Only love can reboot us

When Kenya Shujaa sevens rugby team won the Singapore Sevens cup on Sunday, April 17, 2016, we celebrated as a nation. Everyone was talking about it and congratulating them on social media. When Kenya athletes broke records at the Limassol marathon on Sunday, March 19 we again celebrated as a nation. We were all proud of their victory. We called them Kenyans without caring/naming what tribe or what part of the country they came from. Where does this love go during an election year?

The “msimu wa siasa” is here and you can barely walk a meter without seeing the face of a Kenyan citizen in a poster asking for your votes. Are they worth our votes? We live in a country where the political class has made us political tribal puppets for their own selfish political gains.

In a country where you can only be a Jubilee or Nasa supporter. This deeply influenced by which tribe you come from. We don’t care about what kind of leader he or she is instead we care about who is our own.

We don’t care who will reduce poverty, increase infrastructure, and reduce corruption rather we only care about tribesmen. We are ignoramuses that we want to complain about the high poverty levels, poor infrastructure and corruption but we are willing to vote in the same old fogies who lied to us five years ago who are bloating from corruption and mediocrity.

Truth be told the political class cannot survive without them dividing us with our tribes. What we don’t know or rather ignore is Tribalism is our enemy of progress. We need to change this. We need to stop getting used by selfish leaders. What they do is put us in a box and make us not to think clearly. We need to change the narrative. New narratives need to replace old ones. What are the new narratives?

R.Burkminster once said: Never change things by fighting existing reality, to change things build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. The new narrative is for us Kenyans to be one and realise that you don’t have to be a Jubilee or Cord supporter. No more backward thinking. You have to be a supporter of leadership that is people oriented, development oriented, change oriented. We need to see much more than our ethnicity and tribe and think as a nation. Think as Kenya. We are the instruments of change (voters). Democracy doesn’t work unless you participate.

This will be our first step towards ending tribalism and to a better Kenya. We are the change that we seek. Be the change that you wish to see in the world. If we are united, they (politicians) will not divide us. I know we can do it if we all take a stand.