Yet every citizen ought to ask himself this question, “Where is Kenya going?” We should especially inquire about our personal contribution to where the country is, and where it is headed. The answers are resident in our individual souls and in our collective national soul. If we should find them today, we will be saved from having to say to God tomorrow, “God, how did we get here?” Of course God will tell us, “You brought yourselves here. You came of your own free accord, passport and transport.”
These past few months have been most unnerving. There has been violence here, violence there, violence everywhere. And it is not just violence. It is planned violence that smacks of political organisation, motive and prospect. But it is not just political. It is ethnic. Does the tribal beast that resides in our souls tend to be so powerful, so overmastering? Does it rule the intellectual and the feeble angel within? Does it threaten to eat up everybody and everything around it, and even eat up itself, too?
That is the impression you get when you, predictably, see political top cats from any one tribe digging in to apologise for merchants of terror from the tribe.
I need not mention any specific example. The late Jean Marie Seroney of Tinderet taught us in 1975 that is useless to give examples of the obvious.
Still, if you are in doubt, thump through the back numbers of our papers over the past three months. It is a tale of unmitigated murder and mayhem.
So, where is this country going? Could we be counting our footsteps towards the failed State and the final Armageddon? Failed States have often begun with “cantonisation” of the nation into unofficial fiefdoms. Each fiefdom assembles around a tribal leader.
He is also the de facto fiefdom spokesperson. The tribe is encouraged to place itself above all other institutions and concerns in the land. But equally significant, members of the tribe surrender their right to think and make decisions to the tribal lord. You are either with him or you will perish, for you are a traitor if you are not with him.
Examples from Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Burundi, Serbia and Bosnia, show the population does not think. It has no right to think, it must not think. This is the perfect negation of Thomas Hobbes’ notion of the Leviathan. You will recall that Hobbes has made the argument for a social contract between the rulers and the ruled.
He has argued that wars could be averted through creation of strong central Governments. In essence, the individual surrenders his rights and liberties to the State. You restrain yourself from exercising your liberty. You instead allow the State to do it for you.
In the process, the State protects you against others, even as it protects others against you. This way, war is averted. You are then assured of a more contended life in the place of an otherwise anarchic existence, where life is “a permanent all against all war.” You are spared a “nasty, short and brutish” life.
But do we seem to be turning this argument on its head? Have we opted to restrain ourselves from thinking and surrendered this right not to a powerful central Government but a strong tribal overlord?
Surrender of the faculty of thought to the tribal chief, or to the tribal assembly for that matter, would seem to be the first step towards a return to the state of nature – to the all against all tribal warfare. For, the tribal overlord seems to be ruled by atavistic instincts. He has a natural thrust towards violence. It would be healthy for us to worry about such persons, but only if we can still think. My foremost worry today is that we have lost the capacity to think, worse still to worry. This is except for those who ask, “Where is this country going?”
It ought to worry us when elected Members of Parliament brazenly bask in the glory of TV cameras to apologise for the terrorist.
Kenyans are blasted to smithereens as they go about their business in a city slum.
The police try to swing into action. The outcome is outcry from tribal politicians. Innocent soldiers are killed in cold blood.
The mayhem that follows betrays a failing Sate. Who would have thought of anybody touching an innocent soldier?
Policemen go out to reign in cattle thieves. The outcome is catastrophic. Officers are killed like locusts. Politicians alternately smile and fume before TV cameras as they apologise for the killers. A failed State is essentially one whose institutions have ground to a halt. When it becomes normal for militias to kill your policemen like locusts, you are becoming a fragile State and definitively orbiting towards State failure.
When it becomes normal for your soldiers to be casually killed in the streets of Garissa. When civilians hurl wild objects at soldiers.
When bombs explode in public transport. When you must be frisked before entering the Church and the hospital.
When the top cats in the Police Department are tight lipped on massacre in Baragoi. When the Defence Minister says it is ‘stupid’ to ask him a question on defence. Know that trouble is at hand.
These are difficult dilemmas for any nation. But such is the conduct of a State in atrophy.
The primary goal of any State is to provide its citizens the primary good of security. The State secures the borders from external assault. It ensures that there is no internal conflict. Other public goods can only follow.
Where did the rain start beating us? It started where you were when you first surrendered your right to think to the tribal Leviathan. We can still be saved if we start thinking again.
The writer is a publishing editor and advisor on public and media relations
www.doitadigital.com