Will the imperial West allow the global South to extricate itself from the influences of the metropoles? Will African countries embark on nation-building in their own image and likeness? The excitement about the king's coming was much ado about nothing.
The legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism has always stood in the path to genuine nationhood. Their policy of divide and rule was so successful in a negative way that to date, we are yet to fully extricate ourselves from its stranglehold. All the talk about kingpins is the clearest manifestation that the ethnic cleavages opened during the colonial enterprise are still open.
Kenya, as we know it today, was first a property of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEACO). Their primary motive was extraction of resources and secondly to ward of competition from other European powers over the hinterland of the East Africa Coast. As such, what we view as the markers of development today; roads, railway and other monuments, were only incidental to that colonial enterprise.
When IBEACO set off to construct the Kenya- Uganda railway (the lunatic line), it was to make it easy to extract the labour of the African people while at the same time dispossessing the African people, not only of their land and cattle, but also of their culture and civilisation. When the African leaders started to come together to agitate for the rolling back of the veil of oppression that was colonialism, they were told they could only organise politically within their localities.
After independence, they helped prop up administrations that, like them, did not give a care about human rights and rule of law.
All that mattered was stability that could encourage the good old extraction. But the most damaging thing to project Kenya was the fusion between the interests of the departing colonial masters and that of insecure but ambitious political elite sitting at the head of what was once the colonial administrative bureaucracy. These political elite out of eagerness for acceptability by the western powers adopted and domesticated the very same colonial edifice that had stripped naked, jailed, tortured and even killed the African people.
When President Jomo Kenyatta talked about forgiving but not forgetting, right in the nerve centre of what was once 'The Kenya white highlands', he was in effect telling the settler community that he was willing to do business with them.
How would you forgive the massive land alienation and dispossession that the British presided over if you were not a perpetuation of the misdeeds of the empire? The land redistribution program was then designed to further punish those who had viciously fought the British.
Should we blame them forever for our problems? We would become nothing but crybabies. We must learn to evade the all too obvious traps that they have always laid on our paths. See how, after our attempt to renew ourselves through a new constitution, they skillfully set that rat trap called ICC.
The ICC process extinguished all the goodwill that should have helped us reset the tone of the Second Republic. Self-preservation kicked into overdrive. Subterfuge and counter-subterfuge became the order of the day. The legislations that were intended to operationalise the constitution were not given the much needed foresight.
The drafts of those bills were construed or misconstrued through the lenses of the 2013 elections and revenge-seeking. I will risk and speculate that the plunder of the 2013-2017 period was in part due to the pound of flesh that international mercenaries were extracting out of the ICC process. The next five years, were then taken over by personality fights stemming from the fallout of the previous five years. Those personality fights took us to 2022 elections with its ugly post-election fallout that we are still trying to apply a salve on through the National dialogue.
-Mr. Mwaga is Convenor, Inter Parties Youth Forum. kidimwaga@gmail.com
