From outhouse to State House: Is it possible in Kenya?

From log cabin to the White House – that is one story about which America’s liberal media and classrooms never cease to boast. It is the charming thing about an unkempt boy called Abraham Lincoln who rose – as black presidential candidate Jesse Jackson recently put it – all the way “from the outhouse to the White House”.

For Kenya’s “democrats”, however, it raises a salient question: If a Ndorobo girl and a Taveta boy are Kenyans, why do we permanently block their way to our “White House”? How constitutional is our constitution when it makes no effort to enable girls and boys from certain communities even to dream of ever becoming our national chief?

Ours, then, is a conspiracy of silence. It quietly bans all otherwise qualified Kenyans – as long as they come from minority communities – from ever ascending to Kenya’s Babel of politics. As in other countries whose leaders swear by the word “democracy” – elective “majoritarianism” is our only idea of democracy.

Where a palpable majority has voted a partisan into the seat of power, the voters – like the thoughtless “multitude” that the Greek New Testament calls hoi polloi – will care nothing about how it uses its mandate.

In the world that a certain Western European class has created in its own image, “democracy” begins and ends inside the election day’s ballot kiosk.

Majoritarianism is never scored by popularising and trying to implement any nationally beneficial ideas. In Kenya, you can score a majority only if you are a member of a very large ethnic community. In our politics, even if you are the very Joe Kadenge of football, you can score that goal only if you are a Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo, Kalenjin or Kamba. Only tribalism can lead you into the majoritarian Ararat.

Though we know it as tribalism, none of us knows how to avoid it.

Though we call it education, our mental upbringing has utterly failed to annihilate the scourge of negative tribalism from our political activities.

SHARPEN INBORN ABILITIES

The value of our “democracy” is that nobody from a small ethnic community will ever be elected Kenya’s president.

For our classrooms have failed to cultivate a thought regime to enable a candidate from a tiny community to obtain a sizable national vote. We have failed to produce a constitution to serve our purposes like the scaffolding to a new building.

That is why our constitutional tenets cannot take any roots in the popular mind.

Our leaders never seem to have any intention to galvanise all our intellectual resources in such a way as to produce a new human being under whose leadership we can compete with other societies to raise Kenya into a techno-intellectual power redoubt.

Can Kenya ever become a superpower through the tribal pin-headedness in which our country abounds, through our tribalist habit of denying our truly gifted and best trained individuals all entry into the only avenues through which they can sharpen their inborn abilities and their training to become our Stephen Hawkings?

Some of Kenya’s sharpest minds are rotting among communities too underprivileged to rise to national attention, communities too small to make any numerical difference in a presidential election. The question is ineluctable: Isn’t there any way in which official Kenya can create political parties based on real social philosophies?

Were you in power, would you try to put paid to associations – such as now dominate Kenya’s political landscape – by which certain individuals seek to gain power and perpetuate themselves in it, not through any demonstrably great ideas, but merely through the numerical strengths of their tribes?
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