Kenya: Sword of repression still hangs over us

It’s March again when the nightly angel of tyranny draws her long knives to slay voices speaking against oppression and corruption and to silence those willing to stand firm for our freedoms.

The Russians have just buried Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, who dared raise his voice against Putin.

Last month, we remembered Malcolm X, Pio Gama Pinto and Robert Ouko. 

On March 2, 1975, our collective naivety as a young republic was crushed when Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (JM) was assassinated.

That particular slaying of a young, egalitarian politician slowly guided us into an era of political and economic suppression that only those with an intrepid spirit of resistance survived.

A reader, while eulogizing Kariuki, recalled the shrill song, Woi, woi, JM, and again remembered how despotism glided in circles like a hawk over our national skies during those days.

Marcus Brutus led the “Ides of March” on this very month to slay Julius Caesar in what Shakespeare reminds us, “Though a noble deed by a noble Roman against a tyrant, proved futile to bring political change by violence, and Rome was destroyed.”

We are always reminded that those who do not learn from History are doomed to repeat it.

So what is it as a country that we have learned from these events? If you asked me, nothing.

 Whenever reports are churned out showing the latest corruption rankings, we are always at the bottom of the indices.

And it is not even a matter of understanding NGO jargon to know how corrupt we are; look around you and you will see corruption in the police, hospitals, higher institutions of learning, parliamentary commissions, parastatals... everywhere.

Our number one enemy, terrorism, is powered by the corruption within our borders.

And yet, as a country, we ridicule the few heroes who stand to fight for accountability, and envy the villains with ill-gotten wealth who, like the biblical Pharisees, flaunt it shamelessly and sneer at us as we beg at their feet, and sing poetry in their courts of plunder.

The little man that has mockingly been branded Safara sees nothing wrong with the plunder at the top.

He lionises those who have been able to get there, wishing that he could also reach the berries and avail himself of some.

 

Whatever meat was left on the bones of our moral body, was gnawed away by our panda mbegu religious leaders – those that Marx warned us of more than a century ago – and they, too, have joined politicians at the high table, feasting on whatever spoils that are left of Kenya.

Gone are the wonderful days when university students and their dons led the struggle for pluralism.

The days when intellectual debates fiercely radiated from lecture halls, with everyone craving to contribute to a better society.

We now watch thugs in expensive suits, speaking broken English, while masquerading as the dominant voices of our intelligentsia.

Future leaders whose destiny is to lead us from woe to death.

March is also the month we deservedly celebrate women who have played a great role in our general wellbeing.

But a friend wondered about the negations we are seeing by a youthful cadre of lasses, the so-called socialites and exhibitionists, who have no qualms reducing the gains made by latter-day feminists in empowering women.  For years, women struggled to take their rightful place as equals to men and deserving to take part in national building without discrimination.

But this endeavour has been quickly negated by those willing to use their bodies as sex tools for everyone to ogle at and disrespect.

I believe the heroes I mentioned at the beginning are not the only ones that history will record.

There are others out there, no matter how few, who are seeing the dangers lurking in the shadows and are willing to sacrifice for a better country no matter the pain.

For if we lack such foresighted individuals with the integrity to stand for that which is right, then I am afraid our nation will crash pretty hard, like a workman’s tongue crushing a ball of ugali against the upper roof of his mouth!