‘Handshake’ best thing for Kenya

Retirement, unless you are sickly, is a bad thing. I have tried it for a full four months and I can tell you from experience that it is not for me or any man with any juice left in him.

And a man who wishes another man retirement is a witchdoctor. Therefore, all those people calling on Mr Raila Odinga to retire are witchdoctors.

Insularity, a refusal to admit gifted outsiders into your sanctums, is the biggest threat to human progress and the reason why, in my opinion, Kenya Kwanza will fail in its programme for the development of the country. My childhood friend, Dr Roy Bundi Mugiira, who has many degrees, some of them Chinese, once taught me some things which have lived with me all these years. 

He taught me the value of the grilled tomato and the right way to make it: You expose it to high temperature in the presence of oil, and the good stuff is released and dissolves in the oil so when you eat the tomato, you get a kick of anti-oxidants.

He also taught me that the true goodness of fruits comes on its own not when each is eaten singly but when they are mixed into a motley. They not only interact and provide a broad range of benefits, and a full arsenal of goodness, but also each contributes something different, supplementing what is contained in another.

In my own area of ancient academic interest, linguistics, we used to talk about Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures of 1957 the way, in the old days, students of economic planning and DOs in training—like DP Rigathi Gachagua once was, the Lord bless his red gums—talk about “Sessional Paper No 10 of 1965”, “African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya”: A shower of fresh ideas on an otherwise dry, parched field.

Linguistics made progress from an infusion of people from other disciplines, particularly mathematics. New tools for the analysis and description of language systems boosted linguistics as an exciting discipline of study and it advanced our understanding of how we produce, and use, language.

When you apply a big brain to a small task, you get progress. However, the complexity of stuff is such that specialists—folk who know a hell of a lot about a tiny thing—are incapable of solving a complex problem whose big buttocks straddle many touchpoints (if you know what I mean). That’s the whole idea behind the multi-disciplinary study: A salad of experts, contributing diverse scholarship to clobber a problem. Even in security circles, we use multi-agency teams to great effect in killing terrorists and, according to the politicians, assassinating innocent and blameless folk in containers.

In other words, the days of one wise man, one fountain of cleverness, sitting in his attic with a quill, parchment and an abacus, to solve humanity’s problems are long gone. This is why I find the current pretence that a ‘handshake’, or government of national unity, is a bad thing, shambolic beyond belief. 

Beneficial

First of all, a handshake between President William Ruto and opposition leader Raila Odinga is the smartest, most mature and most beneficial thing that could happen to Kenya.

The Kenya Kwanza winner-take-all fantasy might succeed in creating a stable polity in cuckoo land or some other wonderland but not in Kenya, which is hostage to venal elites. Only a balanced, inclusive system—where the government respects those outside it—can achieve that. A narrow government consumed by daily conflict, revenge, abuse from the podium and disrespect for other leaders will never create stable politics.

And service to country should be open to all; it should not be an exclusive reward for the supporters of a party. This mantra against a handshake is just typical Kenyan corruption; just a means for a section of the maggot elite to corner access to jobs and public funds. Kenyans will do anything to create a shortcut to quick wealth and big jobs: Tribalism, bribery, witchcraft, trickery and these new-found bogus pretensions to political purity. 

Kenya Kwanza was controversially declared the winner with a thin and contested margin. That is not a very strong platform, however many speeches we make, to exclude the rest of the country from government.

Can you imagine the kind of formidable government the President would form if he forgot, for a minute, the next election and rewarding cronies and formed a government on the basis of ability, experience, and youthful energy made up of Kenyans from every walk of life? You can winnow like beans a roomful of Oscar Sudis—a great guy whom I respect—and end up with a 90kg bag of teeth but hardly a handful of useful talent.

I’m all for a handshake, for an inclusive, tolerant, peaceful, respectful, law-abiding government. Kenya Kwanza must remember that government is not a title deed that you need to hide from your wife and allow Kenyans to be part of building their country. This government of Kenya Kwanza, by Kenya Kwanza, for Kenya Kwanza is an even worse idea than retirement.

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