kenyans were even more tribal than in 2007. We must also accept that tribalism interfered with how we chose our leaders. Finally, we must develop a plan on how to ensure that this does not happen again in the next election.
A place to start would be to figure out how to affect the over 65 per cent of Kenya’s population that is below 35 years in age. This generation is the result of a non-ethnic based mode of education; operate in a non-tribal commercial and professional service industry; and their access to public services is not dictated by tribal affiliations.
This election showed they are happy to dabble in tribal politics; but this attraction is cosmetic at best. So how do we leverage this population and change our political conversations from tribe to policy by the next elections?
A group of young leaders drawn from the main political formations in the last elections have decided to join hands around an initiative called "Project Kenyan" and seek answers to the questions above. The group has also reached out to its peers from the academia, business and religious communities as well as civil society.
They start from interrogating why Kenyans do not seem to have a clear and/or common definition of what it means to be Kenyan. They then intend to understand, develop and brand a common simple definition; one that is acceptable and usable from one end of Kenya to the other, to explain the phrase "I am a Kenyan". They believe that such a definition would introduce an identity that can competitively challenge the tribal badges we so proudly display these days.
My work will be to share the experiences of these young leaders in their various activities, conversations and events as they venture into uncharted territory and try to develop a roadmap for how our younger generation of Kenyans can change our political discourse by changing the identity platform from which they engage.
At the very least, it will be exciting.
You can join this conversation through writing to info@change-associates.org
No comments:
Post a Comment