In 2008, after the PEV, I joined my Comrade Njeri Kabeberi in their CMD-Kenya Uwiano Program. What we did was to get some 27 male and female adult residents of Bondo Constituency to travel to and live in Kieni constituency in Nyeri for 14 days and nights and then got the same 27 hosts in Kieni to travel and be hosted by their counterparts in Bondo for 14 days (I think it was 21 days, will need to confirm).
At the end of the Bondo residents stay in Kieni Nyeri, we gathered comments and feedback before they traveled to Bondo to prepare to host their visitors from Nyeri. One Mzee from Bondo told us how amazing the Kieni people were but was particularly impressed by their access to markets for their milk, vegetables and such like. Generally, they envied their Kieni counterparts for the awesome economic and commercial networks they had. Oburu Odinga was the Bondo MP at this time. The Luo party generally found their Kikuyu hosts to be very pleasant, hardworking people. They wondered what had made them dislike Kikuyus so strong all these years!
Time came for the 27 from Kieni to visit Bondo. A story is told of how one night a gentleman from Kieni had opened the door to go out and relief himself at the pit-latrine outside the house but burst back in and locked the door in a huff to the alarm and concern of his host. The host woke up quickly to check what the matter was. The Kieni gentleman in his mid-fifties I think narrated how he had gone out only to see so many witches carrying lanterns and had run back into the house to escape being captured and given to the Luo gods as a Kafara.
The Bondo host, (whose house was in Usenge past the Usenge High School, very near to PLO Lumumba’s home facing the Lake) so upset that witches who are unheard of in the area had come to kill his Kikuyu visitor went out with a machete (panga) and looked all over the compound and could not see anyone. He came back and fetched his Kieni visitor who on stepping out saw the witches once again and wanted to run back in, only for the host to hold his hand and tell him that those had not been witches but Luo fishermen in the Lake fishing at night.
The following morning the Kieni visitor still traumatized inquired from his hosts when then Luos slept if they worked in the night and then spent the whole day repairing the nets, washing and drying the fish and selling it! He concluded that Luos are probably the hardest working group of Kenyans, yet he had been brought up being told that Luos were the laziest Kenyans, and that this is why they were poor!
In the final workshop with the two sets of Kenyans in Nairobi, where their two MPs Oburu Jaoko Oburu Odinga and Nemesius Warugongo were ( I have never stopped wondering where the former MP’s parent got this name and why they chose it for their son), this gentleman insisted that there was something the government was doing to ensure that Luos do not prosper. Of course, I reflected on this and told them that this was the meaning and impact of what we call the system (the laws, policies, programs, allocations, practices, the education etc that have been put in place to get things done in a certain way and sustained that way). When you hear people say that Raila has not done this or that for his people of Luo Nyanza or of Kibra, just know that the one saying that is an ignorant and brainwashed man or woman. What Kenyatta and Moi did in the Gusii area, in Kalenjin country, in Kikuyu country, in Embu and Meru country was to set up tea, coffee, pyrethrum, milk, potato aggregation and development systems including factories for these ethnic communities because both Kenyatta and Moi saw these communities as politically correct ethnic communities. Moi later fell out with the Kikuyu elite and wanted to destroy the systems that Kenyatta had set up. Moi’s attempt to destroy the coffee, tea, milk and economic systems led to bloodshed in Central Kenya. in the Coffee Sector, things became extremely ugly to the extent where sons had ganged up against their fathers. I spent two years in the Kikuyu country as a researcher and saw very violent producer conflicts that will not be erased from my memory.
As a young man from Kisii arriving in Homa Bay School in 1990 and then Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Ouko gets killed within a week or two, I was shocked by the lack of roads, factories, markets and any commercial agricultural activities including lack of fishing systems across the Lake region. What the Kenyatta and then the Moi administrations did to Luo Nyanza was to destroy the region’s capability to be economically viable. The cotton ginneries that Oginga Odinga had managed to get started while he and Tom Mboya were still in government were crippled by lack of operating capital and marketing as well as business systems. For thirty years until Raila entered the NDP-KANU cooperation, Luo Nyanza didn’t even have basic road infrastructure. Our Science, debating or sports tours from Homa Bay to Kisumu used to take us nearly two and half hours to cover the 73-kilometer distance between Homa Bay and Katito while inhaling lots of dust for good measure.
Listening to MP Kipchumba Sudi speak over the weekend about wajaluo wajinga who are doing maandamano and destroying what he called their only town Kisumu, my memories came flashing back to the time I first went to Usenge to bury Mr Ben Okello Lobengula our history teacher in Homa Bay School. Previously I had only been to Siaya Town where my Dad was working as an education Officer. What I saw at Usenge was a certain level of poverty and deprivation that was difficult to explain. Except for the millet ugali that was being harvested and used to cook ugali to eat omena with, there was hardly any tangible source of income in the general area. MP Sudi is only the latest of the purveyors of a narrative against the Luo people of Kenya. This narrative is an ideological narrative that has been weaved over decades by the Kikuyu and Kalenjin elite and used conveniently from time to time by Raila Odinga’s detractors to defeat every important national discussion that makes the ruling elite uncomfortable. That narrative is very simple: Raila has controlled Luos like zombies, they are poor because of his style of politics, Raila and Jaramogi’s stranglehold over the Luo should be ended, these are power thirsty and power-hungry men who will sacrifice their own people in order to get power at all costs, so goes the narrative. Eliud Owalo, Tuju and so many others before them have done it for the Kikuyu-Kalenjin elite.
So when Kenyans rise up to demand for justice and accountability, especially electoral justice the government of the day ( GoTD) quickly frames that demand as a Luo demand whose only intention is to get Raila to access power. However, in 2007/8 when Ruto was with Raila (and I was right in the center of that campaign) he didn’t think it was a Luo affair or a Raila affair. Instead, at the time, he saw it as his and their ODM fight for justice and the truth. Martha Karua at the time was on the government side and she and Kimunya basically framed it as a Raila-Luo unbridled ambition to grab power at all costs. Kimunya in wanting to shut Raila from asking questions around the ownership of Mobitelea which Michuki was privatizing as Minister for Communication and Transport at that time even threw a barb at Raila Odinga, the Prime Minister, that the NSE was not a fish market and therefore he didnt expect Raila to understand a lot about how the Stock Exchange worked. I am writing this reflection because Martha Karua has just been appointed to lead the Azimio negotiations with government over what they say is Azimio’s presidential victory that was robbed from them by Ruto/UDA working with Western powers.
There is an overwhelming sense of illiteracy and brainwashing that so many Kenyans continue to suffer that does not let even university graduates to understand how the world around them works. Which is how our wonderful lawyers led by the Late SC Nzamba Kitonga and Dr Ekuru Aukot working with Dr Abdikadir Mohamed (our Harvard graduate) ended up giving us a Presidential system of government against the good counsel from Prof Yash Pal Ghai who kept insisting that a Parliamentary system as was in the Bomas draft would serve our country better than a Presidential system. After three elections under the COK 2010, it now is clear that a Presidential system of government is not good for Kenya. But because Kalenjin and Kikuyu/GEMA elites have had power since independence and are now the two ethnic communities with the kind of political money that can buy and keep the presidency between the two sets of elites, they do not want us to talk about the defectiveness of the system of government the constitution set up. They now describe our only problem as Raila who refuses to accept election results. Moses Kuria is the chief purveyor of this narrative.
Friends, we need to sort out the Kenyan question earnestly so that we can focus on the core agenda of decolonization of our country and deconstructing the structures and systems that the White supremacists set up to continue exploiting us long after they left Kenya. We cannot begin the work of confronting the neoliberal and neocolonial system if we are still being gaslighted at home by the Rutoists, the Gachagua and Ichungwaists, the UDAnites.
Our country must stop putting up with this Gachagua drivel and let him know that we know how the Kikuyu and Kalenjin elites plan to set up our peoples against each other in order to keep rotate the presidency between the KK alliance only to give token ministries to Luyhas and Giriamas and Kambas etc as they keep the real money ministries and dockets within the hold of the Kikuyu and Kalenjin barons and therefore ensure that its only the elite of these two groups that can afford to finance the presidential auctions election cycle after election cycle. I do not know why people can’t see that the likes of Ababu Namwamba are out there in Sports and heritage ministries whereas the Murkomen’s and Ndungu’s are at Roads and Treasury. Who is at Energy and Petroleum?
We need to deal with these system preserving narratives so that we unite all Kenyans in concluding the Kenyan political question and then embark on the Kenyan economic reconstruction agenda in the 4th Industrial revolution.
Omiyo this so called Bi-partisan parliamentary process will not even begin to address the ailment Kenya continues to suffer. What is sad is that Political Science Departments, social science departments across the country’s universities are not even helping to inform Kenyans what the issue is. So now the national discourse is on how Maandamano should be restricted so that Kikuyu businesses in Nairobi do not get disturbed. Nowhere is the discussion on how to preserve the Kenyan State from imploding, yet Dr David Ndii was mouthing this “Kenya is an abusive marriage” story so wildly and loudly only 58 months ago but now sees nothing structurally and systemically flowed with the UDA fascist system, policies and practices.
By Cyprian Nyamwamu
