Only peace can drive a nation to prosperity

Many a time, as it may seem, we tend to underestimate the significance of the correlation between peace and human progress.

Prevalent anarchy supplants anxiety and fear in a society, thus blunting the tools that support human development.

Of those tools, peace of mind, hopefulness and a positive mental disposition are fundamental to human progress. Securing peaceful coexistence of communities within a state is, therefore, in essence, paving the way to prosperity.

Let’s now invoke the pertinence of numbers to make a clearer illustration. A 2023 “Global Peace Index (GPI)” report, by Vision of Humanity (VoH), placed Austria, New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark and Iceland, in that order, as the most peaceful countries. VoH is a leading data-driven global organisation that analyses peace, security and development using an index that measures the peacefulness of countries on account of more than 20 quantitative and qualitative parameters, each weighted on a scale of one to five.

Save for New Zealand, the other four countries in the report also fall under the 20 wealthiest. That is according to the well-respected monthly magazine, Global Finance. Peace is the most critical support system and lifeblood to human prosperity and progress.

In a 2014 paper by Caleb Mackatiani, Mercy Imbovah and Navin Imbovah titled “Peace and development in Africa: Prospects and challenges”, peace is viewed as a basic prerequisite for the human development cycle. Without it, economic breakthroughs associated with the exploitation of resources available to a country remain elusive. In other words, the very potential to gain economic success from resources a country is endowed with is gravely undermined by the mere prospect of a conflict, let alone a full-blown war.

That said, building a culture of sustainable peaceful coexistence between communities within our borders and ensuring that communities that live next to our international boundaries maintain good neighbourliness to foster uninterrupted transboundary tranquillity is of supreme importance.

A handful of twisted minds in our midst have in the past muddied our political waters with the intent of riding the crest of man-made anarchy to garner political capital. This, to say the least, is the height of self-obsession and disregard for the principle of the greater good, to which any leader worth their salt should aspire.

Another major cause of the breakdown of peace is shared yet oft-scarce resources—such as water and pasture. The age-old conundrum has stalked the livestock sub-sector since time immemorial. The reasons behind it are no longer alien to us. The time has come for us to commit resources to close the yawning resource gap, find ways of forcing the communities to unlearn objectionable ways of dealing with looming conflicts and encourage them to diversify their sources of income through value-chain developments.

Besides, in this day and age of widespread use of modern information technology, we have no excuse for continuing benighted practices in the name of culture. One of these is the theft of livestock that we have euphemised as “rustling”, ostensibly to mute the horrid nature of the underlying criminal activity.

All in all, we must not forget that peace does not build itself; human beings do.

Mr Gikuru is an advocate of the High Court of Kenya. @GikuruSK