BBI was not inaugurated with sword, let’s not fight

President Uhuru Kenyatta (centre), Deputy President William Ruto (left) and opposition leader and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga during the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report launch in Nairobi.

Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • There are those who wished the President should have joined Kenya Power in keeping us in the dark over the document.
  • Whatever the camp you ascribe to, one thing is clear: the report has come at a time Kenya is battling an upsurge of Covid cases.
  • The peace that we enjoy right now needs to be sustained; this is not the time to settle long-festering political scores.

The Building Bridges Initiative report we have been waiting for was finally released this week. It marks the end of years of patience and anxiety; we are now left with the stadium in Kamariny to compete with the second coming of Jesus on who shall come second. 

The launch was greeted with mixed reaction. There are those who wished the President should have joined Kenya Power in keeping us in the dark over the document.

Others asked for change but said they didn’t have money now for a referendum. We are yet to hear from those who have made a career out of sitting on the fence, as the BBI report is not clear on whether the new seats shall be created from wood and barbed wire.

Whatever the camp you ascribe to, one thing is clear: the report has come at a time Kenya is battling an upsurge of Covid cases.

We would have wished that it waited for the government to battle one pandemic at a time, but it seems officials want to demonstrate that they can chew gum and dance to Jerusalema at the same time. Now that we can’t spoil their party, we wish to state as follows: 

Kenyans are tired of the politics of antagonism. We know insults reel off the mouths of politicians faster than service delivery, but Kenyans are fed up with watching politicians tear into each other over a document that wasn’t inaugurated with a sword.

Keep calm and wait

The peace that we enjoy right now needs to be sustained; this is not the time to settle long-festering political scores. The only fight Kenyans are going to entertain is on ignorance, poverty and Covid-19.

If we can’t agree on the contents of the BBI report, may we never turn the disagreement into a popularity contest on who has the most number of hecklers on social media.

It is the BBI contents we will be voting for, not individuals supporting or opposing it.

If you do not like the shape of someone’s nose and the BBI secretariat did not register your petition to God, the honourable thing to do is to keep calm and wait for the IEBC to sound the trumpet for Judgment Day.

The 2010 Constitution we are about to massage was given to us through flowing blood and sorrowful tears.

There are people who died for this Constitution so that the rest of us may live in a better Kenya.

While some politicians would want Kenyans to forget their history and those who fought for constitutional freedoms, Covid-19 has given us a perfect opportunity to take our children through history lessons, now that they are at home and aren’t playing with the map of Kenya.

We are still smarting from a pandemic that infected our pockets with poverty, and left us living in fear of health monsters.

Let us not use the BBI report to say hurtful things to one another and aggravate the pain of suffering Kenyans.

Teach our children

If the BBI won’t solve our problems, let politicians not compound it with their running mouths and wheelbarrow-riding contests.

We live in a fragile country that easily gets edgy whenever politicians take hardline positions on national issues.

The last time we asked the International Criminal Court to send a strong message that crime doesn’t pay, we marched to The Hague and called the ICC bad names.

We must teach our children how far Kenya has come because, if we don’t ,politicians will force us to repeat that class.

There is no way the ICC would come back to help us sip the hot porridge that scalded their tongue. If we can’t put our house in order, our neighbours will watch us burn and say we asked for it.