Moses Kuria is a war monger out to introduce a Culture of Violence

Under what conditions, if any, can violent action be said to be “legitimate?”Violence; physical or verbal is destructive and degrading. When people use violence against one another, and leaders try to portray their cause as legitimate before the court of public opinion then we need to listen to the trumpets that are being blown

It is not easy to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable violence, legitimate or illegitimate violence, or good or bad forms or uses of violence and force. However violence whether good or bad it’s always tragic. This is why we must question Moses Kuria’s intentions to introduce the Kenya Stand Your Ground Bill that will justify violence in the name of self-defence.

Violence in Kenyan politics is not unheard of and it tends to pick up during the electioneering period like the one we are headed into. It has reared its ugly head since the infancy of multi-party politics of 1992 and has been a factor in every election ever since. It is, therefore, appalling when a Member of Parliament of Moses Kuria’s caliber tries to enshrine violence through back door into the constitution.

Moses Kuria should know better and stop pretending as though he was on planet Jupiter when this country was burning in 2007/2008 post-election violence. We have those who started off the violence and those who responded in retaliation-this is what he is calling self-defence. We hope he remembers how the economy went down into the drains and all of us were affected. I hope he remembers that 1300 innocent Kenyans lost their lives, we can’t tell who was the aggressor and who was acting in self-defence-bottom line they all died.

Any society that condones and justifies violence whether by the civilians or the state is a decaying society. Kenya should be wary of leaders who are out to introduce a culture of violence. It's easy to reject the initiation of violence against one's neighbour but it's ironic that the people arbitrarily and freely anoint politicians with monopoly power to initiate violence against the Kenyan people—practically at will. We must not legitimize Moses Kuria’s selfish interests that can easily make us a pariah state. He is a politician with loose lips that can easily sink a ship because one never knows who is going to hear what he says or how they will use what they hear. We all remember his call for one political leader to be assassinated; we recall vividly his firm instructions to the youth in Gatundu to chop off the heads of those who were opposed to the NYS initiative. Kuria acts like a hardened war monger and we shouldn’t even for a second allow him to introduce masks in the constitution that he can hide behind.

We have rule of law and only cowards without morals and political courage would blur the line between right and wrong. The fact that we could not conceivably belong to the same political party, the same socio-economic strata, share the same religious or sexual interests make it inevitable that, beyond all the obvious differences, we are still Kenyans. Therefore, no political party affiliation should become mightier than the power of our common heritage or emerge more precious than the sacredness of citizenship. For, if we are Kenyans first, then we must not allow anyone to convince us to join the crusade to destroy our country through violence.