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​Kenya Elections 2017: A crisis is rooted in Euro-American capitalist psychosis

26/10/2017

30 Comments

 
PictureVillage Life. Borrowed from: Potentash
​In the last few days, in the run up of the repeat “election” that takes place today, the business community has gone full throttle in bombarding Kenyans with the idea that the elections have cost the economy too much. The latest in this messaging came from the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, which released a statement saying that 700bn shillings have been lost over the last four months. In other words, democracy is too expensive for Africans.

​Similarly, it is clear that the US, its embassy and media, have taken the side of the current government, although with less subtlety than the business community. The US Ambassador’s statements, for example, suggest that Kenyans should not set a high standard for Kenya’s electoral body, and instead be grateful that we’ve come this far in the democratic process.

Several critics of this reasoning have pointed to the amnesia on the impact of Kenya’s runaway corruption, government appetite for borrowing for unprofitable projects, and labor strife, on the economy. Others point to the military and corporate interests that the US is defending under the cover of concern about democracy in Kenya.

Clearly, both the US and the business sector have taken the president’s side against the people of Kenya, and against the principle of justice. The mainly private mainstream media, and even its American counterparts like NPR and the New York Times, have persistently given the government views of the election and avoided contrary views as much as possible. However, the American media was forced to soften its anti-Raila stance after the Supreme Court ordered a repeat of the presidential elections.

What is surprising, though, is that at a similar moment in the 1990s, the US and the business sector supported the struggle for democracy against the Moi government. The media was open to reporting the pro-democracy movement in a way that they are not doing now. Indeed, in their replies to Ambassador Bob Godec’s tweets, several Kenyans remember the days when one of the previous ambassadors, Smith Hempstone, supported the democratic struggles during the Moi presidency. 

What accounts for this difference? Why do the West and the business sector not support Moi, but now support the current president, even when all evidence points to the fact that his regime has been worse for the economy? 

The answer can be attributed to one factor: tribe. The current president is Kikuyu, and Moi was not.

Capitalism, ethnicity and instability

In 2004, Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, published a book World on fire, in which she argued that the West creates global instability by establishing a schism between a market-dominant minority ethnic group, which controls wealth and power, and a majority, to whom it ascribes democracy. Kenya features prominently in the book, with the Kikuyu as the market-dominant minority. Everywhere Euro-America plants two feet, one which is capitalism and the other which is democracy, countries become fractured because the impoverished majority turns to ethnic hatred to fight against a minority that dominates capital. The result is is mass killings and sometimes worse, genocide.

While Prof Chua was on point to connect democracy to ethnic hatred, there are major weaknesses in her book. One, her arguments rely on a flawed knowledge of African history. Two, because the book's goal is to redeem capitalism, rather than attack it, it fails to see that at the core of capitalism is white supremacy. In other words, whites are the market-dominant minority ethnic group. In the United States, for instance, European settlers systematically wiped out indigenous communities as European settlers moved west, and exploited African slave labor. To support this dehumanization, they created narratives about the inferiority and savagery of black and brown peoples, and to this day, whites remain the market-dominant ethnic group of the United States and the world.  

Because of this mono-ethnic heritage, capitalism's use of ethnicity is not an accident but its essential characteristic. This reality means that the capitalist mind is too simplistic to understand complexities of human society, and that capitalism entrenches itself through a single blood line. Capitalism is the most insane, narrow-minded, psychotic economic system on the planet. Its logic is mono-ethnic. It knows one color of money: white.

When the British settlers came to Kenya, the intention was to run the continent like an outpost of Britain, in which whites would be at the top of the hierarchy and the lives of Africans would literally not matter. However, this American dream in the African sun did not work. The people rose up in struggle, and so the struggles of anti-colonialism taught capital that it can't get away with having a white face to capital. So in every African country, it appointed a particular ethnic group as an honorary white community, and supports that ethnic group, no matter what. In Kenya, the appointed bloodline is Kikuyu.

That would explain why US interests are treating two presidents, Moi and Muigai, differently, even when the struggle of the Kenyan people against the two is literally the same. Kenyans are struggling for a constitutional order, and for elections that can be credibly audited and proved to represent the will of the people. The fact that Raila is the main face of this struggle is merely coincidental, and, I would even argue, is the result of the systematic frustration of diverse other  efforts by Kenyans to entrench the constitution in our institutions and daily life. 

However, because the capitalist mind is mono-ethnic and cannot accommodate complexity and diversity, it narrows the Kenyan crisis to a tiff between Raila and Muigai or a Luo-Kikuyu rivalry, and resorts to supporting a flawed election today, which it would not do when Moi was president. Even the American media are finding it difficult to understand and report the democratic nature of the Kenyan people’s resistance. They are unable to divorce Raila’s stature in the resistance from Raila the man. Instead, they persist on calling the current crisis a Luo-Kikuyu one, and on attributing the people’s support of Raila not to a clear political reasoning, but to a mindless stranglehold that Raila has on the Luo. The fact that it is not only the Luo who support the NASA resistance movement remains an inconvenient truth the American journalists would rather not deal with. I have pointed out this misreporting in tweets to different American and British journalists, but NPR’s Eyder Peralta, the only American journalist who got back to me, still responded to my concerns about mystifying Raila as follows: “Raila supporters do see him in mythical terms.”

The persistent focus on Raila’s Luo ethnicity points to the twin element of this capitalist ethnicization: the dubbing of resistance to capitalist instability as a cultural oddity, rather than an explicitly political project.  A classic example can be found in the episode on Kenya in the BBC series End of Empire.

The documentary makes no mention of the political context in which the movement emerged. From the beginning to the end, the documentary – which boasts of the involvement of renowned historian John Lonsdale – talks of Kenyan resistance in terms of cultural savagery. With pictures, it reminds us of the brutal murders of thousands of Africans and a few British settlers, and the torture of domestic animals. The documentary goes on and on about the gory details of oathing, and its so-called magical hold on Africans that made them turn against the British, and made them never break their secrecy, even when arrested and tortured. Throughout the documentary, the narrator refers to the Mau Mau as “gangs,” and never once recognizes the political consciousness of the people involved in the resistance.

This denial of the political nature of the resistance is worse among the settlers. They persist in asking a deliriously naïve question, that John Nottingham, a former District Commissioner, would put this way: “the fact that your own cook, who’d been with you thirty, forty years, could be oathed in a way that he could come kill you? Unbelievable. You’d been a friend to him, you’d been helpful to his children, you’d done this, that and the other over the years, and yet happily, one night, he would come and slit your throat…they [the settlers] couldn’t understand the depth of bitterness.”

And for the next forty or so minutes, the documentary tries to explain how the natives “happily” turned against their employers: the “gangs” controlled the Kikuyu, and the “oath” had an inexplicable magical hold on the natives. Never once does the documentary mention the colonial massacres, from the coast to Western Kenya, that began the conquest of Kenya and that are chronicled in another documentary entitled Black man’s land: images of colonialism and independence in Kenya. The BBC documentary does not mention the colonial displacement of Africans for settlers in the white highlands, or the fact that people were not only rendered squatters, but forced to work for settlers who took their land in order to pay hut tax. How the settlers would believe that their cook would go through all that, and not be bitter, is simply amazing. But the documentary would have us believe that the Africans had no bitterness with injustice, and that there was no political resistance; there was just oathing.

And the legacy of using oathing to deny the political nature of oppression in Kenya, and the resistance against it, is what has entrenched ethnic manipulation in Kenya. From 1969 till today, the oligarchy has used oathing to blackmail the Kikuyu to support it whenever there is mounted political resistance. While the Kikuyu are told that support for their king is a cultural project to assert identity, the rest of Kenya is told that this culturally driven support justifies the political and economic dominance of the Kamau-Muigai dynasty. The dynasty deserves to rule because the Kikuyu supposedly have the numbers, or because Kenya owes them independence. In addition, the dynasty explains economic dominance by the Kikuyu elite - many of whom became land owners  -  as a cultural phenomenon, not a political one. The elite are rich because they "work hard," not because they get tenders thanks to connections in government. Some are so brazen in this cultural denial of political cronyism, that at the height of the election campaigns, the vice-chair of the president’s Jubilee party even suggested on TV that NASA and its supporters were economically reckless because they had no stake in the economy.

Implosion

The problem with these ethnocentric-capitalist narratives is that if, God forbid, Kenya implodes after today, the West, especially the US, and its surrogate Jubilee supporters, will continue to naively project the conflict in tribal, not political, terms. The cook whom DC Nottingham talked about will no longer be a Njoroge or a Maina. Instead, the cook will now be called Mutua, Mwanaisha, Moraa, Kasichana, Oluoch, Chepkirui, Ereng, or Abdallah. 

And the business community, using the American mono-ethnic capitalist logic, will continue to drive the political resistance underground and to elevate cultural diversity as the single greatest challenge that Kenya faces. When the corporates announce that we've accepted and moved on, and that we're now Kenya Moja, we will all cheer. And the president's supporters will be sure, like the settlers, that now we're all friends. Kenyans will even continue to intermarry.

And every time a political problem is raised, the Kenyan corporates will do what they're doing now. They'll baptize the political problems as a distraction from "work," and as "ethnic animosity." Like the settlers who blamed politically constructed resentment on "oathing," the corporates will tell us that this resentment is "tribalism." They will continue to call Raila a man who is never satisfied, they will tell us that Luos are just like that, and eventually tell us that all Kenyans are tribalist, but that can be solved by some cultural festivals and intermarriage. They'll bury the political problem of elections, suffrage and rigging under the failure to appreciate cultural diversity.

If there is no civil war after tomorrow, the US will continue in its mad pursuit of culturalizing Kenya's political problems. It may even consider opening a consulate in Luo-dominated Kisumu, as it has done in Muslim-dominated Mombasa. We might see more American sponsorship of cultural festivals and identity groups such as women and sexual minorities, supposedly out of concern for democracy, when really, it will be a stupid formula at work: Kenya's problems are not political; they're cultural. They're Luo. And corporates will repeat the same jargon. They'll sponsor more programs like My Unspoken, or elevate journalists like Victoria Rubadiri to be the next Oprah, in order to tell women that all we women in Kenya need is a good cry, rather than political thinking that links our oppression to political patriarchy.

And when we Kenyans are not crying, we'll be smiling through our teeth.

But the lesson of the colonial settler’s cook is that the resentment never goes away. Like the Mau Mau, the bitterness will erupt some day, if not today. And on that day, the Jubilee supporters who swallowed the hubris of the Muigai dynasty will be naively baffled, giving us lines like "but I thought ole Kantai was my friend. But Wafula used to buy goods at my shop. But Koech sold me this land; he even married my cousin." And their rich corporate backers, who will have escaped to London and Washington, will be sipping tea with their Euro-American masters and saying: "There must be something in the Maa culture that makes the people in Laikipia not appreciate the schools and hospitals built for them by the landed Western conservationists. That's why they still wear shukas and are still pastoralists." And at the UN, the Western diplomats will be telling the world that the conflict in Kenya can be attributed to “ancient tribal hatreds,” just as they have done before, for countries like Rwanda and Bosnia.

As C J Polychroniou has noted, denial of reality is an essential characteristic of capitalism. But what is more annoying is that the ultimate price for this psychosis will be paid not by the US and its Kenyan compradors, but by the ordinary people of Kenya. And most of them will not even be aware of why they are suffering. Tragically, they will keep defining the problem as a cultural one, rather than as a political one. And they will keep thinking that their survival depends on who is in power, instead of on Kenya having a democratic, constitutional government. The point of fighting for a credible election for most Kenyans outside politics, was not for Raila to win. It was to detach government from a particular ethnic group, and to have an objective, verifiable, non-ethnic, method of power succession and distribution of resources, which is the very definition of politics. But instead, Kenya's Western sponsors decided to make Kenya join the US and European nations in entrenching ethno-capitalism and a Kenyan version of fascism. Na hiyo, as Moi used to say, ni maendeleo. Sadly.
​
30 Comments
Isaac
26/10/2017 05:31:36 am

Nice perspective Ms Njoya. I like the econo-political perspective which almost everyone overlooks.We tend to stereotype people based on their tribes. The interesting thing is even the exploited members of the ingroup will deem themselves superior to other outgroups.

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joshua osoro
26/10/2017 11:43:04 am

A very insightful article. I've always though ours is a political-economic problem. Now I understand it better.

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Brian okwemba
26/10/2017 06:35:03 am

It is a case of the house slave thinking that he/she is 'less of a slave' than the field slave simply because they are given 'lighter duties' to perform but the slave master still treats them both with contempt and disgust.

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Paul Kahangara
26/10/2017 06:36:02 am

Excellent article: well-written, well-researched, educative, and insightful.
Thank you Dr.Wandia.

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Richard Trillo link
26/10/2017 09:58:28 am

Bang on! Thank you for the best bit of historical analysis I've read for a while. In an increasingly trivializing media environment, Kenya needs much more like this.

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Su Stephanou link
26/10/2017 10:34:10 am

So very true on every level.

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Kagunda Gaby
26/10/2017 01:10:41 pm

Very incisive. Really we do not have had to reach here. Interestingly the subsequent regimes after independence quickly deviated from the original philosophy of inclusivity in leadership that Jaramogi held when he insisted that No independence as long as Kenyatta was in Jail. If he was selfish.

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Kariuki Kiragu link
26/10/2017 04:18:08 pm

The business community would naturally defend its interest and your interpretation that western democracy is too expensive for Africans is correct from their point of view, assuming they are Africans.
It is expensive for Africans in another, more fundamentally devastating way. Beside the point that the revolutions in euro-America never really shared the wealth but manage to give people an impression that they “choose” their leadership and are “represented” in policy, it comes with European civilization values which are almost diametrically opposed to ours.

What are these values?
According to Cheick Anta Diop, the differences between African and European civilizations are as follows:

African - Spirit of Abundance and justice, Matriarchy, Emancipation of women, Territoriality, Xenophilia, Cosmopolitanism, Social collectivism, Material solidarity, Optimism and Literature emphasizing novel tales, fables and comedy

European - Scarcity and Fortress mentality, Warlike nature, Spirit of survival, Patriarchal family, Debasement of women, Xenophobia, Parochialism, Individualism, Moral solitude, Disgust for existence, Pessimism and Literature that favors tragedy.

How does western democracy accommodate, for example:
.1 The equality of vote power of an 85-year old lady and her 18-year-old great-grandson? Considering she probably has 10 such grandson, when her wisdom and experience is outvoted by literal children, how much does society lose? People who are cosmopolitan rather than parochial?
.2 What is the point of an “Opposition” in a society of consensual, rather than confrontational Africans? Socially collectivist rather than individualistic? Have material solidarity rather than Moral solitude?
.3 That the seven or so current conflicts in Africa are caused directly by western democracy? Is this a coincidence?

One might then say that the Africans need to adopt the European civilization traits for western democracy to work for them – And the tail wags the dog.
Nevertheless, if the Africans totally abandoned their civilization traits they would lose, in a causative sequence, their interrelated cultures, identity, capacity for self-determination, ability to generate authentic aspirations and finally the wherewithal to influence their destiny.

Besides, in the futile shift from African into European civilization, collecting the trappings (mansions, limousines, choppers) along the way, the emigrants end up in a traumatic limbo where they have no influence in the world, tossed around in white supremacist winds. The cross-over is futile because civilizations change slowly over millennia and an unknown quantity of traits are epigenetic. Therefore, a lifetime is probably is less than 1 % of the time needed to cross and, looking at the differences above, why would an African want to do so?

A study has been done where an oil company, through its parent government, that causes a rebellion and installs a 50-person regime in a country producing 200,000 barrels per day. The 10-year aggregate cost of the rebellion, regime installation and running – down to the last grenade, golden doorknob and chopper – is 3 % of the oil firm’s net profits. The business case is only marginally affected by whether the 50 top regime members are from one or 50 ethnic groups.
After 2 years a democratic election will be held but the figures will remain the same.

This is why western democracy is the political handmaiden of capitalism, the economic arm of white supremacy. It is not necessary to have ethnic and other groups to do the bidding of the global white supremacist order because, the traits that come with that governance system ensure the necessary programming required to keep that world order humming along.

Ambassadors represent the interests of their countries and tat interest includes “helping” us “tweak” social systems, such as western democracy, that, voluntarily or otherwise, we adapted form them, again to their own interests not ours. Their other instruments include merchants, for sanctions where needed, missionaries to align our belief systems and the military should force be needed.
They would quickly change sides, as they did midstream in the 1977 Ogaden War, hence the of the anti-Raila stance after the Supreme Court presidential elections nullifications although it is noteworthy that the same court and law society of Kenya are busy blocking investigations into allegation that the documents used to arrive at that judgment were forgeries.

The struggle against Moi was to install the western democracy which keeps people at loggerheads, the nation unstable and thus vulnerable. Hence, the tools were availed with alacrity for this. Currently, a changeover with all the hall-marks of a judicial coup may interrupt the flow, discard all the diplomacy since ICC and cause a pause as the counterfactual regime, which also claims to be democr

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Elizabeth Omondi
26/10/2017 05:00:22 pm

I agree with you totally
This is what l leart some 35 years ago at the university but majority cannot see it this way
Thanks for bringing it out

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Douglas
26/10/2017 06:40:30 pm

Thank you Dr Wandia, so insightful.

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Linda
26/10/2017 06:47:40 pm

Very objectively written. Proud of you for going against the grain

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Anthony Muhindi link
26/10/2017 08:07:00 pm

You seem to be quite ignorant of our history. It was a policy of the colonial govt to deny the kikuyu community education opportunities and some kikuyus were forced to change their names in order in order to get admission to good schools. eg, George Saitoti. Your argument that the colonialist favoured the kikuyus is out of ignorance.Apart from your flowery language your argument is short of substance. As a member of DUPA am pertubed by your ideological convictions and wonder if the administration interogated you sufficiently before hiring you.

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Wangari
26/10/2017 08:24:55 pm

I do not agree with the above article and in my opinion I think its extremely careless and reckless of you to share this kind of an article during such a volatile political environment.

In your illustration regarding BBC series End of Empire, the there was justified anger and bitterness from the locals to the white settlers because they actually stole land from the local and made the locals their slaves. However, in the case of Kenya today, we are aware of historical injustices but these stemmed from the colonial era. Kikuyu's were the most affected having lost plenty of land to while settlers (till today) and Kenyatta's family and even Odinga's family. Where is justice for them? The attempts by Jomo Kenyatta to resettle the Kikuyu's in rift Valley and Lamu also introduced new injustices, but remember, these were victims of a previous injustice. And so the chain continues...
If a Luo, Luhya, Kamba, Kisii etc attacks a Kikuyu today, it will not be because the Kikuyu did him any wrong, unlike your illustration between the white settlers and the locals. The two do not compare. The reason why another tribe will rise against a Kikuyu is because of the perceived "privilege" that has been peddled by articles such as this.

Its very careless and irresponsible of you, someone with such a position in society to stereotype and victimize an entire ethnic community for the acts of a select few. The Kenyatta's family and several other elite families (who happen to be Kikuyu) may have very strong ties to the West and indeed it is not surprising that the West may be interested in having them in power. But they do not even constitute 5% of the Kikuyu community, So unless your main objective is to fun the flames of a genocide against Kikuyu's I would say this is a lot of propaganda and lies. If there's any truth in this, then present it in the most accurate way.

If this country goes up in flames, you and your family, Kenyatta and his family, Raila and his family and several other wealthy people will book plane tickets and go to the same west. You will sit there and watch the country burn because of a fire that you all caused. Stop the hypocrisy Wandia!

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Wandia
27/10/2017 04:22:35 am

It's a pity that you took this article personally and decided to call me names. I'm not sure how that makes you less hateful than you accuse me of being.

May I suggest that you go to Amazon, buy a copy of Amy Chua's book and read it for yourself. I'm not the only sheriff in town. There are others who have views that might be more palatable to you. Name calling is behaving like the King Canute. It doesn't stop reality from being unpleasant.

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James
31/10/2017 06:23:08 pm

Wangari has point. Where she says hypocrisy, i say lack of detail. Within the kikuyu, those who have any connection to the kamau-muigai dynasty do not amount to even 3%. The rest don't have tenders to given under the table, illegal government handouts by the said dynasty etc. Most have worked themselves off poverty in 1 or 2 generations.
In your narrative, these 97% people have been lumped up with the sin of the 3%, ready to be crucified for injustices not done by them but also done to them. When you(we) point a generalized finger to the kikuyu, they will act as any other group of people in that situation, they will retreat within themselves, thus giving more power to the 3%. Alienating themselves as 'watu wabaya',

What you have said is very true, but lets mark a clear line between the guilty ones and the innocent kikuyus. Because if we do't keep that in mind, innocent people reeling from the same injustices will be executed unjustly....but as they say..'the road to peace is paved with the blood of the innocent.'

The truth in your words cannot be escaped, but creating one unfair narrative cannot undo another.

Zef
28/10/2017 03:15:25 pm

It is amazing how Dr. WN describes your ilk in the article. Too hypnotised to see the truth. Well, postponing the problem is what we have been doing. Trust me, going up in flames it will. And those who begin the fire either never read such articles or start and rush to the comments to insult the writes. That's you Wangari. Sadly

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Solo
26/10/2017 09:09:48 pm

Spot on! Most illuminating article I have read on Kenya's political and socio-economic problems.

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Camilla
26/10/2017 09:23:40 pm

Thank you for this necessary truth

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Jacqui
26/10/2017 09:34:08 pm

What? Now that is a piece of writing that should be published day after day. Asante.

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Ernest link
27/10/2017 12:46:59 am

Well researched piece. The angry cook analogy makes sense, but I notice a flaw. It seems to work in those who directly feel the injustice. I felt this way too when Mungiki came for my father, sister and I in 2008. What about the children of the affected? And their children's children? Many get born into this system and simply hate the Kikuyu because they were taught. Many simply hate the Luo simply because they were taught. They hold tribal and cultural reservations without solid cause. The cultural angle has a play to this but I feel that you dismissed it too fast.. An honest conversation with the average Luo and the Kikuyu on the ground and they respond "baba alisema" and "Uhuru ni wetu" respectively. What do the pawns on the ground reflect when the political wheels of tensions are not turning? When their leaders are gone? A good number of Kenyans falls into this. The other thing that you have grossly downplayed is the intercultural marriages. There is a project in Nairobi on several couples who have given first hand evidence on the power of intercultural marriages in solving tension. And this is empirical. Your points are strong but I feel you have denied the antithesis points justice. When painting an antithesis, perhaps the best thing is to give it a fair representation. Otherwise you may deny its power to boost the pedestal of your thesis.

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Wandia
27/10/2017 04:31:20 am

One thing our education system has been bad at teaching, is systemic logic. Meaning - what values do institutions and government teach inadvertently, rather than explicitly?

What you're talking about is interventions that may succeed for individuals, but the do not change the system. So individuals can use intermarriage to resolve ethnic tension between themselves, but they don't solve the problem of the larger society.

The point all the disagreers are missing is this: the ethnic tension is caused by a political and economic system, not by cultural difference. This election has entrenched that problem. You all sound as naive as Rodney King asking "Can't we all just get along?" And no one took him seriously.

Wishful thinking is no substitute for reality.

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Kariuki Kiragu
27/10/2017 04:53:40 pm

...Yes, and we tend to equate history with our lifespans... ethnicity with racism. I may not agree totally with you Wandia (as you might see in my looooong story above) but we need this kind of analyses so that, in the debates raised, direction can be found.

Seth Ouma
27/10/2017 03:12:42 am

Wandia Njoya at her deepest! Very deep indeed!

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Nick
27/10/2017 09:16:46 am

Facts are such stubborn things. They stay. They may be hidden, twisted but they always return ti show. Truth will out, as they say. There's no question we have deep historical political problems that we'd all love to wish away. And no matter how hard we've been doing that, they just will not die. Injustice...(sigh)...we're doing so poorly as a nation to resolve those. Leaders who ascend to presidency do their best to burry reports till they leave office.
The cold hard reality, as you so well put it, is that it will not go away. There's a reason we have a constitution, laws, judiciary. Because, in a way, the law cannot be partial. It must be partial. We must all believe justice will be served. I see this as one of our biggest failures as a nation, that after years and years we are still crying for justice for historical wrongs done by kenyans to kenyans and we are no closer to resolving them.

I do love the way you think and write and analyze issues. And it takes a revolutionary to keep at it day after day. In this day and age, you are in many ways, a heroine. God bless you.

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Njoki Kasera link
28/10/2017 10:20:48 am

Done in depth thoughts here Wandia of the situation of our socio-political dilemma. I agree with you when you say the issues have been skewed to suit various narratives. My father is a Luo my mother a proud Kiambu girl whose family was driven out of Kiambu by the said brigades so that my grandfather was rendered homeless from detention. This is not a Luo/Kikuyu divide, it suits those who dress it as such and the sooner we see the cloaked enemy for who it is the sooner we will trace the path back to where we lost ourselves to the exploitative corrosive narrative that is propagated by the neo-colonial mind as well as the neo-liberal capitalists that would have us slaughter one another.

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JB Ohaga
28/10/2017 12:48:21 pm

My God Dr. Wandia,

I haven't read anything in my life that defined excellence in writing from the first letter of the article like this one. I won't even comment on the uncomfortable truths that you raise, I am still stuck at the clarity of thought and the depth of reasoning. I am going to make a very humble request. Would you kindly consider being my supervisor for PhD study. I would love to study and learn everything I possibly can from you!!

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Tony link
29/10/2017 09:37:37 pm

Notable.

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Daniel Juma link
29/10/2017 10:26:17 pm

A very objective and useful read.

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Njiru Njagi
17/12/2017 07:56:46 am

Facts are stubborn and the truth bites. Hard cold truth brazenly broken down. It’s convenient now for those comfortable with the current injustices and oppression meted towards fellow Kenyans simply because they’re either beneficiaries by extent of their affiliation to certain quarters up in this echelon or by way of the fallacy as aptly put in the article “ support for the king is a cultural project to assert identity “. How devastating it is that a people shackled in so much poverty can be so gullible to such lies all the while advancing the cause for the few filthy wealth elite.

Well, it’s just but a matter of time..

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Emma
24/12/2017 06:17:30 pm

Hi, I am a student from Belgium and I'm writing a paper on this topic. I read your blog post and found it very interesting. I do have some questions on which I really would like your opinion.
I know this is a very complicated matter and one cannot explain this is a few lines, but maybe you help me a bit.

I was wondering what you think is the reason mister Raila Odinga didn't get enough votes to become president the firs election the the 8th of august? Who tampered with the voting? Did this tampering really happen or is it just an excuse?

I read so many articles about this, but I really wanted to hear a different voice. In my paper I want to include both the media's voice as well as just people like you.

Could you help me with this?

greetings.

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    Wandia Njoya

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