Mutunga's Claims Are Self-Serving 1 of 1

Chief Justice Willy Mutunga .photo Elkana Jacob

WYCLIFFE MUGA

November 5, 2015

Chief Justice Willy Mutunga’s remarks late last week that “the country is dancing on a precipice and may flip over” is a shallow and misleading generalisation, which should not go unchallenged.

It also reminds us that after he retires next year, he will seek to reclaim his old place atop the NGO food-chain. A factual statement like, “Devolution has made much progress but more needs to be done” is not what will bring the donors rushing to our rescue. But “dancing on a precipice”? That has a sinister but satisfyingly familiar ring to it, for those who live off donor support (or intend to soon resume doing so).

And indeed, Mutunga – speaking at the launch of a huge civic education effort generously sponsored by the Swedish government – actually specified that: “Only a strong social movement can save us from this precipice.”

Now I have been told by any number of journalists from neighbouring countries that the thing they envy Kenya the most is the potency of our civil society and media establishment. Civil society demonstrators releasing pigs outside Parliament to embarrass the “MPigs”; newspapers in which a president is mocked and dismissed just as easily as anyone else: such things, apparently, could never happen in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, or Sudan.

So these civil society NGOs are undoubtedly very important.

But to return to the central question, I would ask: are we really on the edge of a precipice?

Consider the key problems we face at this time: In no particular order, they are that our national finances have apparently been badly mismanaged; we are paying a steep price for our President’s love for grandiose projects; Parliament continues to reveal a limitless appetite for all kinds of perks; corruption cartels are having a field day under the current government; and county governors have also been shown to have no immunity to the corruption that comes with power.

But in virtually all these respects, we have previously seen much worse. Just ahead of the 1992 general election, all fiscal prudence was tossed out of the window, and interest rates rose much higher than anything we are likely to see now; virtually all our former presidents also had a taste for white elephant projects; MPs have always sought to enhance their benefits; and the county governors may be judged by many to be, essentially, a bunch of incompetent crooks, but most Kenyans would rather retain devolution than go back to the imperial presidency.

So, how exactly are we “dancing on a precipice”?

In my view, there is really only one thing to be feared, going into any Kenyan election. And that is the potential for explosive violence in the Rift Valley: a phenomenon deeply rooted in what one historian termed “a cult of antiquity and a fetish for agriculture”.

I refer here to a localised perception of illegitimacy, attached to the large-scale settlement in the fertile plains of the Rift Valley, of “non-indigenous communities” like the Luhya, Kisii, but above all, the Kikuyu.

These settlement schemes were mostly undertaken during the early years of Independence by the Jomo Kenyatta government, as a matter of historical necessity. But not everyone saw that Kenyatta was really just bowing to the inevitable.

In decades past, there has always been political capital to be gained by local leaders of the two main communities indigenous to the Rift Valley, the Kalenjin and the Maasai, in persuading their supporters to view the arrival of these other communities in “their region” as an annexation very much like the one behind the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there was a concurrent belief within parts of the Maasai and Kalenjin populations that the Rift Valley was the Garden of Eden, until these “outsiders” arrived.

This mind-frame provides a highly toxic environment, in which violence can very easily flare up, and even evolve into the kind of “eliminationist agenda” we saw in 2007-08, targeting specifically the Kikuyu community.

So any development likely to revive these ancient resentments would certainly be cause for grave concern.

But so long as there is peace in the Rift Valley, the rest of all this is just politics as usual.

And as for Mutunga, if there is violence in 2017, he will say he warned us of what was coming. And if there is peace, he can argue that his efforts to create “a strong social movement” are what “saved us from the precipice”.

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