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Stop dividing Kenyans on account of age

What you need to know:

  • Seriously: You cannot attack the old people in one political constellation and pretend that your attacks do not apply to their counterparts in your own constellation
  • The Jubilee Alliance must rethink its emerging young-versus-old platform and the shrill rhetoric that conveys it

Different generations of politicians devise different ways of dividing people in order to impose their will on them.

British colonialists made chiefs and tribes, books and churches drivers of their despise-and-dispirit to divide-and-rule creed. Divide-and-rule served the colonial masters and their successors at independence very well.

Politicians always divided Kenyans along tribal lines but, from 1991, they have set community against another, especially in the vote-rich Rift Valley, in pursuit of power.

Today, age will be the jewel in the splinter-and-triumph crown if Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, Mr Danson Mungatana, Mr William Ruto and Mr Najib Balala don’t check their tongues.

I have watched with increasing unease as Mr Francis Kaparo, Mrs Charity Ngilu, Mr Yusuf Haji and Mr Chirau Mwakwere have bravely endured brazen condemnation of older politicians by the quartet at Jubilee Alliance rallies. This came to a head at Tononoka in Mombasa and Kasarani in Nairobi.

Little wonder at Kasarani, subdued Haji and Mwakwere meekly apologised for their age, for being at the same places as the juniors and for seeking positions of leadership as if in supplication to the Jubilee presidential ticket. Please bear in mind that Mr Mwakwere and Mr Haji are sitting Cabinet ministers.

Remember also that Mr Kaparo is the chairman of the Ruto-led United Republican Party (URP).

So, why does 47-year-old Ruto, who is led by a 64-year-old Kaparo, have only disdain and disregard for Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka who is 59? Surely what is good for the Jubilee goose is good for the Cord (Coalition for Reforms and Democracy) gander.

Just as I see the old men behind 50-year-old Kenyatta so also do I see young Mr Ababu Namwamba, Dr Paul Otuoma, Mr Alfred Mutua, Mr Hassan Joho and Mr Charles Kilonzo, to name but five, in Cord. Are they to be categorised as geriatric because their presidential flag-bearer, Mr Raila Odinga, was born in 1945?

If that holds true for Cord then it is quite in order that Mr Mwakwere, Mr Kaparo and Mr Haji be regarded as young men. Isn’t one judged by the company one keeps?

Since Mr Ruto conceded in Parliament that Mr Mwai Kibaki has been a good President, would he want to argue that the President’s is a digital head on analogue shoulders?

Listen, you cannot attack the old people in one political constellation and pretend that your attacks do not apply to their counterparts in your own constellation or the next one.

If the old people in rival constellations are bereft of ideas on account of their age, the same goes for their counterparts in your coalition and to those out of politics.

You are, therefore, deliberately defining, profiling and dividing Kenyans on account of their age. If you blame the ills and evils that bedevil Kenya on old politicians and parade the young as the owners of their treatments and cures, you have neatly divided the country into desirable and lovable young against despicable and unlikeable old.

When American columnist Michael Kinsley declared in 2011 that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was too fat to be president, he passed that verdict on all fat people.

He condemned all fat office holders and all fat people who aspire to high office. Similarly, he could not claim to hold in high esteem those who would elect a fat man president.

How, pray, is Kenya’s politics enriched if, at 54, I am branded an analogue relic unfit to lead in digital Kenya and suited only for Jurassic Park?

What message of hope is passed to young people when old persons are blamed for the hopelessness of joblessness engulfing them?

How are young and old now supposed to relate on social and economic planes?

Are Dr James Mwangi, the Equity Bank boss; Mr Jimnah Mbaru, the former Nairobi Stock Exchange chief; Dr Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General; and Dr Manu Chandaria, the Mabati Rolling Mills chairman; to be role models for the young or figures of hate?

When 48-year-old President Bill Clinton was asked in 1996 if the age of his challenger Bob Dole would be a campaign issue, he gave a smart answer.

Mr Clinton famously replied that he worried more about the age of Bob Dole’s ideas than about his vastly advanced age. Meaning? He would rather debate Bob Dole’s ideas than his age.

The Jubilee Alliance must rethink its emerging young-versus-old platform and the shrill rhetoric that conveys it. It is discriminatory and, therefore, unconstitutional. More importantly, why gain the youth and lose Kenya?