All these bravado, false humility will only hurt us

By Charles Kanjama

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Soon after high school, I got into the habit of visiting a basketball court for casual Sunday sport. I was rather below the average height on the court, and though shorter players typically make good dribblers, the height disadvantage at the board easily resulted in an inferiority complex.

Those were the days when the popular but only 5-foot-3 Muggsy Bogues of the Charlotte Hornets excelled in America’s top NBA league amongst giant-sized players. Bogues “the midget” proved to the vertically challenged that it took guts and confidence more than mere vertical advantage to succeed.

Basketball being a team sport, our casual Sunday players would casually form teams as they arrived on the court, with a mix of familiars, strangers and semi-strangers joining up for love of the game.

And partly due to false humility, I would never hold myself forward and would wait for the team captains of the day to select me into any team. So I would occasionally find myself left out as the teams formed.

One evening after the game, a friend asked: “So Kanjama, how was it today?” I responded, a bit wretchedly: “The good guys did not select me today, so it was rather boring...”

My friend Martin then gave me some brilliant advice: “You know Kanjama, you first have to be confident in yourself, before you can expect others to become confident in you. So show confidence when you get onto the court and it will be fine.”

Observing the recent wretched debate between the pro-ICC and the anti-ICC crowd, I’ve been forced to recall that experience.

Because it’s been miserable listening to both camps arguing their heads off, unable to come to a middle ground, and yet both showing wretched timidity and false humility about Kenya. And worst of all, this comes just a few weeks before our 50th anniversary celebrations.

The anti-ICC crowd, even as they pretend lack of care about what Western nations think, manifest a great spirit of timidity. They are quick to laud perceived foreign supporters, to trumpet Asian nations like China, and opponents of Western hegemony like Russia. They exhibit a false bravado as they quip, “We don’t need America or England.”

They claim that Western nations are failing even as they desperately seek to court the international institutions these nations dominate to enable deferral of the pending ICC trials.

The pro-ICC crowd is no better. They timidly exclaim that Kenya is a midget in international affairs and will go into intensive care should any Western nation release a cough. Their self-deprecation extends to appealing piteously to foreign nations for intervention against “African despots” and to predicting doom unless we dance avidly to the tune of foreign agendas.

Surprisingly, they view it a mark of patriotism to tear down their country in world affairs, something you are unlikely to see their heroes from the West ever doing.

In the jungle, any animal that projects weakness cannot survive. The food-fight between the pro- and anti-ICC camps is simply projecting weakness to the international community. And you wonder why foreign nations are all waiting in the wings like patient scavengers, aware that regardless of which side wins this ICC debate, we all lose, and they take the spoils.

It is enough to make a person go mad. This inability to solve our domestic challenges without calling big brother for support is pathetic.

Both the Jubilee team running round the world pleading for help to make ICC go away, and the NGO-led opposition nourishing on foreign money and agenda to oppose Jubilee every step of the way deserve a bush-full of barbs. “Enough!” I say.

They are fighting a blood sport in which the moral high ground was long since vacated. Ask yourself, what happens if civil society succeeds in isolating the Jubilee government from the international community?

Will that ensure justice for the victims? Wouldn’t their end game merely radicalise Kenya and entrench the impunity they loudly mourn about? And what happens if instead Jubilee succeeds in manipulating the ICC trials through politics, or ignores ICC altogether by default? Will that aid Kenya in the short or long-term?

It seems clear that one thing will happen, either way.

Whether Uhuru goes to The Hague or chooses not to, Kenya’s focus on development will suffer for the next four years, maybe ten.

Maybe we all want to get to the 2017 elections thrilling in the Schadenfreude of collective punishment, and the mutual antipathy of “I told you so”. So be it. But if so, the 2017 elections will be a desperate affair with no pleasant choices.